In Sickness and Health

Well, to be very short: I am sick. I am coughing up my lungs, have random headaches every few hours, have snot coming out of places I didn’t even know snot could come out, and feeling feverish as well. That means its just me lying on the sofa, a little reading, a little zapping and a lot of sleep and nothing else.. well.. nothing…

“Luckily” I started feeling sick Sunday afternoon, which means I did some serious play testing with Vicente this weekend before the snot bomb hit me..

Play testing results:

First: the good:

The rules are solid and fun. Play was very fast but still we both needed to think over our moves. The best part was that even though some hands and cards were not so “good” game-play wise, knowing that the next warrior would have a fresh, clean shot at winning a VP (victory point) was good enough to continue play each time.
I bet you all know that feeling when playing a Magic, WOW or any other CCG: Knowing you are losing from the first of second turn onwards. Vicente and I never had this feeling while play testing, simply because we both had FIVE opportunities to win.
Even though the cards were very vanilla, they played out nicely and no rule questions came up during play testing. Also there were no Timing issues and loops detected. Hurray!

The not so good:
This is probably due to lack of game text on cards, but when each players has their maximum # of cards in their combat zone (Sustain number), game play got very slow. It was very hard to turn a defensive combat zone into an offensive one, for example. The card flow on the table was too slow. This needs to change (see point A). Since most of the cards were played in the first few turns (thus filling up the combat zone very fast), it was a bit slow afterwards to see any real change in both our combat zones.

Card options in hand was a little too low, but this was easily corrected by increasing a players hand size to 7 (+2 cards extra).

The card flow was ok, but we both felt a little increase wouldn’t hurt. This needs to change as well (see point B).

Reposing. This needs to go. We both were doing our utmost best to at least be able to Repose (read: gain 1 Chi) each turn. This makes no fun and I think it is best to change the drawing rule as well (see point C.)

Lastly, gameplay was alittle too long, with us going to more than an hour for each game. Easy fix: increase damage output or decrease life on warriors. (i´ll choice the first, see point D.).

The Bad:
None. There was nothing pointing out to a serious problem with the game and after a few minor changes (see points below) I think the game is ready to be filled in with real cards.
The changes:

First of all, to battle the problem with a filled up combat zone not changing so much, Vicente came up with an idea:

Remove the combat zone (cards played gets discarded at the end of turn) and introduce a new card type: fighting styles.

Normally, a player with Liú gets to play cards until they lose Liú or they choose not to play more cards. This quickly ended up in a filled up combat zone and warriors with very little Chi and cards in hand. Fighting Style cards could change that.

Fighting style cards simply increase card flow and makes you keep Liú no matter what cards you play (even if playing Liú (X) cards).

Example:
Praying Mantis Style:

Gain 3 Chi
3 cards, 5 Chi
Convert 2.

You would put your Fighting Style cards just as combat card into your combat deck. Fighting style cards are free to play and using the example above, would do the following:
Your warrior gains 3 chi for using the Praying Mantis style.
He may play any 3 combat cards from hand, up to a maximum of 5 chi cost combined, OR he may play it for free to convert 2.

What does it do? It helps players creating their combat deck (deck building) and it helps you get rid of all those cards that make you lose Liú.
It still allows you to play combat cards without having a fighting style card.

When we used these fighting Style cards, we both pretty much kept our warrior filled up with cards and Chi, but it also came with a few downsides:

It really felt again like a “I play cards”, “you play cards” game again, where both players just went for a full scale assault, and only played defensively when they had no choice.
Second, it also needed again the use of Initiative. To figure out whose turn it was to begin playing combat cards. I really hated that: now you attack, next turn I attack.
Third, it created a bad feeling when not drawing combat style cards. They felt they had too much an edge over not playing with them. Meaning that hand screw could come right back into play here, with not drawing any combat styles for a few turns.

So I decided, even though that I like the concept, and maybe a future expansion could see them introduced, to delete and not use combat style cards for now.

The changes that were implementes were:

A. Create more cards that lets (or makes) you discard cards from a combat zone, or place them face down. This has to be a lot more so that combat is a bit more dynamic and changes pretty much each turn. This is a change that needs to go through in card design.

B. Also a card design change, to create more cards with the Convert game text and cards that let you gain Chi, take face-down cards back into hand etc.

C. Removing the Repose rule and changing the Ready and convert step into the draw and Convert step: “”Starting with the player who has Liú, each player may convert (1) , meaning that they may take one of their combat cards from their Chi pool into their hand OR gain (1) Chi””.

This way, I will let the player decide what is the best way to play the game. Increasing their hand, or increasing their Chi each turn. This also simplifies the Action step a lot (deleting repose)

D. Increased damage dealt by cards. With shield cards going to a maximum of +1, and damage cards going to a maximum of +2, more damage will be dealt, hopefully decreasing playing time.

After these rule changes, I will make up two sample decks to print out and play, so I can get some opinions from players all over the world.

Expect them at the end of the week, or at the latest Monday morning.. Depending on how well I continue to feel.. ugh…