Troubles with paradise

It’s been a long time since I posted to this blog but even longer since I self published anything, several years in fact.

I have been planning to publish Eden 1157B for more than a year now but development has been a bear and I don’t want to waste the time and money on a flawed product. Just when I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel I had it tested at Protospiel. Guess what happened. You don’t have to guess I’ll tell you but first you’ll have to understand the game a little.

Eden 1157B is a card driven territory accusation and resource gathering game. The object being to get enough resources to build a space craft to travel to Eden 1157B. The players gather resources so they can increase their population to settle more territories. Some units become the rulers of the territory and other the subjects. More population means more actions per turn and each territory only produces certain resources. You must spread out to win and often fight over key resource location since each has a limit to how many units it can support.

Now to what happened. My test group did something no other test group did. That was to not spread out but rather max out the population limits in the territories they already occupied. The game already tends to be 60+ min. This particular strategy caused the game to grind to a snail’s pace, limit the decision making, and worse yet lock out some players from a potential win early in the game (It was their fault for trying it but still ugly).

Like I said I have been working on the game for a long time and its one of the buggiest designs I have ever worked on. Fix one thing and another broke. That went on for a long time before I reached a stable state with several kludge rules to hold it together. But even that was ruined now. I was about to throw in the towel when it dawned on me that the problem was not my idea but my clinging to tightly to the original rules set. What the game needed is drastic change so that’s what it got. I sat down with the rules set and started over with just the concept.

The result is a game with simpler rules that should be less fiddly while still being true to the original concept. So much was changed I felt the name needed changing too so New Eden was born.

How does it play? I don’t know yet, I haven’t gotten it to the table. Still I feel good about the change and hope to publish it soon, soon as in 2011 that is.