New Village Feedback

One of the key things about playtesting is seeing people do things that you hadn't necessarily expected, and seeing how those actions might impact the systems that have been put in place.

Over the last week, I've seen a few of these types of actions...

  1. One of the characters who was infected by the zombie toxin was killed. They started trying to spread the infection, but the first couple of bites infected the same people that the original zombie had already infected. It didn't really make a disruption to the systems in place, but it was something I hadn't necessarily accounted for in the timing of the game. I had just assumed that a second zombie would double the rate of infection, but this chance of re-infecting someone who was already infected actually means that the acceleration isn't quite that extreme.
  2. A few of the players still just don't get it. I've explained that all they really need to do to remain active in the game is to write a name on their turn-by-turn handout. Yet each turn, I'm seeing about a quarter of the handouts come back to me without any names in them. It's a catch-22 where the players don't have the desire to learn what's going on, and because they don't know what's going on they can't see the benefit of trying to learn what's happening.  
  3. Our hunter hasn't been attacked yet, so their ability just hasn't come into play. 
  4. Similarly, our priest/priestess keeps blessing people (and removing the zombie plague) from people who aren't infected. 
  5. Our players imprisoned in jail keep trying to affect those outside, and vice versa. So I clearly need to explain this better in the rules.
  6. I've been printing the handouts before each school day begins. However, I've ended up with a whole heap of extra slips of certain types because I have 4 handout slips on each page. I'm instead thinking that the next time I run this game, I'll just create a multi-turn sheet with a name and role at the top, then a bunch of lines for each turn so players can see an archive of what they've done in the game. This will be particularly useful for characters like the zombie noble to make sure they don't accidentally infect the same person twice, or the psychic to make sure they don't waste turns identifying the same person multiple times.

So we've still got some refinement to do, but it's feeling good at this time. 

 

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