Friday, September 17, 2021

Protospiel Chicago 2021 Recap

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This past weekend I attended Protospiel Chicago, my first in-person playtesting event (aside from a couple of small, local game nights where I've playtested a few things) since the one-day Protospiel Madison Mini back in February 2020!  It felt really great to be back at a table playing prototypes with friends I hadn't seen in two years, even if we had to wear masks.  This year I brought six games to playtest, all of which didn't exist at the last full Protospiel I attended.  I was a bit nervous since only Rolling Seas had a lot of play (and the Current Events expansion I was testing was still new).  None of the games had been playtested more than once or twice with anyone other than myself, and Polyhedral Prix had never been played with anyone.  But the event was a great success!  

My games were a hit with people asking to play them so much that on Saturday I barely got to play anyone else's games.  Sunday I made a point to make the rounds and try out others' games, but I did end the event with two more plays of my games.  I came home with some great feedback to ponder, a few tweaks to make, some rules to clarify, and an idea for a new game bouncing around in my head.  Plus I made a few new friends over the weekend, met a few online friends in person, and got to see a bunch of older friends.  So I call that a success!  

In all, I played 8 games by 7 different designers, plus I had 6 of my games played: Rolling Seas w/ Current Events expansion, Duct Tape Roll, Go Make A Hike, Polyhedral Potions, Polyhedral Perils, and Polyhedral Prix.  I played other designers' games for about 6.5 hours and had my games played for a bit over 7 hours (plus rules and feedback on both sides).  So I used a bit more time than I gave this year, but people wanted to play my games!

Read on for a full recap of each game I played (or taught), including some thoughts on how my own games went.  As usual, I'll include the designer, who I played with, and also three ratings, from 1-5.  
  • The first rating is how close to finished I felt the game was.  1 means it was a super early prototype and 5 means it was very close to publication-ready.  
  • The second rating is how fun the game was in its current state.  1 means it needs a lot of work and wasn't really playable or much fun at all.  5 means I had a great time playing and would love to play again.  
  • Finally, the third rating is the potential the game has of becoming a really great game.  1 means I wasn't a huge fan of the game (luckily there weren't any of those) and 5 means I thought the game was pretty awesome.
So a rating of 2-2-5 would mean that it was a pretty early prototype, wasn't a whole lot of fun yet, but had quite a bit of potential to be a pretty good game.

Saturday, September 11, 2021

Title: Tomten
By: Chris Scaffidi (developed and presented by Keith Wilcoxon)
Played with: Kevin Kotowski, Owen Lange
Game Time: 1:05 hrs
Prototype Rating: 5-4-4

Tomten is a nearly final game about Gnomes getting ready for St. Knut's Day.  Each player has a set of dice and horse meeples (the prototypes looked more like dogs).  You take turns completing tasks by placing a die or a horse on a job card.  Each job card has two tasks that need to be complete in order to complete the job.  Once completed the job will give one player an immediate bonus and the other player collects the card and gains situational in-game bonuses.  A cool calendar mechanic keeps the game moving toward the end (it's very similar to the calendar in Dual Powers, though you only progress through it once).  

I quite enjoyed Tomten and it was a great first game of Protospiel.  The art is gorgeous (public domain art from Jenny Nyström, a Swedish painter and illustrator famous for her Scandinavian gnome paintings (you've probably seen them on Christmas cards).  Keith Wilcoxon is doing development on the game, preparing it for a Kickstarter campaign coming soon.  The game is very solid and mostly had a few small hiccups.  Keep an eye out for this one, it'll be a fun, festive game for the holidays!
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Title: Atomic Atlantis
By: Owen Lange
Played with: Adelheide Zimmerman, Karen Corbeill, Keith Wilcoxon, Kevin Kotowski, Stuart Wolf
Game Time: 1:15 hrs
Prototype Rating: 2-3-3

The second game I played was Owen Lange's Atomic Atlantis.  I did horribly (though didn't come in last, barely).  We played with six players in this game of area control and atomic annihilation.  The mechanics here were very straightforward: each turn you expand and attack.  The game used an interesting combat mechanic where the attacker would place a token on the border of the territory they were attacking from and their target territory.  The token would have a value between 1 and the number of units on the attacking territory (up to 6), then the defender would try to guess the number.  A correct guess would kill off that many attacking units and an incorrect guess would kill off one defender.  The attacker could continue attacking until they either decided to stop or the defender was completely defeated, then the attacker could move units equal to the attack value into the attacking territory.   The winner of combat would get a few other bonuses, too, like the ability to add special ability tokens to the intersections of territories, which would make some locations more valuable and worth fighting over.  

