Scurvy Treasures

The game of the moment is definitely Scurvy Crew, and I have managed to get another playtest group assembled to test the changes I have made over the last couple of weeks. The main changes involve the way treasure is handled, with custom treasure cards, plus a treasure bonus for the player who sinks each merchant ship in addition to the "area control" rewards.

Towards the end of the game, with treasure and tea nearly run out.

So, some of the take-aways from this play included:

• The game took 70 minutes to play, with several pauses where I needed to clarify some rules. Without those pauses and bits of confusion, the game would have been within an hour, and almost certainly a load quicker with more experienced players. This I take as a win.
• BUT those pauses for clarification are a huge problem. Part of the problem is that the terminology I have on the cards is woolly and inconsistent, so fixing that should reduce confusion significantly. I will also have to think long and hard (and observe more) to see what complexity in the game is unnecessary and should be cut or simplified. There is bound to be something.
• The bonus treasure for actually sinking a merchant was an incentive for people to jump in and actually finish them off, but when the final scores were reckoned, it turned out that these bonuses didn't effect anything and were in practice disproportionately small. Shouldn't be hard to fix that.
• The set collection aspect of treasure collecting didn't really pan out as hoped: there was a feeling that you were getting random rewards and then you ended up with some sort of a score that you had little control over. 
• Balance is terrible.  I know this, and am slowly chipping away at it, but my style of play is to not worry too much about balance until late in the development process. The players were aware of this, but it can be hard for them to not worry about it. Maybe I should rethink my process a bit here.
• There was general agreement that there should be parrots, monkeys and rum. :/

I ended up with plenty more notes than this, so I have a lot to be working with. Big thanks to the Some-Mondays group for some great feedback.  My next opportunity to playtest is likely to be next week, so I'd better get to it...

The Crew is Still Scurvy

Over Christmas I started thinking about Scurvy Crew, a game I was working on ages ago, before I discovered the 24 hour game design contests or the Playtest UK community.  It has been sitting on the shelf for nearly two and a half years, having got to a state where it was playable but not particularly enjoyable.  One of the issues was that I had got about half of the game working fine, but the other half, which was basically the bit that allowed you to score points and win the game, was terrible.

The decent (though still flawed) part of the game was crewing a pirate ship by collecting cards and building a tableau in front of you, and the mechanism of either discarding cards from the tableau or taking them back into hand in order to trigger special actions.  However, hunting and capturing merchant ships was, at various times, boring, fiddly, and/or anticlimatic.

Me versus me in a battle for treasure on the high seas.

So I had an idea about how to handle hunting merchants, which kinda turns that aspect of the game from a make-a-decision-take-a-chance mechanism to a more Euro-style system, which involves overcoming a series of challenges by expending crew resources, and rewards coming when all the challenges have been completed according to who has done the most.  Yes, this is more or less an area control game, which doesn't sound too piratey, but I wanted to give it a try.

This required a fair bit of chopping and changing the game around, which I did over the last week or two, until I finally had myself a playable prototype again.  Where possible, it is worth doing a bit of solo testing before arm-twisting my friends into giving it a go, so I have done just that and can report that the game seems to have improved.  I didn't have a system for player-vs-player attacks, and I think the game is currently weaker because of it, but other than that, I think I have at least taken a step in the right direction.  It's worth sorting out the PvP aspect before the game leaves the house, but it feels nice to make some progress with an old design.