New types of artifice

If you've been here a while, you might remember about The Artifact, a project I have been working on since... ages ago with co-designer Alex Cannon. We've been working on this mostly in a virtual form (implemented on Screentop.gg), and have had a core to the game, about which we have tried a heap of different approaches to make a full game. Some of the iterations have been quick and light, and some have been crunchy brain-burners, but none have really felt right to us.

We got into another fresh approach a couple of months or so back, which felt good. Alex managed to arrange some in-person playtesting which helped develop the idea into something that worked pretty well, and I was able to get some further tests that have added some additional shape to the project. After a period of slow progress, we have got into something of a rhythm with one of us doing some independent testing and development, then working together to consolidate, then the other doing something, and so on...

A recent 2-player test of the game on Screentop.
Note the very basic "it'll do for now" grid on the right -
enough to test with and no more.

It feels to me that we have reached a shape to the game that we enjoy playing and shows promise. It still has plenty of flaws, some of which we have identified already, and some we are sure exist but will need testing to find, but we seem to have a workable direction of travel for now.

The core of the game has always been built around placing domino-like tiles to a central play area, placing "researcher" tokens onto these, and using those researchers to access "knowledge resources" on the tiles to gain... something, generally including "projects" that progress towards victory, but in some iterations there have been other things involved.

Right now, added to the spatial game of building the array of tiles and having researchers in the right place to achieve objectives, we have a secondary board representing the projects and developments that can be achieved using the researchers and the resources they access. This board provides a second spacial element as victory comes from connecting up a group of completed spaces on its grid, and as you complete projects you get actions which can manipulate the state of the tiles, so there is a circular dependency.

A 3-player test that got really bogged down and ground to a stop.

This all works pretty well for two players, but for three, it seems a lot more patchy and the current setup can get bogged down quite badly, with some turns involving some serious puzzling out, and active blocking moves making it very difficult for someone to win. That latter point can certainly be addressed, and we'll have to see if the former is a problem for players. We haven't yet tried more than three players. I think that there are ways around this though, with plenty of elements we can adjust, including costs of projects, layout of the project board, effects that take place with completed projects, and so on. We'll be exploring this over the coming weeks.

We're likely to continue to test primarily with two players for the time being, there being the two of us working on the game, but we'll increasingly have to look at higher player counts. It might be that we can get it to work great for two but struggle with more, and that's fine, but would frankly be a little disappointing. There may need to be variations in setup for different player counts, and this is something we already have some ideas about.

All in all though, progress is good.