Wind Up - Sample Rules

I had a read through the rules and here are some comments in random order. A caveat on all of these comments is that it is a bit hard to judge what the gameplay is going to be like without playtesting it, so if I've misunderstood anything feel free to ignore the comment.

* It seems this game would benefit from using either square or round cards for the gears, rather than poker cards.

* The proposed playing time seems optimistically low. Given 12 rounds, a 4 player game will have 48 individual turns so that is just under 1 minute per player. I guess playtesting would reveal whether players can actually play that fast.

* I didn't understand why the first player gets to decide who to give the unwind cards to, given that once played they affect all players. It seems you would always want to give them to the two players to your left, with the worst one to the immediate left. Unless I'm reading it wrong it seems there's only a small opportunity for clever play here, but I suspect that it would be (1) nasty and (2) slow the game down without making it more fun.

* The Overview section may benefit from being shorter; as it is, the Overview is longer than the "detailed" Sequence of Play section. There is a lot of duplication between the Overview and the Sequence of Play.

* In the setup you deal 3 workers face up. I assume from analogy to similar games that when buying workers you can select any of the 3 face up workers and then draw a replacement from the deck, however this is not explicitly stated.

* I was somewhat confused by the production rules until I saw the sample cards. An example picture embedded in the text would help.

* I assume that energy cannot stored for future rounds, although this is not explicitly stated.

* The example of Overwinding has 3 doubling to 8.

* Thief: In a multiplayer game, paying 3 gold to steal 1 prism would actually put you at a disadvantage vs the non-stolen-from players. That is, assuming that you steal from the leader, you have a net loss of 1 point vs his net loss of 2 points (for a relative gain of 1). But the other 2 players have a relative gain of 2 points each for no cost. Is that the intended outcome?

* Alchemist: This doesn't seem to be very useful, other than to try to get the bonus points for most prisms. You're spending two points to gain two points, but at a loss of flexibility (since the gold could have been used as iron) and you've also lost the gold that you spent to buy the Alchemist.

* Vandal: This doesn't seem useful in a multiplayer game, for the same reason as the Thief.

Overall, it looks like the game has promise. It appears to follow the pattern of a typical eurogame, where there are multiple strategies available and opportunity costs for everything you do. Little direct interaction between players other than the "take that" work abilities, but it does seem like there would be indirect interaction through the increasing costs of the cards.

I wish you all the best and happy playtesting.

Regards,
kos