Project 2 - Up Ship Creek - Raffertys Reaping (A) Thread Play-testing

This week we had the chance to get a play-test of our (A) thread played in class. After getting our F.L.O.Y.D MP3s ready and creating some new mechanics for the movement of corpses on the fly we were ready to test. Unfortunately due to the low number of people in the class, my teammate Victor had to be a part of the play-test but even with that i was able to get a large list of extremely beneficial notes.

From the get go we realised that we didn’t actually state where the cat started in our S thread “Star Scream”, we are currently fixing this on our typed up version of the crisis in photoshop. We also learned that the item we created called “Spaceship in a Bottle” was extremely overpowered as Tony instructed Victor never to drop it (the item started with 1 tech stat which would grow by 1 every turn the item was held). Victor did however eventually have to drop the item onto a condition for the play-test to continue. We provided a solution to this problem by putting a fixed number the item would grow to, we chose the number 4 because a player would need to hold it for at least 3 turns to accrue that worth and some of our crisis cards run for only 4 turns.

The character we chose in our expansion was The Puppy, during this play-test we were shown that the puppy (who has many Item Slots) could pick up the cat and trigger his ability indefinitely meaning he could move for free over the entire board. Personally i don’t see this as a huge problem as there are many hazards on the board which could delay the puppy or damage it, also the addition of possibly getting feared and losing health and ap would stop the puppies constant movement. However the easiest fix for this is changing the wording on the puppies ability to state that it cannot pick up the cat, this also plays into the classic dog vs cat stereotype of them hating each other.

At one point during the play-test Steve instructed me to note that if he didn’t have the “Force Field” item that they would have lost the game due to a fear check on the final condition in the brainroom. I didn’t actually see this as a problem because had the players planned ahead they could have been closer by to Steve which would have kicked our “Reassurance” mechanic into play. We did change the location of that final crisis to the Lobby instead of the brainroom so that not as many hazards needed to be passed through to complete and to adjust to earlier feedback that we barely got the players to enter the lobby.

One of the most game changing results of the play-test was finding out that our current (at the time) A1 crisis “Heat Wave” was incredibly difficult and would be better suited to a later round while our then A3 Crisis “Treasure Planet” was very easy. The only other feedback i noted before we swapped Treasure Planet to be A1 and test again was that a previous piece of feedback i had received from Steve was that at no point during a playthrough did he feel that a player was forced to give up a good item just to prolong the survival of the team. During this play session however Victor as the Puppy was forced to give up his starting item “The fanny pack of relativity” which is incredibly valuable (adds item slots to the character).

The main change we had when starting our next game with Treasure Planet as A1 was that on the fly we added some new items to the common item decks which helped the players specifically with fear checks. An example of one of these items was the “Crash Test Dummy” which as its passive stated that when held it counted as an adjacent player when a fear check was rolled.

At this point i had noted our new addition to the core mechanic of our expansion “Fear Tokens” hadn’t been used a single time and with Tony’s help we reworked how the mechanic worked. It became:

Roll a D6 - 5 - 6 = Not Feared

3 - 4 = Can make the move into the room but must sacrifice 1 AP/HP

1 - 2 = Can make the move into the room but must sacrifice 3 AP/HP

(Can be a combination of AP and HP - for example if rolling a 2 they could spend 2 HP and 1 AP to meet the sacrifice.

Another problem we encountered throughout the many times the players played our starting crisis was that the players were never sure if adding the blinds (crisis specific item) to the condition actually counted as completing a condition which would cost AP to do and also would end the player's turn. Victor and I came to the conclusion that i did count as trying to solve a condition because otherwise it would stray too far from the game's base mechanics and we noted that the players dropped them off one at a time and used the time they had left to gather a large array of items to prepare them for upcoming crisis.

We then got to see Treasure Planet in action for the first time, in the beginning it seemed like an almost trivial crisis as two of the three players all started in the Med bay which was only a few nodes away from the space walk the players needed to do. Making things even easier The Bodyguards ability meant that he could teleport to the location, collect the item and spare another player any damage all without taking his turn. In which he was able to collect the 2nd set of Grave-Robber Loot and make his way to the final condition. Even though the Bodyguard seemed to make the crisis easy i noted that the Bodyguard then had very low health for the rest of the game and was unable to use his special ability on multiple occasions. I also came up with the idea to possibly have the Grave-Robber Loot take up 2 inventory slots each meaning the Bodyguard would be full after the first lot and another player would be forced to get the second. We also got feedback to add an extra condition to the crisis possibly another room to get to before finishing. Another way around this we came up with could be to have the Grave-Robber Loot (which already loses 2 bio per turn from a max of 8) be completely destroyed if the bio stat reaches 0, this would mean the players would have to put the items into a teleporter and have a teammate already on the way to complete the mission.

We also got to test our A2 crisis “Apocalypse Meow” which had one major flaw, when we created the crisis card we hadn’t given the conditions their specific needed stat and came up with Energy Tech Energy, this didn’t synergise with the scenario specific items as they all had high Bio, we have decided to remedy this by changing the conditions to be Energy Bio Tech.

We came across various non scenario specific problems with the game which were handled on the go such as the Chef's ability changing from players on adjacent nodes being effected to players in adjacent rooms.

Altogether the playtest was an invaluable source of information and has led us to make many changes which are positively impacting our scenario. We have planned another play-test outside of school time on Friday 7/7/17 to test out our B and C threads.