Water everywhere.
As mentioned in the previous post, I keep testing the board game idea variants.
This month I did two different tests with a version where all the pieces were water only. This led to a few interesting discoveries. I also removed the dice element again, as I wanted to test this version without that added element first.
Some of the takeaways:
1: The game seems to play faster. Since teams just have to make a connection between starting points and they can use the opposing teams laid out course, there is a closer inevitability built into playing now. Especially with the “if a team has no legal connection possible, the game is a draw” rule that encourages teams to not fully block each other.
2: The edge of the board is still tricky and at one of the tests there was what I would describe as a corner case with regards to how I’ve phrased the rule about placing pieces at the edge. Some slight rewording is needed to fix that, but it seems fixable.
3: I also included “stop pieces” where the connection gets broken. These brought some interesting tactical plays for the players, but the random pull of pieces means that a team can get several of those in a row. There were no complaints from the players as they said they liked the challenge of figuring out if they had a good place to put them, but this is something where I will have to keep an eye on it.
4: I do now want to test with a version where the gameplay mechanic is based on cards drawn and keeping a set amount on hand at all times. This does require planning and production of cards, so it might take a while before I am ready to test that. The potential advantages I see is that by using cards I can give the players the ability to always have multiple cards to choose a play from, and the cards themselves would allow for options as they can show more than one type of piece at the same time, and even include some types I have not implemented/tested yet.
The overall feedback on the game is still that players really enjoy playing it, so that has been and is still very motivating for continuing to develop it.