Yore Playtest III and IV: In Which Slash-and-Burn Prove Viable Design Choices

I cut out half of the features of the cards and they went from looking like novellas to flash cards.  This change in readability sped turns up dramatically.

The mechanics of the game were much better.  The turns went faster, counting points was better, and laying down cards was much more natural.  The other playtesters did not have much trouble picking up the rules.  Turns went from 4-6 minutes each to 1-2 minutes each.  We could actually get some rhythm going.  However...

Problem: The game was not fun.

Granted, the current state of the game is the least developed of all the playtests.  All the schools of abilities were the same and there was no reason to choose one over the other.  We were only fighting one monster in three different flavors.  Though I did not misprint the cards this time, the numbers were still horribly skewed.  If you could lay down 4 points of damage, you had a 16% chance of winning.  If you laid down 6 points of damage, that jumped to 50%.  Players could only lay down four cards in combat, making 6 points hard to reach with the starting abilities.  Since we rolled for the enemy we fought, it made it even more crushing when we lost the combat.

The combat mechanics were not empowering.  Everyone could hold up to 8 cards total and play 4 of them in combat.  I instated a cooldown mechanism to make sure the same combo was not used over and over and to add some spice to the game.  The problem was that everyone was using their best combo and then was stuck with a shoddy hand afterwords while their main attack was on cooldown.  Maybe a strategy would emerge that you mix up the cards more, but I don't think we would have discovered that in the current state of the game.

Card maintenance was a pain with the cooldown stacks, all the active cards, gaining and losing abilities, and keeping track of your hand.  In this confusion one person lost a card or two and other players forgot to fold back in their cooldown stacks.  A game that has so many things to balance expects too much of its players, and I could tell the other players were losing their interest and patience quickly.

Solutions:

Since those two playtests, I've spent time differentiating the ability schools.  Combat now has big numbers as openers and finishers and is good at linking other abilities.  Magic has enchantments that accumulate into explosive finales.  Mental is all about multiplying other attacks.  Playing with different stats feels much different.  The numbers are fairly balanced.  I am confident that the deck has improved.

The majority of my time will be spent on the hardest part before Playtest V: figuring out and playing around with deck and draw mechanics.  The ideas I have so far all have drawbacks, and I'm wondering what in the game I'll have to sacrifice to make things work.  I've already cut a lot out to great effect, but I may need to cut even more.  There are a lot of elements in my combat system I want to see blossom, but I may need to prune them so the whole game can grow.

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