A Playtester's POV on Yore

I am the mystery third person (or second or fourth, I guess, depending on how you look at it) that is part of Patrick's board game playing/testing/thinking group. I personally haven't managed to create a prototype of my idea yet (but it is cool and exciting and kind of backwards from the norm) but I do get to play a lot of Yore and Golem. This post will be my thoughts on Yore (I'll write another post later on Golem).

Yore


After the first playtest session Patrick went back to the drawing board for the combat system and also discussed adding in more player choice for his current iteration. I really like the concept of Yore and had fun the first time we played it. Unfortunately, in the newest version I felt that I had no strategy and no control over circumstances. After thinking about Yore for a few days, I have come up with some ideas that could possibly be explored.

Currently in Yore, players explore a grid system composed of separate 3x3 tiles. You explore a tile by flipping a new one over and orienting it in any way you choose. The tiles may be blank, have a monster encounter, a treasure encounter, or both. I feel that that alone is not enough choice. There is no objective in the game other than to reach the exit (a filled in middle square on one of the 3x3 tiles). Reach the exit too soon, and you will lose from having not enough treasure points. Until the 3x3 tile is flipped over with the exit on it, there is no real strategy other than wandering and hoping for encounters that give you victory points. My first proposal is adding mini objectives on some of the tiles. Possible hoard rooms or even mini-bosses that give unique treasure.

Quick Sketch:

Thoughts on this:
1) Creates more player choice by giving objectives throughout the game instead of just at the end.
2) Causes players to come together and possibly interact (in our playtest every player went in a separate direction).
3) You could add directional arrows on the 3x3 tile that must always be placed in X direction to keep a player from orienting the 3x3 tile in their favor.
4) Mini bosses could be a deck of cards with monster stats and information on the top and a treasure on the bottom - possibly victory points or even an ability. Player would keep the monster card after defeating it.
5) Single square tiles could have treasure removed from them entirely so this is the only place treasure is obtained.

My second proposal is a change in abilities. Abilities are currently physical cards the player can purchase with experience points. Abilities are only used in combat and are generally a conversion of one fight type to another. My proposal is that different types of abilities are added that can be used in regular game play. Cool abilities would be being able to reorient a tile already place or possibly a Mystical Elevator sort of situation where an entire 3x3 tile is moved to another part of the board. To keep abilities from being too powerful, one-time or multi-time use abilities could be introduced.

The next issue I had with Yore was the difficulty. Straight away the player could defeat the strongest monster. You'd be hurt, but it wasn't a big deal. I'm not sure how to completely fix that, but since Patrick eats probability for breakfast, I'm sure he has a few ideas up his sleeve. One simple change I thought of was to change the item Potion. A potion can currently be used at any time and restores a player to full health. If Potions only restored a single heart at a time, I think that would help balance the difficulty.

The last thing I noticed was the pace of the game. I felt a lot of stuff could not get done in a single turn. The rules currently state a player can move 3 squares, but only explore a single square. That means most turns you are only moving one square. One idea is to add blank halls and passageways to the 3x3 tiles. Somewhat like my idea for treasure rooms/mini bosses, except just a way for the player to expedite movement. This would cause the amount of 3x3 tiles to be explored faster, and would also cause the player to place single tiles carefully so hallways could be used and not blocked.

I think with just a few changes, Patrick could add more player choice and a little bit more fun to Yore. I love the idea of a randomly generated dungeon crawl through the flipping of tiles and I am very excited to see where Patrick takes Yore next.
                            

Yore Playtest I : In Which Frost and Fire Make Everything Damp

I spent a feverish eight hours brainstorming ideas for the combat system and then twelve hours designing, plotting, printing, and preparing the cards for it.  Twenty minutes of playtesting later, I was left holding the scraps of my original system, wondering, "Why did I think those mechanics were good ideas?"

Synopsis of the Combat System

In the game, you have an item and three stats: magic, mental, and combat.  The item corresponds to an stat and modifies its abilities while each stat determine what abilities you can use.  Your abilities can chain together (notice the chain images on the sides of the cards) and you can keep going.  Magic abilities add afflictions to your opponents.  Other abilities consume those afflictions, doing extra damage.  Mental abilities allow you to draw more cards.  Most abilities do damage.  During your turn, you have a few deck management options (trading some of your abilities, discarding unusable ones).

The three card types.

In hopes of achieving the unique, choice-driving combat system, I added one major mechanic:  You do not shuffle your deck.  Since the backs of cards partially reveal the content of the card, it opened too many opportunities for cheating during shuffling.  By not shuffling I also hoped to add more importance to how you play the cards.  As the game progressed players could stack the deck, building a sequence of powerful abilities to take down increasingly difficult monsters.  That was the theory.

While the game is collaborative, I had the idea of making the playtesting a versus challenge.  Everyone had access to the same spells, but we used them against each other rather than against the monsters of the game.  If you ever want to test balance, you'll get the most vocal reactions in a player-versus-player environment: unfairness stands out much more when someone is using it against you.

Problem I: Spell effects

The first major problem was spell effects (frost and fire) that the magic abilities applied.  Two of us focused our stats in magic.  The results were polar opposite.  I ended up with a beautiful balance of spells and a finisher, along with a wand that helped out.  Laying down the combination as my first move was very satisfying.  The other player had all finishers, which do nothing without a spell effect present.  She was not satisfied.  When we dueled, I ran into the same combo (via the not shuffling effect).  I dealt 8 damage, she dealt 3.

A spell chain.

Problem II: The same cards over and over

The other player meanwhile floundered with the same combo over and over again.  Because he could not win any matches with the combo, he had no way of getting additional abilities.  Additionally, he had two cards that he could not use, so he had to skip turns to get them out of his hand.  This was the second major flaw of the non-shuffling mechanic.

Problem III: Play Order

Because this was versus mode, the question came up of how each player lays down their cards.  I didn't have an easy solution for this.  I had thought both players would lay them down at once.  That was anticlimactic.  We tested one card at a time, but that went awry.  Once one player ran out, it was easy for the other player to put down as few cards as they needed to win.  Neither solution felt entirely natural.

Solutions:

To solve those problems, I decided to try the following.

1. Spell effects will not stack.  There is a card you flip over that tells which has been applied.  One spell effect overcomes the other when cast.
2. Bring in the monsters so that the game flow is more natural.  This would allow players to build their decks faster, as they would win far more than 50% of the time in the beginning.
3. Like solution II, I hoped moving to the players versus game setup would fix the play order problem.

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