All’s Well That Ends As You Like It
Mar. 30th, 2012 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIt’s a board game-rpg hybrid that the first revision of moves more towards a board game (for the better, I think). It was amusing, but still needs some tweaking. We played V2.2, according to the website.
I remade the entire game board in Excel and printed it large on card stock. I also made cards for all of the characters and NPCs, cards for the items, Woo and Luck tokens, and counters to represent each character. I should have made standups for the characters instead, and costume “flaps” to hang over them. It was hard to keep track of who was wearing which costume, as it was. In retrospect, poker chips of two colors would have been better for tokens. (I can send the Excel file to anyone who wants to use it.)
We had a bit of a slow start to the dramatic stuff—the first few turns were mostly trying to get characters in from the edges of the board. That picked up as Wooing and Acquiring picked up. I suspect if we were more comfortable with the rules to begin with, there could have been more narration and ridiculousness.
Rules issues:
• It’s not clear enough what counts as an “action” and what doesn’t, so we assumed that a roll to Duel, Woo or Acquire on your turn were the only things that did. We were hazy on whether changing costumes, using a philter or book, or drinking ale counted as actions.
• We needed a lot of ale cards—the rules for drinking and tracking how drunk you were aren’t terribly clear, and it’s easy to acquire large amounts of ale.
• It wasn’t terribly clear what NPCs did if they weren’t controlled by a player via Luck token. The Fool was particularly problematic, since his actions seem to activate on other people’s turns, not his own. Also, I had to make up Woo, Duel and Acquire scores for a bunch of the NPCs. If an NPC gets Wooed, how do you decide if they’re receptive to it? If an NPC gets forced to act by the Fool, who controls them?
• We assumed that Woo tokens did not have a “target” (that is, you could get married once you had 5 Woo tokens from _anyone_, which is the only way one of the Brash Hero’s win conditions makes sense) but I’m not certain this was correct.
• We assumed that the Faithful Counselor was able to Woo and be Wooed, acquire a True Love, and get married (and that he could, in fact, marry himself to someone). This would allow him to win by wooing and marrying the female twin, though it’s not clear whether any of this is intended or not.
• It’s not that clear where the boundaries of rooms are, so we adopted the Doctor Lucky style of determining who can see you: Lines of sight. If anyone could draw a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line from them to you without hitting a wall, they could see you.
• The Chapel description claims there are rules for Praying. There aren’t. We assumed that you could sober up by going to the Chapel and declaring that you were sober.
Win Conditions:
• I was rather proud of my strategy: As the Rightful Ruler, I immediately grabbed a female costume, the nurse, and was planning to try to seduce the Usurper off his throne. When my daughter acquired a True Love, I switch gears and just tricked the Usurper into giving me his royal epee, so I could go kill her True Love instead.
• We needed to “clarify” the Amiable Wastrel’s win condition from “acquire a Woo token from every character” to “acquire a Woo token from every PC”, because trying to Woo the nine NPCs as well seems absurd.
• Unfortunately for me, two other players had figured out ways to fulfill their win conditions via suicide and were racing to the bottom: One twin can kill the other’s True Love, so one twin got the costume of the other’s True Love, burned all their luck tokens in a single turn by switching places repeatedly, then committed suicide with an epee. Had that failed, the Amiable Wastrel was going to kill the True Love of the last person he’d wooed: Himself. There should probably be a rule against using suicide to fulfill win conditions, because it makes some win conditions (especially for the twins) much, much easier than others.
• Not really knowing anyone else’s win conditions (because our heads were already crammed with new rules) actually made the game more fun and strategic, though it would be hard to maintain that through multiple games. I think the ideal way to do it would be a list / chart of randomized win conditions that each person gets assigned at the beginning of a new game.
I remade the entire game board in Excel and printed it large on card stock. I also made cards for all of the characters and NPCs, cards for the items, Woo and Luck tokens, and counters to represent each character. I should have made standups for the characters instead, and costume “flaps” to hang over them. It was hard to keep track of who was wearing which costume, as it was. In retrospect, poker chips of two colors would have been better for tokens. (I can send the Excel file to anyone who wants to use it.)
We had a bit of a slow start to the dramatic stuff—the first few turns were mostly trying to get characters in from the edges of the board. That picked up as Wooing and Acquiring picked up. I suspect if we were more comfortable with the rules to begin with, there could have been more narration and ridiculousness.
Rules issues:
• It’s not clear enough what counts as an “action” and what doesn’t, so we assumed that a roll to Duel, Woo or Acquire on your turn were the only things that did. We were hazy on whether changing costumes, using a philter or book, or drinking ale counted as actions.
• We needed a lot of ale cards—the rules for drinking and tracking how drunk you were aren’t terribly clear, and it’s easy to acquire large amounts of ale.
• It wasn’t terribly clear what NPCs did if they weren’t controlled by a player via Luck token. The Fool was particularly problematic, since his actions seem to activate on other people’s turns, not his own. Also, I had to make up Woo, Duel and Acquire scores for a bunch of the NPCs. If an NPC gets Wooed, how do you decide if they’re receptive to it? If an NPC gets forced to act by the Fool, who controls them?
• We assumed that Woo tokens did not have a “target” (that is, you could get married once you had 5 Woo tokens from _anyone_, which is the only way one of the Brash Hero’s win conditions makes sense) but I’m not certain this was correct.
• We assumed that the Faithful Counselor was able to Woo and be Wooed, acquire a True Love, and get married (and that he could, in fact, marry himself to someone). This would allow him to win by wooing and marrying the female twin, though it’s not clear whether any of this is intended or not.
• It’s not that clear where the boundaries of rooms are, so we adopted the Doctor Lucky style of determining who can see you: Lines of sight. If anyone could draw a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line from them to you without hitting a wall, they could see you.
• The Chapel description claims there are rules for Praying. There aren’t. We assumed that you could sober up by going to the Chapel and declaring that you were sober.
Win Conditions:
• I was rather proud of my strategy: As the Rightful Ruler, I immediately grabbed a female costume, the nurse, and was planning to try to seduce the Usurper off his throne. When my daughter acquired a True Love, I switch gears and just tricked the Usurper into giving me his royal epee, so I could go kill her True Love instead.
• We needed to “clarify” the Amiable Wastrel’s win condition from “acquire a Woo token from every character” to “acquire a Woo token from every PC”, because trying to Woo the nine NPCs as well seems absurd.
• Unfortunately for me, two other players had figured out ways to fulfill their win conditions via suicide and were racing to the bottom: One twin can kill the other’s True Love, so one twin got the costume of the other’s True Love, burned all their luck tokens in a single turn by switching places repeatedly, then committed suicide with an epee. Had that failed, the Amiable Wastrel was going to kill the True Love of the last person he’d wooed: Himself. There should probably be a rule against using suicide to fulfill win conditions, because it makes some win conditions (especially for the twins) much, much easier than others.
• Not really knowing anyone else’s win conditions (because our heads were already crammed with new rules) actually made the game more fun and strategic, though it would be hard to maintain that through multiple games. I think the ideal way to do it would be a list / chart of randomized win conditions that each person gets assigned at the beginning of a new game.