Another cool aspect of the game was destroying territories.  Players could play cards together that would nuke a tile (and any units on it), removing it from the board.  Each territory was made up of two colors (some of two of the same color), so players would combine two cards and then determine which territory was destroyed.  Sometimes players would cooperate and blow up specific tiles, sometimes players would lie about the color they were going to play and then something unexpected would blow up.  It was a fun, if chaotic, mechanic.  I'd love to see it refined a little bit, but it was a lot of fun to just randomly blow stuff up.

Overall the game worked pretty good, but once you fell behind it was very hard to get back in the game.  We made a few suggestions for ways to keep losing players engaged and had a few ideas for catchup mechanisms, but I think my favorite suggestion was to have eliminated players return as part of a shared faction.  Then they'd play as the shared faction, along with any other eliminated players, and any points they would score as the shared, rebel faction would go to their own points.  This would let eliminated players work together to build up a competing force, make those players have to decide how much to build up the rebel faction (since their success would mean the next shared faction player would have an opportunity to score even more points), and make the remaining original faction players have to decide when to fight each other and when to work together to fight the strengthening rebel faction.  I'd love to see how the game plays with a few changes.
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Title: Rolling Seas w/ Current Events expansion
By: George Jaros
Played by: Clark Bender, Curt Parr, Keith Wilcoxon, Kerry Anderson
Game Time: 1:20 hrs

Next up was Rolling Seas.  I forgot to print out Tutorial maps, so teaching the game took a little longer than usual, but these were experienced gamers and they all picked it up pretty quickly.  I was mainly playing to test out the Current Events expansion and it played great!  We had four of the five events come up in the game, including three that I really wanted to test out: Merchant Port, Volcano, and Ship Race.  Mystic Waters were also encountered.  They all worked out great, just needing a few minor tweaks.  I'm really happy with how the Current Events expansion is working out and I can't wait to see what Nuts! Publishing does with the game.

Everyone really enjoyed Rolling Seas and one of the players even bought a copy off of The Game Crafter this week!

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Title: Polyhedral Perils
By: George Jaros
Played with: Keith Wilcoxon
Game Time: 0:10 hrs

After cleaning up Rolling Seas and while we were waiting for a few people that wanted to play Duct Tape Roll to finish their game I taught Polyhedral Perils to Kevin Wilcoxon.  It's a super simple game, using only a set of polyhedral dice and something to track score, so there's only a tiny bit of wiggle room for changing things up without adding more components, but make it wiggle we did!  After playing I decided to make a few minor changes to how scoring was calculated to make it a little more intuitive.  But Kevin seemed to enjoy the game for what it was, agreeing that it would be a fun game to pull out while waiting for food at a restaurant or as a quick filler while waiting for people to show up for game night.  So it's hitting the right spot.
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Title: Duct Tape Roll
By: George Jaros
Played by: Adelheide Zimmerman, Carl Klutzke, Karen Corbeill, Keith Wilcoxon
Game Time: 0:50 hrs

Duct Tape Roll is my Red Green themed dice game that I had people very excited to play.  For only the second playtest ever, it played great.  Everyone loved the theme, thought the mechanics worked well with the theme, and had a lot of fun.  Game length was pretty much perfect - just long enough to get a satisfying engine going, but it didn't overstay its welcome.  We talked about a few different ways to end the game (it was a little unsatisfying for people that didn't get a final turn, but that might not be a big issue for the style and weight of the game) and about balancing some of the points values on the project cards.  Also talked about making a distinction between the main, public projects and the small personal projects - I think I'm going to call those Equipment or something similar.  Overall though, I'm super happy with how this played and the reception it received.  Everyone was already talking about how I should go about getting the licensing so I can publish it as an official Red Green game (otherwise it'd have to be rethemed as generic handymen, which would still be fun, but not as much).


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Title: Proud Miner
By: Jason Kleronski
Played with: Jason Kleronski, Kevin Mulligan, Lisa Roti
Game Time: 1:00 hrs
Prototype Rating: 1-3-3

I finally got to another game by another designer on Saturday, though I didn't realize at the time that it would be my last.  Proud Miner combined a bunch of different things into a game that sometimes felt like it was trying to do too much.  Each player has a team of miners that have to escape the mine before toxic fumes overtake them.  

