First Playtest Notes

Ran a very brief play today with a friend. VERY brief. Like, it took longer to set up than we spent playing - and this game doesn't even require a long setup.

Anyway, here are some quick observations from this test.

• Setup took a while because I had to shuffle all my cards for the first time. Fortunately this will not be a problem again. At least, unless/until I make drastic changes and toss out everything I currently  have for new stuff.
• I was already planning for one, but: a board setup diagram is extremely important. There are two obvious ways to set up hexagons - pointy end up or flat end up - and one of those is wrong for North. I was all confused because I didn't have enough bridge tiles, but once I realized that I set up the board wrong, I totally did have enough bridge tiles. Considering that I designed the game and I set up the board the wrong... yeah, I should probably have a diagram on hand when I get others to test the game without my direction.
• Tokens. I really should actually have some tokens to represent players, bandits, and monsters if I'm having people test my game. We just used spare coins and dice. Maybe I'll grab some of my D&D character tokens to use during tests.
• Test in an area without wind. My crappy playtest prototype cards and tiles are printed on standard card stock, and pieces fly all over the place with even so much as a light breeze. Ideally the final version will use heavy card with a border, like Settlers of Catan, so the tiles are solidly together and don't move around.
• I'll need to come up with a good way for each player to track heat, endurance, and health. For this test we just wrote down our totals on cards, crossing it out and writing the new total when something changed, but that's not optimal for the final game. Tokens would be easiest, but I don't want to have too many little fiddly things to deal with.
• I need better icons and labels. Oddly enough I think this is more important for the playtest than for the actual finished game - when my art is just hurried scribbles it's easier to figure out which is the snowfield tile by process of elimination than by having the tile actually look like a snowfield. Obviously clarity and readability are very important for a finished product, but it'll be less of an issue with good art and design than with the hand-drawn Sharpie "art" I have now.
• It's too hard to get items. The distribution is much too random. I've got 28 kinds of items so far, with 9 of each item. That means the item deck is just a big stack of 252 cards. Before I start tinkering with how many cards there are for each item, I think I'll split the items up into 3 tiers to match the 3 board zones, with item acquisition tied to the zone you're in. Tier 1 (green) will be the lower quality items, mostly weak single-use stuff; tier 2 (blue) will be better stuff; and tier 3 (black) will be mostly the best items. There'll be a few strong items mixed into tier 1 and a few weak items mixed into tier 3, to keep it from being too predictable or exploitable.  Not sure what I'll call the tiers yet, but for now colour coding is enough.
• If I'm splitting items into tiers, I'll need to change how the survivor camp works. Instead of drawing 3 items and buying 1, you'll draw 1 of each tier and buy 1.
• I may have to adjust heat loss - I was already out of heat after only 3 turns. But I'll hold off on making this change until I see the effects of tiering items, because the tiering will make consumable heat loss prevention items more common in the green zone, and permanent heat protection items more reliably obtainable in the blue and black zones.

You might notice that a couple of these points were kind of silly - like not playing in the wind with crappy paper, and actually having all the pieces I need. Yes, these are dumb problems, but they're easily corrected and will never really come up ever again, and with this stuff already out of the way, I'll be better able to focus on the actual game mechanics and the fine tuning thereof.

I'm planning to playtest with friends and family to start, and I really hope they'll be totally honest with me. It's pretty easy for me to find a stupid obvious flaw like not having player/monster tokens, but with less obvious flaws or balance issues, I want to know every problem there is with my game so that I can address it.

Stay tuned for future playtest notes!