Was able to do quite a bit more playtesting yesterday - the group I played with seemed to like it! The multiple resource mechanic was intriguing. However, there was a still a little balancing to be done - reduced the number of Gods out, and if there are 4 players, increase the number of Mortals and Monsters out - they just spread too thin with that many players.
Anyone on here interested at all in trying it out?
Very interested; I just don't know who else I could shanghai into this. It took a very long time to convince my crowd that Enterprise is just as good as a
real expansion, and I doubt they'll take a chance on a pre-alpha Dominion spin-off.
A few things that would make my job easier, and might entice other people here:
Pretty up the cards some more, and
make them colorblind-friendly. This is a necessity for some people, who won't want to squint every card they played hunting for Xs and Bs and hashtags. It wouldn't be that hard to mock up symbols -- gold circle, red teardrop, blue star, etc., and
put the yields in the same place on every card. After a big turn, players will need to glance over every card they played to tally up the number of coins they have, and then repeat the process three more times for the other resources. If your game revolves around managing multiple resources, this should be as painless as possible. Here's
a template that's in my head right now, courtesy of my shitty MSPaint.
Use standard Dominion verbs for everything. It'll play exactly the same in every way, and it'll be so much more inviting to people when I ask them "Hey, do you want to play this clipart-on-cardstock game made by a perfect stranger from the internet?" I realize you want this to become more than a reskinned Dominion clone, but that will happen on its own time. Donald said that Kingdom Builder and Temporum were both conceived as 'Dominion with a board', but became something different during development.
If, a year from now, this game is still fantasy Dominion, changing the words used for the mechanics won't fool anyone. On the other hand, if you end up with a game that's interesting and engaging in its own right, you'll want everything written in the most widely used jargon to keep it as accessible as possible.
(Also, I'm not keen on the specific names used for the basic Dominion actions. You're making a game where everything revolves around currying favor with Greek gods. One of the things a card might tell you to do is 'sacrifice' something. Do you see how it might be
really confusing to a first-time player that sacrificing has absolutely nothing to do with gaining the favor of said gods?)
Some more general opinions: if you're worried about this game looking samey in comparison to Dominion, it might be worthwhile to look through all the mechanics that you've transported over, and deciding whether each one is helpful for the game you want to make. For instance, why are there a limited number of buys? That mechanic is clearly necessary in Dominion, for a number of reasons that all boil down to 'there's only one resource your deck produces'. But if this game is founded on the exact opposite premise, and everything will be balanced to reward the player whose deck produces some of every resource, then what's the point? If I make $4 6X 5B 5# or whatever in my turn, I'm not going to be emptying any piles.
The stuff you've posted so far has definitely caught my attention, and even if I don't post in this thread often, I would still be interested to read your updates and see how things go as the game progresses.
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Topic: A Mythological Deckbuilder (tentatively called Mythos?) (Read 6418 times)