Return to anarchy

It seems that it has been pretty much four years since I last wrote anything here about The Castle War. This is a two player game inspired by the period of 12th century English history often referred to as The Anarchy, where the anointed king, Stephen, was fighting to keep his crown from the Empress Matilda, the daughter of his predecessor, who many believed to be the rightful monarch. Game play is built around playing cards to develop military forces at a row of six castles, control of which is the aim of the game. There is a little asymmetry in the game, so there are slightly different aims and capabilities on each side. 

Before Covid I did quite a lot of work on it and got it pretty solid, but since then I did a little work via virtual tabletops, but as with many projects, this one fell out of my schedule and nothing has really been done on it for a couple of years.

The latest version of The Castle War implemented on Screentop.
Note hackiness to allow you to peek at face-down cards. 
It's better than nothing.

I recently had an in-person test with a designer friend who had played the game before, and we played the last version I had in a physical form, which missed out on a few changes that I had implemented virtually, but was a useful reminder of the game after a long gap. We actually had a pretty tight play and it felt like there were interesting decisions most turns, with some twists delivered by cards and dice along the way.

There were, of course, a few issues that we found, which were mostly user interface issues, where the presentation of certain elements on the cards made things harder to understand than would be ideal. We also identified a few areas where there were opportunities to increase what I could describe as "thematic interest".

I'll elaborate on that with an example. There are three cards that are always in play that represent three "power bases" (the Church, the Treasury, and London) that either player can play cards to take control of. The castles are the main objective, but these power bases are used to break ties at the end of the game, so can be important, but for most of the time I've been working on the game, that was all they did. I recently introduced a couple of card effects that key into the power bases (e.g. an event that triggers for the player that controls the Church), and these seem interesting and fun, but have only drawn attention to the fact that there is not much of this in the game.

The newly printed card set with a few already cut.
For single-sided cards I load these into sturdy, opaque-backed
card sleeves, which is easy, forgiving of bad cuts, and 
not bad to shuffle and play with.

So now I have rolled fixes for some of the issues we came up against into the prototype and updated both physical and virtual versions of the game. I have had a solo play through, with myself playing both sides, and it looked OK so far. To be clear, this game is not set up for solo play, especially as a lot of the actual play involves hidden plays, so there is room for uncertainty, bluffing and misdirection, which is hard to simulate. Still, the exercise is a passable test that the core of the game still works OK.

Of course, there is no substitute for actual, human playtesting.