#7: Playtest-Cringe

Well, that was hard. I had my first playtest a couple days back and it didn't go exactly as planned. The mechanics I designed so carefully, did not work as intended and even though the game was playable (for the most part) it had some serious issues. Overall I just wasn't satisfied with how it played.

Issues were:

No incentive to deploy the 2nd and 3rd Radical
Tedious pressure-counting ("somebody open up a spreadsheet!")
No choices in the first ring. Everybody loots the Mech-pile
Not much playboard-interaction (ring-turning)
Unbalanced Cards.
Pressure-Dice-Mechanic was way too complicated
Combat was too easy
Pressure was too abundant
No real incentive to fight other players

My first instinct is to jump right into it and start the whole design-process all over again. However I will continue play-testing with v1 just to get a more detailed feedback and also continue to make the few remaining game-objects like pressure-counter and health-meter.

Looks nice - plays bad. Radica v1

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#6: Card-Design v.1

Today I finally get to show off my new card-designs. They are only for testing, but still I put some effort into them, thinking about what information I wanted to display and trying to make them at least a little bit visually attractive. Anyhow, I probably spend way too much time on them. Still it looked nice to finally place them on the board. Sorting out the cards

#1 First Cardboard-Prototype

Here it is. My first cardboard-prototype of Radica. I even managed to play it a few times, although not for long, because I ran out of cards. I now know what I want to change though: Redesign the paths, so each ring has a unique character (fast-ring, etc.) Make the rings turn and stack them like terraces, to make the game more 3 dimensional and also to include a new mechanic of laying and blocking a path Build the whole game with the Laser-Cutter 1st cardboard-prototype

#3: Cards & Balancing

It is done! Thank god. For the past two weeks I have been juggling around with the card-metrics, balancing this, balancing and asking myself a million questions. And to be fair I have no idea if it will work. So let me break this down for you. I had a couple of objectives when designing this: Each ring has a number of these scavenging-sites: mechanical, special and danger The idea is to hide more valuable cards at higher rings. Risk-Reward. But also to mix a certain number of high-level cards into the ring-specific pile to give players an incentive to loot much and quick. Also the total number of cards should still be manageable. I'm now at 130 cards, which is ok for now. I know more after play-testing.

Making Radica

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