Municipality - Week 8

I've begun work on a second map for Municipality. In the meantime, testing continues with the New York City board.

Version 3.1

Changes from v3.0:

• Changed layout of player card
• Changed growth icon on player card (moved "+1" outside of person icon)
• Added population track to board
• Added 3-player-only rule: start with $30 instead of $20

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Setup and Rules - 10 minutes
Initial Selections - 7 minutes
Game Length - 1 hour 56 minutes

Michael R. Keller - 170 (10 x 17)
Jeff Sam - 126 (9 x 14)
Kiratbir Khurana - 69 (3 x 23)

Jeff's notes:

• should reverse order of population track
• should also have permits with only one road instead of two

Kiratbir's notes:

• calculating tax revenues confusing
• still difficult to visualize connections
• maybe a wall to make non-connections clear
• back of player cards helpful, but didn't look often enough
• couldn't screw over Keller, no matter how much it was tried

Conclusions:

• Need to speed up 3-player and 2-player games
• Increase starting properties and permits with fewer players
• Come up with a way to indicate connections
• Maybe a "neighborhood marker" that is placed on all connected zones

Game Design Assistant - Part 1

Game Design Assistant is a tool I created to help me manage my playtests. It started as a reservation system as has slowly been evolving into a more comprehensive aide to my game design efforts.

If you've read my playtesting series, you know that scheduling a playtest can be a chore. My normal process when I am ready to test a game is to first decide on whom to invite. If a game can take four players, I compile a list of four testers. I ask these people when they will be available.

Based on their responses, I choose a date/time and send out a formal invite. Generally half say "yes" immediately, one says no, and the rest don't respond for awhile. I call around until I can find a replacement for the one and pester the unresponsive once every couple of days. On the day of the test one person will cancel and then I have to scramble for a replacement, which I generally cannot find on short notice.

After the playtest I also will occasionally get a complaint from someone about not being on the list of invites for that session. The person isn't really serious about it but I want to keep a large, diverse group of testers. That means I need to avoid alienating them and I take all complaints seriously.

It was seeing this pattern repeat many times that I decided I needed a new way. Thus, I did what I always do when I need to make my life easier: I began coding.

More to come . . .

Municipality - Week 5

Municipality is settling into a groove, rules-wise. The main focus at this point is using component design to clarify things for players. Soon I will add another map to test.

Here are my notes from last week's test.

Version 3.0

Changes from v2.2
Revamped New York City map.
Replacing the Subway special permit with a School that operates like other specials.
Instead of getting all three permits at start of game, placing one, and keeping the other two, players will now have to return ones of the unplaced permits back into the permit deck.
New layout and icons used on player aid cards. New art made for permit cards.
Remove use of Political Capital from some of the role cards.
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Rules Explanation Time - 18 minutes
Playing Time - 86 minutes
Michael R. Keller - 120 (10 x 12)
Dan Glaser - 44 (4 x 11)
Kiratbir Khurana - 36 (9 x 4)
Todd Rodgers - 16 (1 x 16)
Dan's notes:
Like this version.
Forgot about how all 7 roles get picked during final round.
Consider a track for the # of tiles until the game ends.
Surveyor should have an ability where you can pay to get a different random land card than the one revealed.
Add a population track.
Reverse order of Connected/Adjacent on player card.
Move population limit to right-hand side of player card.
Kiratbir's notes:
Connected versus not connected unclear when placing down permits.
Write out "Political Capital" on role cards instead of abbreviating.
Add flavor text to role cards to make it easier to remember what each one does.
Add rules summary to back of player card.
Todd's notes:
Separate the "+1" indicator from the person icon on the player cards.