Notes from pyramid games playtesting

My good friend Nate was kind enough to playtest 3 out of four of the pyramid games I posted yesterday (we didn’t play the party game), and the results shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but they were generally disastrous. In short, none are ready for prime time. (But on the upside, none were complete throw-aways either, and all have potential!) Here are my notes:

Action / Movement Programming — This suffered from the problem where the player has the advantage, so nobody wants to make themselves the second-to-last player. This meant there was little incentive to try and make the target shape. We did play with a pretty cool variant / modification where there are 9 “goal cards” (in a 3×3 grid), and any 4 cards in that group can be the goal. The rule about “modifying” the programmed cards was very confusing to Nate, and I had to clarify / re-explain it several times. There was also confusion about being able to modify pieces on the gameboard, and I think adding an action that would allow you to modify (swap?) existing pieces would probably help. None of this fixes the disincentivization to make the goal shapes. We talked about maybe not replacing the cards. Also, I just had the idea to maybe only take one of the cards instead of all of them, so most of the shape would still be there, but it would obviously need modifying. Maybe then you also get points at the end of the game for collecting “sets” of a single color card. We also played on a very large gameboard (not quite a full chess board, but it was with the triangular chess boards that are sometimes used for looney Pyramids), and I think we could have just played on a 4×4 grid, and it would have been a tighter and better game.

Action Point Allowance System — This game suffered from the rules allowing you to totally screw yourself. If you didn’t play a combination of either 1) two 2-pip pieces or 2) a 1-pip and a 3-pip, you were giving yourself a serious disadvantage later in the game. I think the rules should just specify you can play one of those combinations. Also, the player who played first had a huge advantage, not because they played first, but because as the rules are written, they also got to play last. I think making both players play only a 2-pip on their first turn might mitigate that problem. Another issue was that we played on a 3×3 grid, but never really used more than 4 towers. Another rule change I’m considering is to make the players fill the grid first, before playing higher levels on any tower… or possibly just to play on a 2×2 grid. (Or both.)

Area Control / Area Influence — Finally, as I’d hoped, this game seemingly has a lot of potential, but we ended up not playing it while we spent like 20 minutes discussing how the captures could work. (Rules as written do not specify capture rules, and I thought I’d just make something up quick about surrounding groups, and we’d see how it plays, but turns out there are too many different possibilities!) It would take me a long while to write all the things down that we discussed, but briefly, we talked about: Switching it to allow ONLY swaps of cards with pieces on them (then you could capture from a swap or a placement). Allowing piece movement to capture, with cards containing pieces of the opposite color “frozen” in their place, essentially “locking” neutral spaces on the gameboard as kind of a suicide move. Finally, if we allow swapping cards with pieces on them (which I think is a good idea), I think maybe it should only be allowed if they have the same (or possibly only if the opponent’s card has lesser) pip counts. Maybe that parenthetical should always be true, which would mean you could only move cards that have pieces on them, since by default all the cards start empty.

I don’t know when I’m going to get around to revising the rules as written, but hopefully in the not-too-distant future!