Inital Play Test of Turf Wars

We played the first two games of our creation with the working title, Turf Wars. And the initial verdict is, it doesn’t suck!

Woo hoo!

That may not sound like high praise but Josh and I consider it a win. It’s one thing to have thoughts of what would be a good game when bouncing it off each other and it’s quite another to have things clarified and justified and argued by others who were not involved in its creation.

We’ve uncovered some issues during the play and had some going in that we knew about given time constraints, etc.

  • The Board
    It wasn’t done in time. That was my (Phil) bad. I ran out of time and underestimated the effort involved in dealing with the images, printing them and then pasting them in the proper order on big card board. Ugh. We drew a board on my dry-erase tiles I use for an um… RPG and that served well enough but there were issues of fairness that were uncovered while quickly drawing it.
  • Retreating
    We wanted wars in Turf Wars, oddly. And while we think retreating should be possible, being able to do it at no cost was problematic so we’ve added a cost.
  • Dominance Points (DP)
    These are earned based on controlling turfs and is a win condition but we don’t want this to be primarily a game about accumulating points. We want it to be about war! So we’re going to take a hard look at DP awards and potentially introduce the ability to trade in DP for game-related advantages. TBD.
  • Faction Powers
    In the course of playing, we discovered that some of the powers/abilities we gave to factions were severely under or overpowered so we’ll be making tweaks to get them right. Tonight, we’re thinking of nerfing the Unicorns and Geomancers a bit.

We will continue to publish our progress and major discoveries during the play testing of this game.

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