Last week I finished up an alpha prototype for Diver Delve and did a first playtest. The biggest thing that was different in the prototype than what I described in my last journal entry was that instead of 12 shark cards I reduced that number down to 6 and added 6 jellyfish cards in their place. At the time the jellyfish cards would only act as a barrier that the divers would have to manuever around but another idea came up for those during the first playtest which I will describe later.
Another thing that I added was an action point system which used air as currency. Each diver would start each dive with 30 air units and would spend them to perform both the card manipulation actions as well as the diver's own movement actions. The players would be limited to 5 actions in a turn. Instead of using a 1 to 1 ration between air and the cost of actions I wanted to incorporate something where the more actions a player takes the more air it would cost above a 1 to 1 ratio. What I came up with is if you perform 1 or 2 actions the cost is 1 and 2 units of air respectively. If you perform 3 or 4 actions the cost is 4 and 5 and if you perform 5 actions then the cost is 7. Also, the divers must make three separate dives to retrieve the specimans on their mission card and when the divers get back to their boat their air supply is replenished back to 30.
Another rule I added was in the event that a diver would run out of their 30 units of air (which can happen easily if units of air are squandered by taking too many actions at one time) they could still limp along and make 2 actions. I didn't want to penalize the player in a way that would make them have to start a dive over such as giving up a speciman card they may have retrieved. This would mostly like just slow them down.
During the playtest it seemed like the 'swap two cards' action was a bit overpowered when it was done consecutively 2 or 3 times because then an open card within a certain distance could be easily moved and made accessible which goes against the spatial challenge that I'm envisioning for the game. Because of this I want to try limiting the use of each card manipulation action to once per turn.
Another thing that turned up was that divers would get boxed in by shark and jellyfish cards and it would be difficult to manipulate the card layout in a way that made it possible for the diver to get out. One thing I'm thinking of doing to address this is to allow divers to pass through the jellyfish cards but at a cost of one air.
I also had a couple of other things I want to try out. The first is limiting movement actions to 3 during a turn. This way if there is a straight shot to the ocean floor the diver won't get there in one turn. Also, when a diver runs out of air and are limited to 2 actions I want to try limiting this even further to only 1 action for card manipulation and 1 action for movement just so there is more of a penalty for using up all the units of air on a dive. Also, I want to make it so that if a shark spots a diver it takes away 2 air instead of just 1. Lastly, I also want to add another obstacle card in addition to the shark and jellyfish cards. I'm thinking of adding an octopus card which the divers can move through but when they do their must stop on the card and cannot move off until their next turn. The obstacle cards would breakdown into 4 shark cards, 4 jellyfish cards, and 4 octopus cards.
