Today we finally had our last playtest before submission to try out the 2 options for our rules.
Firstly, I have revorked the rules according to our previous discussions and designed the look, and had some friends read them to give feedback. The rulles were described as clear and easy to understand. Also they preferred the option without a game master
Playtest option 1
We decided to test this option as well. Thus from the beginning it went not very coherently as we’ve mixed the two “how to play” versions. So players acted according to the following scheme:
- Ghosts mute themselves and hunters decide on their positions (they discuss it and form a strategy)
- Hunters mute themselves and ghosts decide on their positions (same applies to ghosts)
- Hunters reveal positions and clashes are announced, as well as rooms, claimed by ghosts. This can be done by any player as they wish, preferably the one, who’s sharing the map and can make marks.
Such approach went quite well, but according to playtesters’ feedback, had several major issues.
a) That most of the time players spend silent and waiting for the other team to decide. We didn’t set the time limit for discussion, so sometimes it took quite long. Also there’s a big opportunity to cheat.
b) We found out that hunters’ moves are quite limited. Playtesters offered at least to add a door between kitchen and game room, so that they can access that part of house faster. Since they’re allowed only one move to a connected room per turn, they end up wandering between entrance, living room and kitchen for most of the time. Another alternative suhggestion was to allow hunters up to 2 moves per turn. Thus this part is debatable, because hunters always prevail over ghosts and as a team we think that allowing ghosts have some extra rooms claimed in the beginning of the game because hunters can’t get there physically yet is fair enough.
Playtest option 2
After that we tried another option which is basically a bit improved original scheme (this was offered and developed by Trini), where everyone should have typed in their position at the same time. This time the positions were revealed simultanoisly per team and it was made spontaniously without any discussion, so that players have to rely on mostly luck and knowledge of each others possible strategy or behaviour.
Moving patterns remain the same: hunters limited, ghosts can go anywhere. Clashes are now announced on the end of hunters’ turn. Who starts first is decided by luck, let’s say, with the help of a coin. Or another random challenge.
Playtesters found this version far more fun and enjoyable as well as quicker. Which is fair enough, because the previous one had no discussion time limit. Here discussions are eliminated at all. Since desisions are almost spontanious and quick, players make more strategy mistakes and clashes happen more often, making the game more dynamic.
Among other suggestions for the future were to resolve stailmate issue, because hunters almost always win them. With randomness of this version ghosts should have more opportunities to survive the stailmate;
To add more rooms to the mansion as the game ends quite fast. What I will partly try to do by the submission date;
To introduce the opportunity for hunters to undo claimed rooms, because ghosts claim them too fast sometimes. The problem with the claimed rooms was that players didn’t tend to enter or pass them even though it is allowed by the rules. We’ll try to enphasize it more in the rules, I think;
The game master issue
Still I have noticed one issue here. Even though we decided to eliminate the role of a game master, technically we still have it as someone has to share the map and mark the positions as you’ll see in the game process video. This person announces clashes as well. Anyone can take up this role from any team and still play the game, but technically we didn’t manage to get rid of the role completely. Otherwise the game would be chaotic.
Conclusions:
The game is mainly working, not according to the scheme that we intended to playtes, but we managed to update our original shoutout idea and bring the chaos to the minimum. Also we don’t need to use technicalities like sound muting. The game is not finished at this stage and can be developed further to enlarging the mansion and adding some features like the one to undo the ectoplasm. The balance between hunters and ghosts need adjusting as well. But still it’s a decent working prototype wich was successfully created by collaboration of 3 people: Arthur, Trini and me. We enjoyed it 🙂