The week of October 25th

We weren't able to get a playtest together on the 15th, but Billy did have a great idea for how to change our pass/fail cards. We were considering adapting them into three roles, but his solution was much simpler: just have everyone vote for who they think should complete the task. The winner of the vote narrates how the task was handled, and if there is no majority, the task is failed. The winner of the most recent task is not eligible to do the current task. We liked this a lot because it was simple, it was quick, it required no extra materials (you could really just point to who you thought should do the task) and it still required people to be on the same page about all of their different powers.

On the 25th we were able to get two playtests in, with this system. I have a lot of notes on these, but in short:

  • As we began to note during GenCon, it's difficult to keep track of who everybody is. Especially in larger games
  • For 4-player games, we should consider having the talent scout be in charge of breaking ties.
  • Our crises in general can be a little vague. I believe this is partly a presentation issue, since we don't yet have cards for our scene-setting tasks, but also partly an issue with our scene-setting tasks suddenly thrusting players into a situation they're unfamiliar with.
  • While Billy's voting system worked, it was very difficult to keep people from giving away who they were going to vote for. In our second playthrough, players decided not to talk at all, and the voting was bit more uncertain. That being said, only one vote ever ended in failure, because it was surprisingly easy to tell who should be doing what.
The next things we want to test are:
  1. How does play proceed when only the talent scout is allowed to ask questions? At GenCon, we only used this rule for 4 and 5 player games, but it might be fine as just the default. A hidden consequence of this may be that the crisis is a little more challenging, since fewer questions will be asked of the heroes, and therefore it will be less obvious who is best for each task.
  2. How do player react to being told that they straight up can't talk for the crisis? The only thing keeping us from testing this before was the fact that the group had to come up with certain story details together for each task. However, since the winner of each vote gets to tell the story of how they solve their task, they're in charge of those details.

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