2018-12-18

Castle War in London Once More

Another month, another playtest meetup in London, the last one of this year. And for a second month I took along The Castle War, my two-player card game inspired by the 12th century war in England between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda.  I've had a pretty productive time with this game over the last few weeks, with several useful playtests, and the game has been stripped back quite a lot in an attempt to make it quicker to learn and smoother and quicker to actually play.

I found my two volunteers, and after a little while playing one of their prototypes (an experimental storytelling game, which had some really interesting aspects, so it'll be great to see how it develops) and set about explaining the game.  Pleasingly this took a load less time that previous plays, but as it turned out this was a bit of an illusion, as several rules turned out to not be clear to the players, partly due to a weak explanation and partly due to wording or presentation of some components being less that ideal, but also, I think, a few points suggest that some of the rules may have been unintuitive.  I need to figure out which bits are this latter, as this is harder to fix than simply improving an explanation or some graphic design.

Getting into the second half of the game and quite a lot of forces on the table.
A few issues came up during play, like the way that the players didn't really click with how the dice are used to constrain card placement and give bonuses in combat, and there was a misunderstanding about how victory was to be calculated, but the things I picked up on as bigger issues at the moment are actually related to game balance.

One of the big issues, and one that has been bugging me throughout my work on this game, is the "withdraw" tactic.  The game has tactic cards that can be added to an army to modify the outcome of battle resolution, and the withdraw card allows a player to lure a lot of the opponent's forces to a battle, and then simply leave them there, ceding the ground to the enemy without fighting, and with a large part of their resources committed to the wrong place.  It made sense in my mind, but the structure of the game never incentivised players to use this option, and in practice it seems at best useless, and at worst counterproductive.  I've tried a few tweaks, but nothing has worked, and this test showed me that the problem has not gone away.

How to address an issue like this? Well, I was flirting with dropping the tactic entirely, but that felt like running away from the problem, and I really wanted to represent in the game the fact that, in the history, there were numerous examples of one side simply walking away from a conflict, effectively saying, "OK, you win!"

So, what is the real benefit of withdrawing your troops from a battle or a siege? Mainly so you don't lose valuable troops, and you have them to use elsewhere, I would say.  The problem is that, in this game, you are limited in how many cards you can play in a given turn, so having a lot of cards in hand may give you options, but it takes a long time to make use of them, thus invalidating that potential advantage.  To fix this I need to either make it so that you can play the additional cards more quickly, or make the withdraw tactic do something different.  What I will try out is allowing a withdrawal to move all the troops at a castle to an adjacent castle.  We'll see how that works out in play.

This is all effectively an issue of balance: if a card is such that nobody ever wants to play it, then it is not in balance with the rest of the game.  Normally I say that I worry about balance later in a game's development, but that is not entirely true: if some element of a game is grossly out of kilter, I do need to change it, partly because it distorts gameplay, but mostly because it is a distraction.  I often find that if something is massively over- or under-powered, even the most experienced playtesters tend to fixate on it and have difficulty seeing the rest of the game.

The other most distracting balance issue, I think, is that two unit types, knights and soldiers, are effectively identical other than the fact that knights are better than soldiers in terms of combat strength.  Where you have no real control over the cards coming to your hand, having some of them being objectively worse (in effectively every situation) than others can be a problem and lead to one player just having worse cards and thus less chance of winning.  I want to do something about this, so have been thinking through a few options that I will be tinkering with.  One that I am thinking about is to make knights more powerful, but those knights don't get benefits from having leaders with them, while soldiers do.

Overall, though, I was pleased with what I saw in the game this time.  It still has a long way to go, but the play time was only a shade over my target 30 minutes, and the game swung back and forth a couple of times during play and was finally decided right at the end -- although the aforementioned misunderstanding about game end scoring did take the shine off that a bit!

Feeling optimistic about this at the moment though.

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