Yore Playtest 7: In which someone loses an eye.

Many days ago, we untook the second major playtest.  It was brutally painful.  Until that point, I had been playtesting a subsection of the game: the combat.  But when I brought all the pieces back together, blood was shed.  The blood of the innocent.  Write this in your fancy leather-bound game notebook: parts are not representative of the whole.  While I had balanced one aspect of the game, the rest of the game did not mesh well with it.   The resulting game was as stillborn as a pickled fetal pig.

What did the game look like?

The game involved exploring a system of dungeons.  You could encounter an empty room, treasure, or a monster.  If you encountered a monster, a card-based combat system started.  In combat, you had abilities you could chain together to match the symbols in front of the monster.  If you beat a monster, you could turn it in to learn new skills.  The object of the game was to end with the most number of points, granted by treasure cards.

Why was it frustrating?

1. Empty Rooms.  1/3 of the rooms were empty, so an entire turn would be spent for a player to do nothing.  One player ended up with six empty rooms in a row.
2. Treasures were 50% potions.  Two players ended up with all of the treasure.  One had all of the potions and was unbeatable.  The other had all of the valuable cards and won the game.  The remaining players had nothing.
3. Cards were everywhere.  The game had ten stacks of cards, took up a lot of space, and involved a lot of maintenance.
4. No choice.  The game offered a number of choices for what you could spend experience points on.  However, the abilities were all mainly the same.  There were no compelling reasons to pick one strategy over another.

Read tomorrow for how I have addressed those problems.