The main mechanic was pretty cool - you are mining dice from a stack of dice in order to first take an action based on the color and value of the die you chose, then store that die as a resource with value based on the color and value.  Collecting the dice out of the stack was very cool and makes the game infinitely replayable because of the multitude of different combinations of dice locations, values, and orientations in that stack.  It also provides a great game clock since the game ends when the last die is "mined".  

The other cool mechanic was how you move your miners through the mine tunnels in an attempt to escape, earning points the closer to the exit you are and collecting various rewards as you progress through the mines.  

Aside from that though, there were a number of pretty standard game elements, like items with special abilities that cost resources, contracts that can be completed for points, etc.  The game felt very rough, and it needs a lot of refinement, but there were some cool sparks of inspiration in the game.  I hope Jason keeps working on it and gets it refined.  I'd love to play it again someday.
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Title: Go Make A Hike
By: George Jaros
Played by: Brian Cable, Kevin Mulligan, Lisa Roti, Stefan Barkow
Game Time: 1:00 hrs

And then it was back to my games for the rest of the day!  The barrage started with Go Make A Hike because a few people saw it sitting on the table and wanted to play it next.  This was the first game with the new color tiles.  I also changed how Features come out in the game, now based on an icon on the next tile in the stack whenever the trail tiles are refreshed.  That seemed to work great, keeping features coming out at a reasonable, but varied pace.  There was still some concern that Viewpoints weren't common enough, but that turned out to just be poor luck of the draw since there were still about 7 in the bag at the end of the game.  

The game played great, there were very few questions about mechanics, and everyone really enjoyed building out their sprawling trail systems.  Though we did find out that the new tiles (2"x4" vs 1.75"x3.5" on the old paper tiles) really increased the size of the trails.  This game takes up a LOT of table space by the end, which is both cool and overwhelming, especially on the narrow tables they had at the event.  The final trails looked awesome sprawling across the table!







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Title: Polyhedral Potions
By: George Jaros
Played with: Benedict Slabik, Ian Winningham, Rebecca Morris, Tony Czekala
Game Time: 0:30 hrs

One of the cool things about ChiBingo (the Protospiel Bingo game where you fill in squares for games you play that match a theme, mechanic, feature, etc. and then get a prize when you complete a series of five boxes) is that it encourages people to play other peoples' games, sparks conversation, and can earn you cool prizes.  The downside though, is if you have games that people need to play to complete their bingos you'll be playing your games all day!  Not that that's much of a downside, but when people heard I had a fast-playing roll and write they wanted to play!  So we played Polyhedral Potions, which went great!  

In Polyhedral Potions players take turns drafting two dice from all seven polyhedral dice (ingredients) to make a potion, then mark it as a distillation or fulminate on the various tracks on the sheet.  Mechanically it's super simple, but there are a ton of decisions (not overwhelming though) and a few different strategies.  All five players were in the running for winning this one.  I'm very happy with how well this is playing!

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Title: Polyhedral Potions
By: George Jaros
Played with: Andrew Stiles, Curt Parr, Kerry Anderson, Tony Czekala
Game Time: 0:30 hrs

As we were finishing up the first game of Polyhedral Potions several people were gathering around watching.  When we finished several people asked if I would run the game again.  So I did and it went over just as well!  We did notice that the D10 track may be an issue, but it didn't matter since everyone had a great time.  
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Title: Polyhedral Perils
By: George Jaros
Played with: Curt Parr, Kerry Anderson
Game Time: 0:15 hrs

After playing Polyhedral Potions, Curt and Kerry wanted to try Polyhedral Perils, so we played a quick three-player game.  We talked a bit more about the scoring and with another small tweak I think it's working great for the minimalist game that it is.
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Title: Go Make A Hike
By: George Jaros
Played by: Carl Klutzke, Hanna Seyerle, Jose Maldonado, Kendall Byington
Game Time: 1:00 hrs

I left the hall for a little bit to call the family and say goodnight and when I came back in I asked if anyone had a game they were ready to play.  I was hoping to finally get someone else's game to the table, but instead, I was asked to pull out Go Make A Hike again.  I didn't make any adjustments this time, and it played great again.  However, after this game, I decided to make a few clarifications and a minor tweak to the end game.  

