Unfortunately, Temporum was just panned by Dice Tower: http://boardgamegeek.com/video/60882/temporum/miami-dice-153-temporum
Tom Vasel seemed to think it was passable, but Dourpuss over on his left really hated it.
I have been feeling like, if I can't include base resources on things, for card balance or to make the resources always available, doesn't that just shut out broad swaths of possible games? I thought it was telling that Tom said, in his top 10 Dominion cards, that the +$2 wasn't the part he liked about Black Market. I mean, how could it be? In the early days of Dominion I didn't put +$2 on anything, I treated that stuff like part of the card concept. But cards needed their +$2's to let me do a variety of effects, and I mean it all worked out. I don't think anyone looks at Monument and Mountebank and thinks, essentially the same card. But here I am continuing to do this in new games and it sounds like some people are all, I draw 2 cards here, I draw 2 cards over there, same card. And uh not doing that is just a limitation I don't want imposed on me. I am already hard to convince to make an initial prototype of anything.
So anyway I finally watched this, to see just what the complaints were. Well, I skipped over some sections, I didn't need to hear all the card descriptions or complaining about the theme or the punchline. He got the rules right, hooray. And overall he seemed pretty friendly about it; he thought the various parts of it sounded good but was unmoved in the games. The big complaints were feeling like the action was too homogeneous between turns and across players, and the other guy feeling like combos weren't attainable because you draw random cards. They also noted that games were close as if it didn't matter what they did, but this folded back into the homogeneity; they wanted to feel like they were doing different things, and if that produced close games, okay.
The actions were less homogeneous originally and got reduced down to what worked. Again I regret having 7 cards that give you a choice of basic action. I don't imagine they totally sink it, for the kind of player with these issues, but the one guy cited this very thing, the choice cards (without quite calling them out). Main sets are trying to be as good as possible - odds are there won't ever be an expansion, so it's not like it makes sense to hold anything back - and part of that means being simple enough for a broad audience. But possibly I could have fit in a few things that were more complex.
The card drawing, I used my classic trick, which I think works and that's certainly my experience with Temporum itself, of giving cards 3 uses. You can play a card because you just want the $, play it because you want the ability, or score it. That magical 3 uses really irons out luck of the draw (well that plus card balance). There is still luck of the draw of course. But you can usually make do and be competitive with whatever you draw.
The games are close because of game balance and having the uh little edges you get be little. You can have opponents that don't bother you and you run away with the game, or can have great luck like Gang of Pickpockets turn one in Communist Utopia. But typically, if you just play better than them but have average luck and they worry about you reasonably, you accumulate small edges that add up to you winning, but it's close. This always felt like a positive for players but I guess may look bad to reviewers. The small edges could have been bigger, easily. I dunno, I like the game as is but haven't run the experiment.
The flavor issue, I just always put gameplay over flavor. The game was once more flavorful in whatever ways that maybe don't count I mean who am I to judge this; for example crowns went on specific times, which is maybe more flavorful because you know, you were powerful in the Renaissance but it's not real now, your power is gone. Instead of, you are powerful in Time 2, no matter what it is. But uh that didn't work and that always trumps flavor for me. I like the flavor; I appreciated that Barnes liked the flavor even as he said that there was no narrative (i.e., it didn't make sense that scoring that Golden Goose got you power in the Civil War or whatever it was, but he still liked flavor elements). When I make a game with strong flavor, I expect it to be changed by the publisher anyway, as happened with Infiltration. I don't usually like extra rules that are just flavorful, I like to keep the rules simple. Anyway not everyone wants to roleplay every game and I don't feel like I should be trying to make my games more flavor-heavy, unless that's what some particular game wants. For that matter I am more likely to be able to get games published that are more abstract.
So anyway. To make Tom like this game more, I think the move would just have been, more complex zones / cards. I could have gone a little way in that direction, dunno if I could have gone enough. I don't feel like I want to aim for games that only hardcore gamers can enjoy. Maybe I am underrating what the masses can cope with, I dunno; I can find Crapuchettes saying how he wished the Dominion expansions were as simple as the main set. But probably I could have replaced at least a few choice zones with more complex things. I am always pleasing myself and the people I play with; we didn't find it too homogeneous. But I lean away from playing with the choice zones, as if, why didn't I realize I had too many of them. And then, for the other guy, I think more card throughput was what he needed - draw way more cards, thus being more likely to get combos or cards you like. Card throughput is fun but not always possible to go heavy on, I mean you need to have enough cards and then you do way more reading.
Thanks for listening.
