I've gotten through a couple test plays with Yeti Mountain's current configuration and rule set and I've got a bunch of ideas which may or may not improve game play:
Change mountain level configuration-Instead of slope, slope, yeti, slope, slope, yeti, slope, slope, yeti, top I'm thinking of trying slope, slope, slope, yeti, slope, slope, yeti, slope, yeti, top. In conjunction with this the maximum number of objects a player can carry would be changed to five. With the lower levels still having the highest chance of success when a player searches for objects the players can just roam around the lower levels collecting objects before they move upward. With the yeti levels being slightly more compressed together the suspense factor might get bumped up a little also.
Divide the Avalanche and Slope cards equally among players and let them chose what card to place-this would add a little more strategy for the players and eliminate those situations where the types of cards are clustered together in a draw pile. With this rule in place the rule of discarding an Avalanche card for another action would most likely go away. If it did stay it would probably be limited to one time per turn. Another option would be to have the players draw cards as an action so they could build a hand and chose what cards to lay down from their hand but again players are still at the mercy of the card shuffle albeit less so. Actions per turn would probably go up to four with that variation since another action would be added.
Allow Yeti cards to be placed side by side-Instead of requiring at least one space between Yeti cards allowing them to be placed side by side might help keep the playing area from sprawling too far.
Now the question I have is should each rule option be tested one at a time or can I get away with testing two or more rule changes? Also how many times should I play test a rule even if the rule seems to be working well the first few times?
Comments
another card type
I thought of another card type last night to use with the Slope and Avalanche cards (at this point collectively known as Mountain cards). This will be a Ledge card and can be used only on the Yeti levels of the mountain and is used to bridge Yeti cards on the same level. Movement on these cards would only be horizontal so they can't be used to move up the mountain.
I also want to try a play varient where instead of players drawing from the Mountain card deck and immediately laying it down the players start off with a hand of 5 random Mountain cards and they lay down cards from their hand. Players can draw more cards for an action and the hand limit would be five. There would still be the randomness of what cards are drawn but there would be uncertainty as to what cards the other players are holding which wouldn't be the case if each player received equal numbers of card types at the beginning of the game. There are probably still some details to work out but I think this would be an interesting route to go.