Game #44: Homini Terra by RookieDesign

And an excellent game it looks too.
I'm a sucker for fantasy themes, and this one is surprisingly original* - fighting the game system is often an interesting way to drive the players (see all those discussions about "player goals" in the [TiGD] forums!) and the whole "well, the humans are going to win in the end" is nicely reminiscent of the wonderful game end in "Evo": the meteor strikes and all the dinos die out anyway!
(*well, more original than is usual in these contexts ;-)

Set-up: I will add the traditional "woah! component overload" comment here too: 150+ cards, 200 "stones" plus tokens and gold pieces. I must admit that I am always wary of games that need a central board and player mats as well; it adds significantly to the table space required and can end up causing problems. This is even more the case when you have multiple card stacks to draw from, and a board design that doesn't lend itself to an obvious place for them.

Rules: The only real grammatical comment I have is with a very early section: it shouldn't say "completes his Magic Harvest hand", it should be something like "refills" or "draws back to". It took me a moment to work out what you meant there. The rest of the rules were pretty clear (albeit occasionally prone to language-oddities) although they still felt a bit like a first draft set, with odd comments stuck in when you remembered them - I notice this because I do it myself!

Otherwise the only comment I had was that the first section ended with the mysterious line "Companion: Ogre Bodyguard". Since the Companions aren't really mentioned until about seven pages later (!) you need a line there which says "(see 6: Companions, below)" or something.
(Note that this companion should really be attached to phase 3, since apparently you don't reveal the Harvest cards until that point.)

Length: I certainly think it would be way too long to interest me, even though there are some nice lines: you may need to accelerate the Human conquest mode even more; the difficulty is that the neat "this slows delivery to market" mechanic would become even slower that way! And you can't really add player trading in, as that would slow the game down even more.
Is there only one real victory goal - the immortality potion? It feels to me as though there needs to be alternate ways to be able to make the potion but you've tied everything else in the game together so nicely (you can only earn serious money through making magic items, and you can only recruit companions through increased experience) that an alternative route to the potion doesn't seem obvious.

Title: I don't understand what you've got against Terra Hominum - it sounds fine to me. (Actually, my humour-translator kicked in when I first saw the title and thought "aha, someone has finally dared to call a game Planet of the Apes ;-))

Finally: this certainly feels like a game that's been a year in development; it's certainly nearer the end of the process than some GDW games. I'd be interested to know why you settled on six races: did you try using five or seven, or has it always been six?
But I can certainly see your concern about player interaction: there just isn't any, beyond the "who gets to the market first?" issue - and that may not be enough to sustain the game length.

I really like the way this game is set up. I personally don't mind the length of time, but I know that a lot of people will. It also seems like it is more of a niche game. You're only going to get so many people who are interested in this kind of game.

My questions concerning the rules:

Do you have to be a certain level to make an item of that same level? For example to make a level 2 formula do you have to be at least level 2?

In the Humans Reinforcement section you said that you should subtract 1 for EACH of the markers in the 5 to 8 region. But in your example there were 2 in the -1region, and 1 in the -2 region. Yet it was only added to -3. Does this mean you only subtract 1 once? Does it not matter how many markers are in a subtract region? you simply subtract that number if there are any markers in the area?

It said that the companion ability can only be used once. I would suggest that being able to use the ability more than once would give more of an incentive to get the companion you want Thus creating a sense of player interaction, because you want to gain the level faster, as well as get to market faster than the other players. I guess it is more of a sense of urgency in comparison to the other players more than a sense of player interaction. In my gaming experience both are good for a game, especially if one is missing. Secondly, by allowing the companion's ability to be used more than once it might speed up the game, because players have more ways in which they can sell stones, make formulas and so on.

Another way you could make the human urgency seem more substantial, is by ending the game when a fixed number of provinces are taken over, no matter what race they are from. For example, if 10 total provinces are taken over then there simply isn't enough magic left in the world for the potion of immortality to be made. (just a thought)

I think you've got a very interesting and unique game here. I still think that the theme and gameplay make it a game that will only attract a fairly specific crowd, but we need games for that crowd so keep it up.

I haven't had a chance to fully digest the rulebook yet, but I just wanted to chime in with few quick reactions.

First, the visual presentation is obviously great; kudos! I think the core idea is also quite imaginative, and quite compelling. I could easily see Fantasy Flight picking this one up.

That said, your component list is a bit silly; 2400 Gold pieces?! A game that takes 2400 of anything is a non-starter. Happily, I think it shouldn't be too hard to remove the need for this many tokens; I see them as a by-product of what I perceive to be a vastly overcomplicated cost structure. Any payout schedule that runs into the high double digits is too complicated. Find a way to simplify things to where payouts, costs, rewards, etc, are all between 1-10 at most (and 1-3 is really ideal, but probably too narrow for this game). This will require some creativity, but you've shown you're capable of that. I may have specific suggestions after looking things over again.

In that sense, I see the "game" as working like this: You are a wizard, and you want to complete great spells/artifacts. The components for these come from the various races, (and the products are bought by the races), so you want to keep the races that contribute the stuff you need for your spells in business to keep supplying you with that stuff. But, the humans are going to attack the "weakest" race each turn, and you want to machinate that so that the races you deal with aren't affected by that for as long as possible.

