In addition to my Zombie game we played my new Terra Mystica which is this fantasy themed resource management game with some Catan in it. I'm super glad I bought it!
Then was King of Tokyo. Really fast and really fun competitive custom dice game with this Godzilla/King Kong theme.
Pandemic was up next. It's funny how I'm constantly thinking about Arkham Horror (which might be my all time favorite board game). It has many of its elements but condensed, and therefor a lot quicker to finish.
The evening's main game would've been X-Wing (I guess this one), which I've been dying to try out for so long, but again was foiled by us somehow losing the main game box.
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| Managed to remember to take a pic during the game. My dude and a friend are storming a house at the left side, pretty much full of zombies, in wake of a fire bottle burning in the middle there. While others are tackling the right side of the map, or what's left of it. |
What has been learned so far
This first real test of the summoning mechanic was good, I think. It ended up really unreliable, but that's how it was designed. We had almost no activity in the first half, and after that a couple creatures managed to come through. Although we had amassed so much weapons at that point they were no match for us.
I also need to think about the ratio of zombies to special creatures more, but I feel that's only doable through more play testings.
The curses, that are essentially players' HP, were almost nonexistent. Some played it safe, and others were just too quickly dispatching the foes to get hurt. This will be my next big thing I need to tackle.
I do want to reward players for playing safe and good, so inverting the mechanic I don't think is the answer. Long ago I thought about just piling the curses on the players as time progresses, but deemed it too hard for the players to manage. Maybe I'll revisit that concept.
Skills (and therefor Stamina) are still in pretty bad-ish place (still!). Players did use them, but I felt that they needed to depend on them more.
Some other small adjustments are needed for the mission I had. Like ending it sooner after the objective has been found, or pile something interesting atop of that. I thought the length was pretty good until the point we found the missing person (although we had to go through all of the rooms before finding him). I had it so that the players needed to escort him back, but I called it after finding him because I felt that it was dumb without any extra twists.
After all these I felt that the game still had improved MASSIVELY. Its flow was so much better with the new dice mechanic and how players can move more in each turn.
