Yore Playtest 8, 9, 10, and 11: In which dice make a welcomed reappearance.

 After the seventh playtest, I took some time to gather my thoughts.  Failure is a necessary experience, but that doesn't make it any less a bitter draught.  Cards were getting out of hand and they were not any less random or rewarding than dice.  So I decided to try dice again.  Golem uses dice efficiently, so I modeled the combat system after it.

There are still three stats (mental, magic, combat), but they now control how many dice you roll, what counts as a victory, and whether you can reroll dice.  It's still not quite there, but it makes for a quick and eventful game.

Also, I'm playtesting all of the mechanics together this time.  We play a shortened game where only half of the board is available.  No more empty rooms clutter the board, which keeps players from having boring turns.

Players also have more choice.  The object of the game is to gather as many orbs as you can.  But those orbs can also be used to buy items or learn new skills.  So there is a cost-benefit theme to the game.  You can level your character up or you can hoard.  There comes a point when hoarding isn't that efficient.  There also comes a point when leveling up isn't efficent, but I leave that to the player to decide.

So far, over the course of playtesting, the game is better.  Some of the characters are a bit unbalanced.  I'm working to address them. There is certain sterileness to it though, possibly because of it being a thinly-veiled probability game.  So that's my next step: making the gameplay a little less sterile and tweaking some of the numbers to make things more balanced.