Piecing Together GOLEM

The title is clever because golems are made of pieces of things. That's what I told myself when I wrote it. Please keep reading my blog post.

I'm sitting on a decent amount of feedback for GOLEM after holding play tests 2 and 3 and I'm finding it hard to know where to start making my first improvements. People "have fun" playing the game. They seem to find it "enjoyable" every time. I feel like that's a "good" thing. I think I'll try to keep that going and "not blow it".

Biggest problems:

• Too many pieces ::
• I need to consolidate. This problem is worsened when we're reduced to using pennies, quarters, and a few glass mermaid tears as game tokens for money, victory points and health. Plus dice. I also have three different types of collectable items. Plus player tokens (observe in the picture below how player 2 is playing the role of a small tomato).
• Set-up and game time is too damn long ::
• Plain index cards don't shuffle very well at all. It's like trying to flip through a magazine with your nipples. No clever or exotic nipple contraptions to assist you. Just bare nipple on bare paper.
•  The math is off ::
• Well shit, I knew that. The problem is that other people have figured it out too. I need to make up some formulas for balanced card creation. Items and characters need fine tuning.
• Secret goals are pig ::
• Pig is the first word that came to my mind when I couldn't think of a word. So... as a key component, GOLEM uses secret goals. Wait, let me get out of these bullet points.

Please ignore the apples in the background. They're a future game expansion involving only fruit.

So... as a key component, GOLEM has secret goals which each player draws and reads at the start of the game. It's supposed to be one of the major ways players score victory points while still cooperating to defeat the GOLEM at the end of the game. A good example of a secret goal would be "Greed: Gain 1VP for each coin you have at the end of the game."

I need to rework them. Some of them are good but don't have enough of a reward, and some are straight up unobtainable within the confines of the game or even due to the random chance that an Island will be made of locations that don't give you what you need. From now on, I plan to record more details during play tests. Things like the number of potions and coins people have left. The number of Items. How many times they fought a monster. Their entire play experience. Knowing all of that might let me go back in later and create secret goals that fit their experience. It will also help me balance the ever important "distribution of crap."


I'm out. Rainbow rainbow.