More ch-ch-changes

I've talked a little more with the person I play tested the game I mentioned in the last post and have been mulling it over.

Tokens

One change that was suggested was switching from a deck of cards to tokens. It felt like such an obvious move actually.

One of my problems in the design was having too few or too many cards. Too few and players were shuffling way too much. Too many and it was impossible to do any sort of prediction with card counting. With 6 of each of 3 suits, if I increased the number of cards evenly I had either 18 cards with one of each suit (which I felt was too few), or 36 with the next jump up. This last version I had 27 cards, with two of each of the 1-3 cards and 1 each of 4-7, though I thought this was a bit clunky with card counting.

Now I have three colors in place of the suits, red white and blue (Easy to remember order for beating them). I used some poker chips I had, with numbers sharpied on.

Having tokens eliminates these problems. There's no shuffling, just a quick shake. We'll see how this works when I do the next test play.

Forgotten Contest

Another suggestion is if someone forgets and reveals the card/token when they should have hidden it because it's a contested move, just make it so they have to stop before it would have been triggered anyway. one thing about that is, if the unit triggered because it moved out of an enemy's range it just means they don't go anywhere, which seems like a big penalty.

The Reserve

Another idea suggested was lost cards/tokens not being recovered at the end of your own turn, so you only get the unspent cards/tokens  to defend with, and then recover at the end of your opponent's turn.
This I'm less sure about simply because you only get 5 tokens/cards, and I don't want to increase this number too much, or else I'd have to increase the total pool. It seems like it'd basicly encourage turtling much more, so players have enough cards.tokens to defend with.
I'm willing to give it a try anyway.

When does it all (token effects) end?

Another aspect I was struggling with in the testplay that I didn't mention is the order of when tokens are removed. I had it simply at the end of your turn, but it makes no sense for a defense token to be placed on your turn and then immediately removed. One solution would be to make it so attack tokens remove at the end of your turn, and defense at the end of your opponent's turn ,but I don't really like the idea of tokens having seperate timings, since it's just one more thing to remember.

Maybe all tokens are removed at the end of your opponent's turn, since attack tokens aren't doing anything anyway.

I was considering just making clean up after both players go, but this would requite some sort of initiative check at the beginning of each round (I know a lot of miniatures games have this, including   Guild ball, a game I' recently discovered and I'm looking forward to playing) which I feel is a bit disruptive and slows the game down, and so I'd rather avoid it.

So those are things I'm looking at being some more changes in the next play. I'll report here on how that game goes, and I'll try to take pictures this time.

Do you have any thoughts on these mechanics? Are there any good examples where these types of mechanics are used well, or poorly?

First Test play for this version

So I got a chance to play feint wars today.

Sadly, I forgot to take pictures. Maybe this is a good sign, because it means I was absorbed in playing the game.

Some thoughts:

The Feinting Mechanic
The feinting mechanic still feels a bit clunky. The person I was playing against said it felt random. I tried to guess what the opponent was playing but I failed badly at it.

I'm not sure how to balance being able to have enough information to make informed decisions on
what cards are still out there. Maybe I need to lower the number of cards (currently it's 27).

A deck has 3 suits, with 2 of each suit of cards 1-3, and 1 of each suit 4-6.

Modified Damage

I'm considering dropping modified damage (that is, doing more damage based on how much you beat the defender by) and making it so you only do damage equal to the unit's damage value.

On the one hand, I like having it, The person I was playing with pointed out it discouraged really playing low cards, since there's no reason not to always play the highest card on your attacks, you're not really wasting anything.

One other solution would be to make a maximum damage, based on your base damage value.

There was a bit of a miscommunication on how I explained the rules and the other player was adding their speed value to their attacks, so they might have felt this way because they were hitting so frequently. I want to do more tests before dropping this.

Contested Movement and memory

Doing contested movement is a little hard to remember. (When you move out of of through the range of an enemy you play the card being used to move face down, and it's used as a defense against an attack of opportunity)

There were times when I played a card face up and then remembered it was contested and had to take it back and play a card face down. Maybe this is just a thing to get used to. I didn't want any special attacks or anything to use extra cards because I felt that slowed the game down, and so I wanted to sort of blend in the movement action with the "attack of opportunity".

I'm not sure i like how the card played is exactly your defense, since in order to move further you have to have a higher defense from the attack of opportunity because you have to play a higher card. Basically it means you always get a sort of bonus for charging. Maybe you subtract squares moved, but I was trying to avoid adding unnecessary math.

Abilities in general seem a bit hard to remember. I kept forgetting to play defense tokens for my shield ability for example on my knights. I also need better explanation on how defense tokens work since they should last during your opponent's turn.

The person I played with said the game is a good start. Now I need to work on refining this game more. I'll try to remember to actually take pictures next time.