The Big Test.

As mentioned in yesterdays post I took my shiny new copy of Citywise round to visit Jack for a playtest and some development advice.

We decided to playtest before getting on to Space Hulk. We set up and started playing, a few niggles came up during the game but we sorted out as they came up and we made notes as we went along. The game played quite well (for a first play) and then we went through the points;

The first major point was bad wording! I had called the upkeep phase the ‘Admin Action’ phase which is admittedly a bad name. I’ll have to think of something sexier!

The Block and Street decks need some rebalancing and the encounters with the low life of the city didn’t seem to reap sufficient rewards for the risk that people were taking facing off against them. The credit rewards will be improved in future.

Jack also suggested making a task desk (removing the tasks from the block deck) and allowing people to take a task as an admin action. I’d initially rejected the idea of tasks as a separate deck as I didn’t want to end up with cards all over the place, but on reflection, I think it’s needed as during play characters can end up wandering aimlessly for a couple of turns waiting for a job to appear.

The rules for going to jail seemed a bit weird as well, I’m not really sure how to handle them without them becoming either unrealistic, or overly complicated. This is one of those things that I’ll have to bodge for the time being and wait until the rest of the game is more complete before finalising. I’ve got a couple of ideas for it but nothing final.

The game also needs more player interaction, that may just have been as a result of the way we played it, but I’ll keep an eye on it!

Overall, Jack seemed to think it was off to a good start and I definitely appreciated his comments. I found the playtesting process very positive and it’s given me, a bit of impetus and direction. I’ve got a lot to be getting on with for this next week, so I’d better be going.

Oh yes, forgot to mention, Jack won the game with almost twice as much money as me!