I think that's roughly how your game works. And that's a very good base indeed. Now you need to work harder to make sure that everything in the game contributes to this core system, and extraneous stuff -- companions, lookup charts, stress levels, etc -- all is pulling its weight at contributing to the central structure of the game. Think long and hard about everything. Don't accept that just because you want it in there, it needs to stay. Don't be afraid to hack gratuitously.

My feeling is that there's a good 90 minute game in here, but 3 hours is just too much. As I said, I'll try to come up with specifics if I can find anything. But overall, my reaction is that you have a very original and clever thematic idea, and some good mechanics, but also some rubble that you need to clear to expose the beautiful sculpture underneath.

Good luck!

-Jeff

Sorry its taking me a while to make some comments. I'll try to be quick and to the point (unlikely say those who know me ....)

I'll also say that I'd like to make better comments but I feel I'd need to lay the game to offer better insights ...

Concept

Firstly, great concept. I also like the way the gameplay and the theme are so closely linked. To me, this aids to the enjoyment and I suspect it should also help players in determining strategies as they can fall back on the theme to guide them.

Components

I am envious of your graphical skills. That said, there do seem to be a lot of components. What options are there for reducing them?

For example, consider less
- races
- magic stones
- army tokens
- gold pieces

I like the variety the 6 races and the 6 stone colours offer, but are they really necessary? (Hard for me to say without playing). Reducing one or both of those will help reduce componets and simplify the gameplay.

For the gold pieces, the numbers seem to get quite big. Is it possible to scale this down? This will reduce both components and the amount of calculation from the players.

Magic items

I couldn't see anywhere how they actually helped against the humans. Do they or is this a trick employed by mages wanting some extra cash?

Game length

Here are some ideas that I have used to reduce game length:

- (A) Have an accelerated start-up. In my GDW'd game "High Council of Evensford", players are given 3 cards from a resource deck and 3 cards from a technology deck. Then they can immediately trade in one tech card for a tech advance in the related technology (which usually requires 3 of a kind).

(B) Scale down things. In my game, (which is about building houses and buildings in a growing city) this meant reducing the resources required to build things.

(C) Increase available resources. In my game, the initial resource deck had too many low value resources, so it took too long to accumulate enough resources to do things.

Trading

I may have missed it, but do you have a way of tracking what people have bought/sold in thier first phase so they don't sell/buy it in their second phase?

Companions

Lots of variety and interesting, but the game might play fine without them and keeps the game simpler. (Save them for your first expansion perhaps?)

I assume only one of each is available.

Also, looking at them, I'm guessing some are better for you personally (e.g. ogre bodyguard, lizardman smuggler), while others are better for the group (e.g. gnome bard, orcish war drums). Is this the case? Do your playtests suggest the same companions are always being taken?

There's some quick comments for now at least ... nice work!

Back again.

Firstly, thanks TuskThunder for your insights. Its always good to hear opinions from a playtester's perspective.

Back to some specifics ...

Armies and Items

I like the idea of items being used in the war against the humans. Removing armies altogether does make things simpler but I'd be tempted to keep some form of army as its a neat concept ... perhaps a fixed army per region, supplemented by magic items?

Game length

My concerns about game length were more a reaction to

If you think that's now better paced, don't worry about those comments!

races and stones

The problem that I see with only 4 kingdom is if I have 5 players, the kingdom will be bought from all players every round. With one more choice than players, there is a small chance that stones remain on the board for the next buying round.

I think I missed something on my first reading through here (and not helped by the fact that I printed it all out in balck & white before reading it). Correct me if I'm wrong, but each type of stone is only produced by a specific race? If I hadn't originally picked up on that ... I was somehow thinking that you might have different stones coming form different areas. For example, the first person would allocate all of the stones on their harvest card to a single race ... the next person would chose a different race and so on ... (or it could be the same race as well, representing a greta harvest from them?)

Anywhere these are just random ideas ... I can see the importance of having a large enough market to support the buying (and selling).

Gold pieces

For me its not only the number but the effect on the maths and amount of calculating involved. Okay, I've got a degree in statistics and it doesn't worry me, but there are quite a few people that are much happier working with smaller numbers ... particularly if they are trying to plan ahead and keeping a running total in their minds.

(For example, in Goa, you can choose to produce differenttypes of spices in your turn. To help my planning and to speed up the game [in my one and only game to date], while it was not my turn, I played with the out of play spice tokens to try and work out the best combination of spices to produce in my turn ... given that all sort of actions required different combinations of spices. If the numbers of spices produced were big, this would have been near impossible and would have significantly slowed down the game).

Companions and races

I take this point, although the races still have some sort of relationship with the types of stones I think? That said, the companios are a nice touch, but I'd be wary if everyone was always trying to pick the same ones ... (as a measure of game balance in the companions)

Moving the stones

An interesting idea, to presumably produce a delay before the stones actually making it to market ...

That said, what would happen if stones always went straight to the market? I'm just trying to think of ways to streamline the game ...

Finally, I'd like to reinforce DarkDream's general comment. I think you've got quite a good game here, but with a bit of streamlining and a possible extra twist, it could potentially be a very good game.

And most importantly, it sounds like the playtesters are having fun.

Bill