Hi everyone,
I'm looking for some help with devising a way for players to claim spots on a game board, similar to the placing of meeples in Carcassonne.
The game I'm designing is a card game where players play have an option to use their cards as pieces of a map (which everyone builds together) or from their hands as assets during the gameplay itself. The twist is that when certain conditions are met on the map, part of the map is removed, the player who causes the removal to happen gains points and then play continues on from there.
The problem I'm having is that in playtesting people feel like they do a lot of work that other people benefit from... Because a certain amount of the map is removed, the players who don't cause the removal to trigger feel like they've lost their last few turns when the cards they've played go away. It's not an awful situation for the game mechanics themselves... the game "works fine." It just doesn't FEEL good (even to me when I'm playing).
As a result, I've been toying around with various "claim" mechanics which allow people to essentially put a hold on regions of the map for a price or for free, etc., but they seem pretty clunky. Also, people don't seem to want/remember to use them.
Anyway... I'd love any suggestions people have on how to mitigate this. I know I've been pretty vague here... Just trying to be as succinct as possible with the description of the problem. I'd be glad to give any more details if anyone's interested.
Thanks much,
Dave
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Great suggestions, both. Thank you for making them...
Mark: I've definitely been wondering if moving the intent towards some kind of sharing is better than my current approach. Another thing I like about this approach is that it opens up another path to victory, allowing one player in the game to maybe focus more on enabling other players and working the non-bonus points instead just trying to clear out sections of the map. Maybe I could even introduce some kind of additional goal/bonus cards based on this kind of approach. I also like the idea of finding some way to more differentiate between my cards (ie red or whatever)... As you might imagine some of the cards are functionally redundant so that the map aspect works. Would be nice to have another way to set them apart. This would also help with one of the other problems I was having with the game--that people don't seem to be grasping a strategy that allows them to anticipate or want to draw a certain card from the deck. In short, they don't know what they're looking for, so they don't enjoy drawing cards (they often forget to draw, too).
JustActCasual: I has also been thinking about the idea of asymmetric "characters" associated with their claims. One thing that worries me with that is that my audience for this game is casual adult players... The character aspect makes it feel a little more genre to me. What do you think? I've found it to be a little hard to understand the purpose for in games where I've encountered it--elder signs is the main example that comes to mind there. I also really like your other suggestion of smaller bonuses... I'll probably look into that first, because it would make the smallest change to the way the game works now.
Anyway, thanks much again for the suggestions. Looking forward to giving them a try ASAP.
-Dave