I decided that the first part of the trail off of the parking lot does count as the first Kilometer and you can add a feature to that section of the trail (including Viewpoints).  It's just easier to have that trail segment follow the same rules as other trail segments instead of making it an exception.   The initial idea was that I didn't want people to be locked into a specific feature for all of their trails, but I decided that would be a risk some players would just have to learn to live with.

The second change I decided to make is with the end game.  One of the end-game triggers is when someone closes off their trail completely.  Initially, the game had a final round where players could add one more Destination to their trail system after the end game was triggered.  I decided that if someone closes off their trail system this final round is skipped and the game ends immediately at the end of the current round.  I did this because closing off your trail system was a huge penalty and I wanted it to be a bonus.  I thought about giving the player that ended the game by closing their trail system a 10 point bonus, but that seemed kludgy, so instead, I think it'll just deny everyone else from drafting a final destination (they can still add Personal Destination tiles though).  I also added an end condition if the Destination Tiles can't be refilled at the end of a game since the first game almost got to that point (only one left in the stack at the end of the game).

So no component changes are needed for Go Make A Hike, just a few tweaks and clarifications to the rules.  I'm super stoked that it's so solid after just a few playtests.  So now I'm thinking about expansions!  Maybe by the next Protospiel, I'll have the Events and Special Features working.  I've been thinking about those for a while now, so I just have to get them made.  Speaking of getting the game made, I priced it out on The Game Crafter and, because of all the tiles needed, it's an $80 game without a box (and they don't have cards of the right proportions).  So it doesn't look like I'll be selling it on The Game Crafter, unfortunately.

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Sunday, September 12, 2021

Title: Insider Trading
By: Ian Winningham
Played with: Ian Winningham, Owen Lange
Game Time: 0:25 hrs
Prototype Rating: 3-3-4

On Sunday I decided to focus on playing other designers' games, so I didn't even take mine to the tables.  They stayed in my bag.  So after breakfast and some chatting while we fueled up on caffeine, I sat down to play Ian's real-time, simultaneous-play stock market manipulation game, Insider Trading.  This game had an interesting mechanic where each action took a certain number of minutes, so when taking an action you'd move your worker meeples that many minutes forward on a track, then take the action (collecting resource chips, contracts to complete, purchasing stock, etc.).  You could only use workers to take actions that were on a number less than or equal to the current minute of the game.  So you were watching a timer on a phone.  So you'd be waiting for the phone to catch up to your worker's time, then there's be a flurry of activity as everyone tried taking their available actions at the same time.

I enjoyed the ebb and flow of the action in this game.  The real-time aspect of it was cool and kept the game fast but crunchy enough to keep you thinking.  But because there were often periods of waiting ten to thirty seconds for the clock to catch up to you the real-time aspect didn't seem overwhelming the way it can in games like FUSE or Escape: The Curse of the Temple.  There was a lot to pay attention to though, and the timer was just enough pressure so you felt like you had to make decisions quickly.  I also think the game could very easily be converted to a round and turn-based game for those that don't want the slight chaos that real-time and simultaneous action creates, though that did highlight the thematic chaos of the stock market.  

I'm very interested to see where this goes for Ian since it hits an unusual target of a 20-minute game that feels more substantial than your typical filler.  I could see my game group playing this frequently since we're often looking for something to fill up the last few minutes of game night, but don't want just another game of Zombie Dice.
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Title: Hell's Kitchen
By: Scott Starkey
Played with: Adelheide Zimmerman, JT Smith
Game Time: 1:15 hrs
Prototype Rating: 1-3-5

Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of Hell's Kitchen when I played, so this is one that Scott took of a game earlier in the weekend.  In Hell's Kitchen players are chefs in the underworld, collecting ingredients in order to make dishes that they serve to tables full of poor souls (lawyers, insurance agents, etc. represented by the four different suits of cards).  Using an action selection mechanic players work to collect ingredients (dice), add them to the required recipes (which require various numbers of dice in different colors and values), earn coins, hire demon helpers (who had special abilities), and ultimately complete recipes and collect the souls at each table.  Completing recipes for each table is cooperative, however, once the recipe is complete and the table is bussed, players collect the souls at that table based on their contributions to the recipe's requirements.  At the end of the game, everyone totals up the souls they collected in each category (suit) and the category they had the fewest souls in is their score.

