Last week I had the opportunity to playtest Doomed Colony two nights in row. I was pretty giddy at this turn of events because it let me note any issues from the first test, then immediately adjust the game to address them for the second.
The first test was version 2.0 (described here) and it went pretty well. The new mix of cards and counters felt about right (we didn’t have the plague of rockets blowing up like in the previous playtest), and the rule change that kept all revealed colonists face-up made the memory component a little less painful.
Of course, in the process of trying to make the game faster and more dynamic, I actually introduced some problems. By adding “then play another card” to a bunch of cards, I did open the game up for more fun, action-packed turns, but also depleted players’ hands, since they were only drawing one card a turn. (Yes, there are cards that let you draw multiple cards, but apparently not enough to counter the effect.)
And the game was faster (down to 60 minutes from 90), but still felt slow.
For the next night’s test, I adjusted a few more things:
- To address the empty hand problem, I changed the game so that players draw up to their max hand size of five cards, rather than simply drawing one card a turn.
- To speed the game up significantly, I cut the deck in half, from 110 cards to 55. As you may recall, the game has a number of (in this case, five) “Countdown” cards shuffled into its bottom half. When the fourth Countdown card is drawn, the game ends. Between the reduced deck size and the increased card draw, I expected to hit those Countdown cards well before the hour was up.
- To increase the incentive for getting your colonists off the colony, I expanded the bonus: you now get +1 point for each non-Alien colonist of your color on your rocket at the end of the game.
The second game did go faster than the first, ending at around 45 minutes. The changes were all positive, but we’re still leaving more colonists on the colony at the end of the game than I like. (Moving them from Zone 1 all the way to the rockets takes a lot of turns and/or card plays.) To that end, I’ll be adding the following rule to the next iteration:
- Pushing: When you advance a colonist from one zone to the next, if there is no room for it in the second zone, you must displace a colonist in the second zone, advancing it to the next location.
This can cause a cascade effect. If I advance a colonist from Zone 1 to Zone 2, but Zone 2 is full, I push a different colonist from Zone 2 to Zone 3; if Zone 3 is full, it pushes a colonist into Zone 4, etc.
(Hmm. Seeing it written out like that, it looks much more complicated than it really is. I’ll probably need a diagram and a few examples in the rulebook.)
Anyway. Despite my natural inclination to despise my own work, I think this game is coming together nicely. I’m looking forward to getting another playtest in and seeing how this change affects the flow of the game.
