Another lovely Friday evening full of gaming. Particularly of note was a little John Kovalic illustrated game called Dungeonville. Play involved assembling a small party of adventurers, each having a class, a color, a rating, and skills in each of the five dungeons. The lower the rating relative to the other adventurers available for recruitment, the more expensive. Low rating wins party vs. party combat. On the other hand, the lower the rating the less loot that character can tote, and the worse their skills tend to be. The Assassin, rated at 1, has E (lowest rank) in all five dungeons. Dungeon delving is mainly a matter of turning over cards and killing a character every time the letter on that card matches their skill in that dungeon. (Lower skills come up more often, thus they tend to die more readily.). If you make it out alive, you acquire as much loot as your adventurers can carry back. The twist is, you're trying to get people to die in the dungeon you yourself run (or kill them in adventurer vs adventurer combat). Which makes everything quite tricky, as you have to balance between acquiring enough loot to get the right adventurers, while trying to lose as few of them as possible as that more than likely means points for your foes. And you have to try to keep your party set up to handle vicious attacks from other players, but still be equipped to survive your dungeon crawl. Oh, and if your guys die in your dungeon: negative points.
The other highlight of the evening was doing some more playtesting for Fantasy Flight. I obviously can't give details, but they're working on an expansion for Runebound which should add a lot of interaction and additional options to the gameplay. I have played partial and full games using this particular expansion, on previous Fridays. Tonight I mostly went over printouts looking for things that stood out as unbalanced, unfun, confusing, or out of flavor. I was pleased to see that some of my input had already been factored in. Sounded like a number of suggestions from tonight will go into the next rendition. I really do enjoy helping make a game better.
And it doesn't hurt that I've been told I might receive a copy of Runebound and expansions, if I do enough playtesting on it..
The other highlight of the evening was doing some more playtesting for Fantasy Flight. I obviously can't give details, but they're working on an expansion for Runebound which should add a lot of interaction and additional options to the gameplay. I have played partial and full games using this particular expansion, on previous Fridays. Tonight I mostly went over printouts looking for things that stood out as unbalanced, unfun, confusing, or out of flavor. I was pleased to see that some of my input had already been factored in. Sounded like a number of suggestions from tonight will go into the next rendition. I really do enjoy helping make a game better.
And it doesn't hurt that I've been told I might receive a copy of Runebound and expansions, if I do enough playtesting on it..