Tonight was game night, and we did manage to get in a four-player playtest of The Abbey.
It was a semi-blind test, meaning that one of the four players grabbed the rulebook and tried to explain the game from it, while I looked on and tried to keep my mouth shut. Three of the four are part of my core playtest group and the fourth has done a playtest with me before, so there was a good vibe. Everyone knew that I don't take negative feedback personally and that the game was up for evaluation, not praise.
They determined start player according to the official rules and got through the setup without any issues... of course, setup has been vastly reduced from earlier versions, it's basically put the monks into the abbey and deal three cards to every player.
The first round went quickly... I want to say too quickly, but I think that it may be just part of the game structure. In area control games, the first tendency is to put out your pieces as fast as possible in the most obvious way possible. That meant Add Workers, which means the scribe moved through the Wheel of the Year fairly quickly and only a few cards were played.
The way the end of round scoring meant that the first player scored no points, and thus was in last place and still start player for the second round. Each player got two more cards (meaning some players had five cards, since they hadn't played any cards in the first round). This meant that the second round was a lot longer and a lot more strategic than the first round. Players had a good handle on how the cards allowed them to get workers out onto the board without the Scribe moving, and we finally saw the monks coming out into the contract area, but that was more about strengthening position than picking cards back up. The start player was behind all of this action... it was in the Stone contract area, meaning the Quarries were the most valuable. Another player had one of the quarries locked up and a monk supervising that work area to prevent himself from being bumped. Moving the scribe into the Winter Market seemed to be more deliberate of a move this time out.
The start player had pushed up Stone, but been locked out of one of the two quarry areas available (since this was a four player game, the work areas on the other side of the river were not used), so he scored some points but not enough to move out of last place. He was start player for the third and final round.
Only one card comes out in the final round, this is intended to ratchet up the tension. Players still had a lot of cards in their hands and we saw a lot of back and forth with the cards. There was a lot of pushing of workers wherever possible and two uses of the Flood card (which clears out the Mine) to deny scoring opportunities. They did end of round scoring, which didn't move people too much and then end of game scoring, which did cause some more action on the track. The player next to the perennial start player was the eventual winner but it was close and the scores grouped together well.
VERDICT: Almost there! I've glossed over a couple of times when the players stumbled on the rules, I'll try to rewrite things for clarity and some folks have volunteered excellent suggestions for the player aid and rulebook.
1> I'm a bit worried about the start player being too weak, but willing to test more. I think with a little more active first round we wouldn't have had a big gap develop.
2> The score track is a bit of an issue... if the mine is dominated by a single player, it needs to be that long, but in most games we hardly use half of it. I may push up the scoring values one notch higher and maybe change the end game scoring a little so that single color lines score more.
3> Those players who had prior experience with old versions of The Abbey commented that this felt very much like a different game, one with a lot more player interaction. My only thought is that I could change how Wool works, to dampen down the interaction a little bit (and remove a potential confusion point at the same time)... I will probably test with this as an option.