Mechanically the game worked great, however for a game about cooking in hell, collecting souls, and hiring demon helpers, the game felt very dry.  It was missing a thematic, hellish flair.  So we talked about adding more excitement to the game.  We talked about names for the different ingredients - brimstone, hot peppers, cilantro, and tofu were funny, but not extreme enough - so maybe categories of ingredients, like Hellfire & Brimstone, Poisons & Carcinogens, Peppers & Spices, and Healthy Greens.  The demons we felt were pretty tame for demons, too.  They needed to be really chaotic.  Expensive to acquire, but they really change things up and add chaos to the game when purchased.  So we gave a few ideas that should make playing Hell's Kitchen a funny, exciting, and memorable experience.  I can't wait to try this again and see how Scott adds some excitement to the game since it was so solid mechanically already (even though it was just hand-drawn on blank cards).
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Title: Crush Dice
By: Owen Lange
Played with: Ian Winningham, Owen Lange
Game Time: 0:30 hrs
Prototype Rating: 1-2-2

I walked up just as Ian and Owen were about to start Owen's dice combat game, Crush Dice, the objective of which is to use dice to crush your opponents' armies.  So, aptly named.  To start the game each player has a budget of 50 credits they can use to buy several different types of units that, at least in the prototype, consisted of plastic toys like dinosaurs, teddy bears, bunnies, and vehicles.  You could also purchase meeples, which are essentially cannon fodder in this game.  Each unit has a certain strength when attacking or defending, as well as a special ability, except for the meeples which have no strength and no abilities.  Each unit also has 1 hit point, including the meeples, so one hit and they're eliminated.  Once players selected their starting army they divide them up into different groups and then the battle begins.

On your turn, you'll roll two d6 dice to tell you what kind of attack you'll make.  Each attack is slightly different, with attacks at either end of the 2d6 bell curve (lows and highs) being more extreme (e.g. force an opponent to attack himself or reverse an attack so the defender rolls their attack strength and you roll your defense strength), and attacks in the middle being more standard (e.g. 1v1, 1v2, you choose which group the defender defends with).  Then each side rolls the appropriate number of combat dice (d6 dice with values of 0, 1, and 2 pips), with pips for the attacker being hits and pips for the defender being blocks.  Any hits that get through remove a unit and the game is played until only one player remains.

Mechanically the game is super simple, and super random, with the most complex parts being the creation of your army at the start and the variety of different types of attacks available based on the die rolls.  The randomness creates exciting moments, like when my last two fully exposed dinos survived by defending against the attack dice pip for pip four times in a row!  They finally fell, but it was an exciting end.  However, the complex parts didn't add anything interesting or present any strategic choices.  So we talked about ways to keep the simplicity and excitement of the dice, but add in a bit more strategic choice.  I think eliminating the random 2d6 rolls to determine the type of attack will be fine.  Keep general attacks simple - maybe a choice of a few different types (I suggested having five types of attacks and three action tokens to select an attack, but you can't choose an attack that already has a token on it so you'd need to keep rotating between different options), but add in earned abilities that can be used to trigger the crazy attacks at certain points (e.g. one of the standard attacks is weaker but earns a bonus token, then later several bonus tokens can be spent to trigger a crazy attack - if you've survived long enough).  I think the game has the potential to be a light, fun, dice chucking game with a few strategic choices during the game instead of just at the beginning.    
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Title: Second Babel (played three times)
By: Eric Jome
Played with: Eric Jome
Game Time: 0:30 hrs
Prototype Rating: 4-4-4

Eric Jome's Second Babel is a game I've played a few times over the years, ever since he came up with the idea while playing around with a few bits at Protospiel Milwaukee in 2019.  Since then he's tweaked it and added in some various modes as well as objectives.  Gameplay is much more refined than it was back in 2019, but it's still a fun, fast, dexterity game (now with both cooperative and competitive modes).  We tried out a few different variations, including my suggestion of playing competitively but with each player deciding the piece their opponent has to play.  I really think the game would benefit from some odd-shaped pieces, like L and T shapes, instead of all straight pieces, but we'll see what Eric comes up with.  I'm happy to play this any time.  Plus, it counted as the last game I needed to earn a ChiBingo!  I think I earned the last one of the event, but I got there!
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Title: Ma-Tricks Magic
By: Maxine & Randy Ekl
Played with: Carl Klutzke, Maxine Ekl, Randy Ekl, Scott Starkey
Game Time: 0:35hrs
Prototype Rating: 2-3-4

