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Nigel Buckle
United Kingdom
Forest Hill
London
Now called Omega Centauri (by Spiral Galaxy Games) release date tbc
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As I've mentioned before I'm working on a deck-building game.
I've got an earlier design - started working on it the day after I played Dominion and decided it wasn't for me but I loved the idea of building a deck/modifying your actions as you go.
Omega Centauri has this a little bit already - technology alters/improves your basic actions, so Hyperdrive lets you move your ships further if you move and PSI labs let you steal an opposing fleet when you research etc, but the main mechanic of chosing 3 actions from 5 isn't changed.
So I went back to my original design and mashed it into Ascendancy - in effect replacing the focus card mechanic with a 'build your deck of focus cards' mechanic.
It worked - after some alteration, and I could see potential - different races could have a different deck ... but there was serious problem, play time.
When I designed Ascendancy I wanted a 4X game playable in under 2 hours - this new game was taking much longer than that. This was a major flaw, my feeling was why play this when Ascendancy is quicker? Does the extra deckbuilding element justify the time it was taken.
Short answer was no, so what to do? Give up on the deck-building aspect completely (it's sort of failed twice now) or rethink the way it had been dropped into Ascendancy?
I took the latter, and decided to repeat what I did with Ascendancy, namely looking at the elements and identifying the ones that took time, and seeing if they could be cut/modified/abstracted to speed the game up.
First things I looked at where the Empire growing and combat - with the extra element of deck building you didn't need those slowing the game down, but without combat how do you control sectors and 'explore', and without the Empire also developing either it is too hard at the start of the game or becomes a push over as the player empires gain combat technology and more fleets.
Linked to this was the map building, moving on a map, generating resources from the map, placing discovery chits on the map ... again all taking time.
So instead I removed the map! Going back to Dominion, it has 'land' represented by VP cards you buy and then clog up your deck. I part like that idea, but wanted a way to limit it a bit, and to bring in exploring rather than 'purchasing'.
I put the sectors onto cards, and gave each an "explore" cost in fleets - removing the vs empire combat - now you pay in fleets to 'buy' the card. Once in your deck it is worth VPs but also you can invade it, for a futher fleet cost which then lets you play it in front of you (like a world in Race for the Galaxy) still worth VP at the end but now you can do stuff with it (like build shipyards, collect resources)
This worked - but I wanted different values of sectors to explore, so they had differing costs. Testing showed the order became crucial, you needed to draw sectors you had sufficient fleets to explore, and that was down to the luck of the shuffle, not good. Throneworld handles this by having different strengths (and values) for the worlds but marking them as inner/outer etc so the early areas players take are weak (and low value), later stronger and more valuable. With a deck I can do the same, I split the sectors into different types and shuffled each type and build a stacked deck, with the strongest at the bottom working up, so as the game progressed the players start to get through the outer sectors and into the valuable core ones.
However a couple of my long suffering testers asked "why Omega Centauri (again ...)" and that got me thinking. There were lots of elements I'd included to give a feel of the board game ... and they were slowing the game down and making it more rule heavy. Did I need these? Was the gaming experience worth the effort?
I realised that my idea to have a deckbuilding game based on Omega Centauri wasn't really working. So I sat down and thought about a retheme (but keeping the central idea of an 'empire building' type game) ...
More to be revealed in step 2.
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Now called Omega Centauri (by Spiral Galaxy Games) release date tbc
interesting read.
