Today we held our first major play test, and the results are encouraging. I must admit that we have left testing a little bit late, but this is on account of us being grounded on our highly theoretical approach to the design, and not because we’re lazy (not in this unit anyway).

Play takes place on a tiered, circular board where players start on the outer tier and compete by trying to be the first to reach the centre tier. To reach the centre, players move their pawns around the board, picking up resource markers as they go (we call these resources ‘rocks’ for the time being to suit our game story). A certain number of rocks on one space will form a ramp, and allow players to jump from that space to an adjacent space on a higher tier. When a player moves his (or her) pawn to a space already occupied by an opposing pawn, a battle can be initiated. If this is declared by either owner of the pawns involved, a ‘battle’ ensues, in which the opposing players roll dice, the loser moving his/her token back to the start. Although I haven’t comprehensively described the game, I think that there is enough information there to give an idea of what we are trying to achieve.

The board consisted of three tiers, with the outer, middle and inner tiers having 16, 12 and 8 spaces on them respectively. This allows some breathing room for players on the bottom to get their pieces out onto the board, while increasing the chances of battles occurring on the top tier. It also makes the fight for resources much more intense towards the top. I felt that the board seemed a little too small, even for three players, and that there should have been more spaces around the bottom tier. This was because when one of us lost a few battles and had our armies (pawns) sent back to the start, he would find it difficult to get back in the game.

Resources were spread fairly evenly around each tier, and since each quadrant of the board had equal space per tier, distributing them evenly was easy. However, I think we need to explore the possibility of these resources being spread a bit more randomly. At present time, we are not allowing resources to be moved between tiers; they can only be used to create a ramp on their original tier. So it wouldn’t be an arduous task to test a different distribution of resources at the start of the game.

Battles are not as exciting as I would have hoped. When Player B moves his piece onto a space occupied by Player A and one of them declares a battle, each player rolls one die for each token he has on that space. The player with the lower roll total moves all of his pawns from that space back to his starting space. We used six-sided dice in this situation, although I had planned to use 20-sided dice, but hadn’t acquired them yet. In no instance did we see two armies (two dice) defeated by a single army (single die), even though such an outcome is mathematically possible. This is not what we wanted; however it supports my push for a 20-sided dice battle system. If my estimations are correct, using 20-sided dice gives a higher chance for the single-army player to beat the double army than six-sided dice do.

Of course, this is just an initial play test, and these outcomes are to be expected. What I must say though, is that we had the fun we expected to, and I believe that this is a direct subsequence of the aspects of competition, alliances/betrayal and chance that we have purposefully weaved into our game. I can see that the game concept is a great one, and that realising an excellent gaming experience will simply be a matter of tweaking the subsystems we have created.