First Play Test - Report
What a surprise - Not to shabby at all!! On the big positive side, all that played enjoyed it and want to play again next week - So that's what we are going to do.
As they'd read the rules but not seen the game it was a bit of a slow start. If we play again, things will move along much quicker.
Obviously we found a few problems - That's what testing is for!
I'm going to remove the 3-sided citadel tiles - Makes it too slow to build a citadel, with a temptation to make it to large as well.
Up until now you could move an army between the 'unseen' gap between one and another citadel - Removing that rule.
The battle strategies actually worked better than I thought they would and the games strategy elements worked extremely well. We decided on a few tweeks with them to speed things up.
My spies on a road idea is a bit limp so we've altered the control of roads to make them have more strategic value and roads will also score more points to encourage their use. Roads are now also going to score more points as well. Road Dead ends are going to be removed.
The other 'problem' would seem to be the number of tiles. We limited play to 3 hours and was less than halfway through them! However, my thought that more tiles were needed to enable the army movement and battle elements to come into play was wrong - Armies came into play quite early on, so I now aim to reduce the number of tiles required to play (less for everyone to cut out then!!).
Last night was good - I'm really encouraged and want to make the changes as soon as possible - We will then play it through with these changes next week, and if all goes well....... Let's just see what happens...
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