Feedback and thoughts on the nascent game, Pouches of Destiny (was Greedy Devils)

[upthebuzzard]

If anyone has any suggestions for improving Pouches of Destiny, do please pop them as a reply to this issue.

[upthebuzzard]

for example,

• So far, the rules have mostly been tuned for 2 players. We anticipate there will be a need to adjust some details for more players to keep things balanced.
• Perhaps the heap could be built from 2 or more decks of cards?
• No reason why the heap can’t expand out beyond the 5x5 grid with discards.
• Maybe there is a better metaphor than Tasmanian Devils?

[upthebuzzard]

Some fab play-testing at the FT Board-Gamers meetup resulted in much uncovering of unhandled edge cases.

• the discard order (of the cards used in a fight) matters. The first discard can change the landscape for the second discard.
  • We opted for "loser discards first".

[upthebuzzard]

• what is the discard rule for when it is impossible to discard on top of the heap?
  • We opted for burying the card.

[upthebuzzard]

• Questions around whether the player can discard without having picked up anything in that round.
  • Answer: yes.

[upthebuzzard]

• If a player has a spade in their pouch, and opts to pick, can they PICK/PICK/DISCARD/DISCARD, or must they PICK/DISCARD/PICK/DISCARD?
  • We played that both combos are allowed.

[upthebuzzard]

• If a player has a spade in their pouch, and opts to pick, can they pick from two different places, e.g. one from underneath and one from the west?
  • Answer: yes. There's no requirement for both picks to come from the same point in the heap.

[upthebuzzard]

• When discarding cards back onto the heap, we left them face up even when covered by a top card. This leads to a lot of peeking at the poorly stacked piles to see what is underneath.
  • We decided to turn all cards face down, apart from the top card which must always be face up.

[upthebuzzard]

• A suggestion was made that a better name would be "Heap of Trouble" since that highlights the main characteristic of the game, i.e. the heap.
  • Could be, could be.

[upthebuzzard]

• Fighting became more of a thing, and the question of who can initiate a fight and in what order became more important.
  • It seems intuitive that the player who has just moved onto a shared card (heap location) is the first with the option to initiate a fight. After that, everyone else on the shared location has the option of initiating a fight, in order of the game's turn-taking.
  • For situations later, where 2 or more players still share a location, i.e. no-one has just moved onto it, it is still possible to initiate fights. In this case, the player who's turn it is has the first option to initiate a fight, followed the other players on the shared location, in order of the game's turn-taking.

[upthebuzzard]

• The heap did get spread out, and quite messy, and started overlapping with players' pouches, i.e. their own set of cards lined up in front of them, making it unclear sometimes as to what was heap and what was pouch.
  • Perhaps as a convention, place the pouch cards so they are at right angles to the prevailing direction of the heap cards. Some players will have a pouch cards in portrait and others in landscape?

[upthebuzzard]

• The rules take a long time to read.

[upthebuzzard]

• It was not clear, having read the rules, how someone wins.

[upthebuzzard]

• The leeching effects needed frequent re-reading, so might benefit from having a crib card for each player.

[upthebuzzard]

some of the demo photos need a little more contrast, e.g. a table cloth that is not the same colour as the cards themselves