Seth Jaffee
United States
Tucson
Arizona
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Big breakthroughs for Terra Prime! I got to play it 3 times at KublaCon this weekend, and once more when I got off the plane in Phoenix.
Test game #1, with Peter Drayton and Marcus [somebody], and myself.
This three player game went pretty well. I'm afraid I don't recall any details, but the main problem I was hoping to address was the lack of tension due to abundant cash. At the beginning, cash is tight, and the tension is high. Soon though you can deliver a couple cubes, and suddenly your cash flow is no problem at all and you can afford anything you want.
Test game #2, With Rick Holzgrafe, Chris Holzgrafe, James Earnest (who was replaced by Nat's friend Daniel), and myself.
This 4 player game took a lot longer than it should have, but then again we had to do the rules twice. We used 2 variant rules I'd been meaning to try:
1. Princes of Florence style VP/Income. When you deliver goods you get
money, and at that time you can choose to trade some of that money
for VPs. At the end of the game, leftover money is worthless.
2. Sabotage as an action. In order to accomplish a few things (Player
interaction, the possibility to slow down a player making a delivery), I
added a rule that you could shoot at each other's ship, and if you hit,
they lose resources (not Modules). If they have no resources, they lose
1 VP per hit. Actually, this game I might not have had the VP thing in
there, just resources.
This game was a little interesting in that the new rules were added, but at no time did anyone use the Sabotage option. Most of the time people opted for money over VPs when delivering goods as well, so the tension of having tight cash still evaporated fairly quickly. I have since made another change (which I will talk about later) which might help that even more. On the up side, it is a little interesting when you start to think "gee, I think I can start banking some of this money now... so how much do I need?"
In that game I ended up arming myself with weapons and shields and upgrading the weapons a couple times so I could roll an extra die. I believe I polayed the entire game with only 2 thrusters, never upgrading to go beyond that, to see if I could stay competetive - because most players go for maximum thrusters on account of more thrusters = more actions. If I remember correctly, Daniel won a very close game, in large part because a single Alien in the Yellow zone wrecked me turn after turn, dodging all my shots and knocking off module after module on my ship. Eventually I had to limp away with no guns and no shields left. I think we computed that the chance of all that happening was under 2% :/
Test game #2, With Rick Holzgrafe, Nat Holzgrafe, Chris Holzgrafe, and myself.
This game we had a better idea of what to do, and there are several pictures of it on BGG now thanks to Rick and his digital camera. Rick continued in his tradition of getting a bad start, but eventually upgraded and bought some thrusters for more actions and started formulating a plan. I may be misremembering, but I think it was Chris who seemed to be executing a plan from the start, exploring, colonizing, and delivering goods as if on purpose. I think I won that game, which was close until a last minute delivery of 2 red resources netted me 14 points for those alone.
This emphasized to me that there is a bit of a problem with the way the delivery and/or rewards for it are working. I think my new change addresses that somewhat, though it doesn't fix the lack of tight cash in the game.
New changes and test game #4:
In an effort to limit the delivery of goods for big money/points, I had an interesting idea on the plane. What if the cargo holds were color specific? Then you couldn't sit at a planet and pick-up 2 valuable resources and then go deliver them together. This was one of the things that was making money so abundant, anyone could easily deliver 2 green cubes for $8 and be set for quite some time. Then when Yellow shows up, there's a quick $10 for anyone as well.
As I considered this color-specific Cargo hold idea, I realized it might do some other neat things to the game: you can't hold 2 Blue, so you might go visit someone else's greewn planet to get some early income (or vice versa). Also, if you want to persue a particular upgrade route, you have to be carful which cargo hold you buy. Here are the cargo holds I ended up with:
Start with Green/Blue
Available for purchase:
Yellow/Green x2
Yellow/Blue x2
Red/Green x2
Red/Blue x2
Yellow/Yellow x1
So for example, if you want to persue a strategy where your late game will involve deliveing Red, you have a few options...
1. Find a Yellow planet, buy a Yellow/X hold and bring back a yellow cube to upgrade your holds, then another to buy a cargo shuttle (which can hold 3 of any cube), then find a Red planet and load up on red for 7 VP a pop. It might take a while to get all those upgrades though.
2. Buy a R/X Hold and find a red planet to deliver 1 Red at a time. This might work better if you fill up in thrusters and shields and use the scanner to avoid aliens.
3. Get a Yellow/X hold and use it to bring back enough yellow to upgrade to the new upgrade: Interchangable Cargo Holds (which lets you ignore the color restrictions on holds), then go collect Red for big point deliveries.
Similar routes could be followed for other strategies, such as Hunting Aliens, making big colonies.
We used these new Cargo holds in Playtest #4, which happened after I got off the plane with my frends from Phoenix: Chris and Becky. Becky got off to a slow staret because she had not played befopre, but by the end she was clearly making moves toward a particular (delivery) strategy, and she was doing a very good job of it. I did some colonizing and alien hunting, and Chris, who was very far behind due to reckless exploration, decided to Sabotage me as much as possible (which was a lot). He probably stole about 15 points from me, and I won by a single point over Becky. But I contend that had Becky known what she could do from the outset, she easily could have gotten one more big delivery or 1 more big colony, and the scores would have been very close even without the Sabotage.
I played a game last night with the new rules, and I managed to win by a good 40 points, but there was a double-alien guarding a 12 oint colony which an opponent with 2 guns (rolling 2 dice) spent quite a few actions trying to colonize, and failing. I swept in at the end and offered 3 goods to the aliens (rolling 3 dice) and defeated them so I could colonize. Statistically, I thought the opponent should have been able to beat the Aliens by then, which would have meant he would have gotten those 18 points instead of me, making the game MUCH closer. In this game, defeating aliens is not an easy task!
I'm pretty excited about how this game is turning out, my biggest concern at this point is the money thing I keep mentioning, But maybe the Princes of Florence mechanic will be "good enough" - though I'm not a huge fan of it.
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Steve Willson
United States
Silver Spring
Maryland
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Have you given any thought to staying out of some play testing entirely? It seems to me that the designer knows just how They want the game to run, but an important factor is how well people can play it without you there. I'm not accusing you of this, but it's something to think about. Your game seems very interesting and I'd be interested to try it out when you're thru tweaking it.
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Seth Jaffee
United States
Tucson
Arizona
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Ryhesling wrote: Have you given any thought to staying out of some play testing entirely?
Yes, I've considered this, but I don't know if I'm at the stage with a rulebook where I can do that yet. I also don't have a pool of playtesters to choose from, I take what I can get - suckering my friends to play once in a while, or occasionally bringing the game out at Game Night at my local game club.
I recently ran a playtest of my other game (All For One, also in the BGG database) without playing, I explained the game and watched but did not play. It went allright, but when the game was entered in the KublaCon Design Contest I noticed a few rules were played wrong, so obviously it's different not being there than being there and watching!
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