Show of Power: Post-Protospiel Updates

Visiting Protospiel 2009 was a very good thing for me. Not only did I get to play and see some very cool games, and get some valuable feedback and advice specific to my projects, I find myself with a strongly renewed creative energy in general.

I was able to get Show of Power* onto the testing table twice during the weekend, playing 2 4-player games with 7 different testers. The game seemed to work pretty well, but had some areas where the feedback played a big roll in shaping what the game is to become. The main thing that happened was to show exactly what could be cut without impacting the game much at all.

Scoring Areas & Player-Driven Scoring: The 3 main scoring areas, and the players' ability to influence what is scored and when scoring takes place seemed to be fairly well-liked. However, the actual mechanics I had for triggering and influencing the scoring needed to be changed. Previously, the player needed to discard a specific set of cards from his hand in order to trigger scoring in the area(s) he wanted. This became frustrating when the player who did a lot of work on the map and would have benefitted from scoring at that point was nearly out of cards and couldn't put together the cards needed to trigger the scoring. Instead, something was needed that would allow players to incrementally influence the next scoring event and drive it to be triggered without it requiring specific cards nor allowing it to be triggered too easily/quickly. What I've settled on is to have a "Political Influence" section on the board where players can set cards that will eventually trigger scoring and influence which areas are scored.

Points for Number of Players Beat: The idea of scoring 1 VP for each player that you scored better than in an area worked pretty well, at least for the 4-player games that we were testing. I believe it will work as well with 3- and 5-player games, but that I will have an alternate scoring method for 2-player games. (In 2-player games, the better player will score the difference between his count and his opponent's count in a scoring area.)

Encouraging Balance & Alternate Game-End Conditions: The game gives the feeling that having to pay attention to all 3 scoring areas should be encouraged. The method for ending the game that I had been using (a fixed number of scoring events) seemed overly-arbitrary. Instead, I now plan to have players mark on the board when they were the best scorer in one of the scoring areas ... players receive extra VPs for marking a 2nd and 3rd scoring area. The game ends once any player has a mark for each of the 3 scoring areas, or once any player reaches a certain number of VPs.

Updated Game Board: To reflect the combination of changes that are coming, I am working on a new game board design to include: A 12-Region Map (reduced by 3 Regions to encourage earlier conflict), a VP scoring track, a set of "Show of Power" boxes for the 3 scoring areas, and a "Political Influence" area for placing the cards that will trigger and influence scoring. I hope to have another post in the next day-or-two to show off the new board design.

-Matt

*"Show of Power" is the name of the game I used to call "Uncivil" here at BGDF.