Newbie Designer

I clearly need to work on my elevator pitch, because I read your question and my first thought was "uhm..."

Right now the game is 3 - 6 players, and not coop although I'm playing with ways to make it possible to either do teams, or coop vs 1 player as alternate game modes. None of those might see the light of day, but I had to entertain the possibilities.

The game is won by victory points, but the basic mechanic is a race. Game ends when 1 player has visited every location on the board with their pawn. Travel between locations is only possible once a portal is opened between them (a player action on their turn can be to open a portal between two locations). Players have a maximum of 6 cards in their hand which they can use on their turn (as an alternate action) to travel through the portals which then close (are removed from the board) behind them. This means anyone else who had been planning to use that route needs to rebuild the portals before travelling.

The tentative theme is around wizards, racing to various realms collecting scrolls to gain knowledge. In addition to the poorly explained mechanic above :) there's also spell cards which players can buy to cast on their turn for various advantages (like taking two actions per turn, etc).

How'd I do? So far the only people I've explained this to are my co-designers and play-testers. It's considerably harder without the board and tokens in front of us. I need to work on that.

No offense taken. This kind of feedback is great, and why I'm here.

We've play tested 6 times now, with groups from 3 - 5 people. Play time has been fairly consistent from 60 - 90 minutes. Our last play test involved some minor changes and that game took 40 minutes with 3 people. The game plays relatively fast, but occasionally someone's turn can take longer while they try to form their strategy. This weekend will see at least 1 new person play testing with us, which will help figure out the timing better since by now we all know what we're doing fairly well.

It is a race, but the board is a map with 22 interconnected locations. The players can split up and not all have to follow the same route so there's no runaway leader in a few moves. You do run into situations where you've placed Portals for a carefully thought out route and then someone swoops in and travels across them before you can and now you have to start over placing those Portals. However, that's never a big enough blow to set someone far enough back that they feel hopeless.

I won the last play test (the only one I've won actually) and arguably this was in part due to a choice to go the opposite direction of the other two players, so they had some conflict and got in each other's way a little, while I was free to do my own thing. There is a mechanic to hinder someone no matter where they are, so this can be prevented. Even so, my win was only by 5 points, and in fact had one player not inadvertently helped me on my final move I'd have lost (come in second).

Picture a map that has lines connecting various locations (kind of like the Pandemic map). These lines come in 4 flavors (right now, pending more theming: red, green, brown and blue). To travel along a line you need a portal there (portals come in 6 flavors right now, affectionately called A through F pending the theme being ironed out). On your turn you can pick from a face up pile of Portals (or draw a random one) and place it on the board (you then draw a card). The catch is that what works for you as a portal, might not work for other players.

e.g. You place a portal A on a Red line. This would cost you one Portal A card from your hand to cross if you took the movement action. However, for me Portal A on Red costs two cards not one. And for a third player Portal A on Red might not be a legal action at all so they can't travel that route no matter what.

This means that you could, on your turn place a Portal where you know I need to go, but it is a blocking move for me. This means I would either need to find a way around it, or spend a turn to remove the Token from the board.

The 6 card limit was put in place to force players to move regularly and not just horde cards and then move across the entire board in fell swoop. It also forces some hand management when you draw a new card but now have to discard one. We do allow 3 cards to count as a wild for travelling across Portals (as long as it is a legal move for your character). So a 6 card limit means you can, no matter what your cards, more than likely travel 2 Portals using them as wilds.

Your questions were great, by the way, and helped me focus my description. Thanks :)

- Andrew