The Week of October 11th

On October 11th we conducted the first playtest we'd done in quite a while. The biggest thing we wanted to look at for this test was the crisis resolution system we'd been talking about for so long. The results of the test taught us a lot of new things and reminded us of a lot of old things:

  • Because you never pick up your cards, you learn more and more about each other's remaining hand as time goes on. This makes the final task a foregone conclusion. We knew about this in advance, but it was good to see it in real life too.
  • One of the players at the table had the expectation that the bulk of the crisis round would involve coming up with a plan to fight the opposition
  • The "no-talking" rule is still stepping on people's fun.
As we spoke with our testers, the idea of replacing the pass/fail cards with something less binary came up. We really liked the idea of turning them into role cards, such as "Lead" "Support" and "Hang Back." Success could require nobody to double up on the above roles.

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