#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

#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.

#5: The Mechanics

Warhammer-Figurines, Pen&Paper Dice do fine for prototyping In this post I will go a little deeper into the mechanics of Radica and try to outline what the actual gameplay might look like. Goal: Reach the Forgotten City Mechanics in order of priority: - Micromanage your pressure - Scavenge for loot - Fight off the Lost during the Night - Manipulate the board to reach the Forgotten City first In the beginning I also had a Network-building-mechanics, kind of like in Settler of Catan, where you could build streets and outposts - but I decided to cut this mechanic for now. I chose these mechanics because 1: I enjoyed these mechanics in other games and 2: They fit the narrative. I wanted to simulate by way of mechanics what the daily life of a Radical might look like - always worrying about pressure, always worrying about the night and the possibility of an attack, always searching for some tech that will give you the upper hand, if just for a short amount of time. T...

Making Radica

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