Yore Playtest II: In Which Cards Go Everywhere But Do Nothing

With the changes conceived in the first playtest session, I went home and spent the entire evening rebuilding Yore.  I wanted to move towards the actual board game structure and away from versus, though the imbalances were very clear there.  I designed a starting set of monsters, tweaked numbers on the existing abilities, added a few new abilities for balancing purposes, and redesigned the character cards.   After running through the rest of my printer cartridge, I was sure of wowing my playtester friends with the progress I had made.  Oh, how I was wrong.

Changes

I designed the monsters so they would be beaten 75% of the time.  Unfortunately, I flipped the numbers and misprinted their stats... players would only beat them 25% of the time.  Also, I changed the spell mechanics so that effects did not stack.  You can have a frost or a fire active; one replaces the other instead of cancelling out.  To make combat more interesting, I added a bleed debuff if you use multiple combat moves in a row.  I made a number of changes to the abilities as well.  Mental cards made it easy to chain combos.  I printed fewer ending and beginning cards and more chains.

The starting monster.

Problem I: Too complex

The game started faster this time, but quickly got muddled in minutiae.  Each card read like a mini novel.  I had given abilities enough wiggle room that they had countless edge cases.  The playtesters had endless and good questions, but turns were taking over five minutes a person to complete.  The game was far too complex, even though we were playtesting a small section of it.

This was actually a valid deployment of cards...

Problem II: Stacks too fast

By the second turn, two of us had decks stacked so well we went through the entire thing in one hand.  The next turn, since it was still stacked well, we did it again.  The interesting mechanic I had hoped for: pockets of good, planned combos, was not there.  Instead, the additional draws of the mental cards made it easy to cycle through every card.

Problem III: That effect does what?

Because I added the bleed mechanic last minute, I had not thought about what it would do.  I don't think adding things last minute is bad though.  Adding a half finished mechanic forced me to come up with answers at the start of the game.  While my solution was sup par, at least I was able to test different things with the mechanic.  In the end, I saw that the complications facing the mechanic were too great, and it would need to be shelved.

The confusing second bleed mechanic.

Solutions:

After finishing the playtest, I knew it was time to start parring down the complexity.  It was the most glaring problem, and my changes the previous day had added complexity where I hoped to eliminate it.  I had gummed up the system so much that nothing in the entire length of a player's turn could be described as "fun."

After considering how to simplify things, I drew up a completely new card design.  From there, things started to look promising...

Note: The placeholder art in Yore comes from Lorc's icon pack.