That's Ma-Tricks as in "matrix", not "my tricks", an important distinction!  😜  Maxine and Randy have created quite a few trick-taking games and each one has an interesting twist.  In Ma-Tricks Magic players are working on five tricks at a time in the game, laying out cards in a grid as each hand progresses.  Each trick has a specific goal to win it (highest card, lowest card, etc.) and each trick is worth a different amount of points.  The game is still very rough and suffers from the same thing most trick-taking games suffer from (i.e. a bad hand leaves you feeling like you can't do anything, and middle-value cards aren't very valuable), but we talked about some ways to fix that and make the gameplay a little more exciting.  The game does some clever things and I'm excited to play it in a new iteration sometime soon!
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Title: Polyhedral Prix
By: George Jaros
Played with: Maxine Ekl, Randy Ekl
Game Time: 0:30 hrs

The only game of mine I hadn't played yet was Polyhedral Prix, my racing game that uses a set of polyhedral dice to determine your vehicle's speed around a track.  This game had never been playtested with anyone (other than a solo run-through I had done to make sure it wasn't completely broken).  Each turn has four steps: 1) Adjust speed (shift up or down to roll larger or smaller dice), 2) Roll for Speed (roll the die according to your gear), 3) Advance (move forward based on your roll, further for a higher roll, but you get a bonus if you roll the max on your gear die, so smaller dice have a better chance of getting the bonus, but larger dice have higher speed overall), 4) Roll for Stress (depending on where you end up on the track you may have to roll another die to see if you gain any stress - roll lower than your speed and you gain stress, but different sections of track have you rolling different dice).  There is also Nitro that can be spent for special abilities and gaining too much Stress can cause you to slow down to 1st gear until you enter the pits to reset. The mechanics are pretty simple and straightforward, though Maxine didn't understand thematically why the Roll for Stress had you trying to roll higher than your speed to avoid stress.  

After one lap we stopped because laps 2 and 3 were just more of the same.  So we talked about ways to make the game grow in excitement during laps 2 and 3 and decided that, since I hope to package this with Polyhedral Potions, which will have dry erase markers and make the cards UV coated, that each lap can add features to the track, like boost spaces and oil spills, that change things up.  So I was very happy that everything seemed to work mechanically and even happier to come up with a way to add some excitement as the game progressed.  So the one, short playtest was great!  On the way home I decided how to make the new features work and I just need to print up a new track with updated reference charts and I'll be good to test this again!


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Title: Polyhedral Potions
By: George Jaros
Played with: Brian Cable, Maxine Ekl, Randy Ekl
Game Time: 0:30hrs

I ended my Protospiel Chicago weekend with one final game of Polyhedral Potions.  Again the game played great, in just 30 minutes, and everyone had a great time.  However, the D10 strategy again seemed a bit overpowered since there are two D10 dice in the set.  So we chatted about maybe making the D10 ingredient track longer or taking away the star for completing that track.  None of that seemed to work though since I didn't want to mess with the clean layout of the sheets and felt it was awkward to have only one ingredient not able to earn a star.  But on the way home I decided to change the layout of the D10 track just a little bit.  It's now 12 slots long, instead of 8 like everything else, and fills two rows.  However, the Draft Again bonuses will be in their own columns instead of below a box like on the other tracks.  So the first Draft Again box is in the 3rd column, after 4 ingredient boxes, then 6 more ingredient boxes for the second Draft Again, followed by two final ingredient boxes and then a Star.  I think lengthening the D10 track like this will keep things balanced, without taking away the bonuses and chance to earn a Star.  I can't wait to print out new sheets and test this because I think the rest of the game was working perfectly!
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Well, that's it for my Protospiel Chicago 2021 recap.  It was wonderful to play new games in person and Maxine and Randy ran a stellar event, as usual.  I really hope this Covid goes away soon so that we can get back to more in-person events.  I missed all my friends that usually travel pretty far for these (a shoutout to my Kansas, Colorado, and Ohio buddies), but couldn't because of Covid.  The online events are wonderfully run, but playing games online just isn't the same.  Hopefully, I'll be able to make Protospiel Madison this year and see everyone (and their updated games) again soon!

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