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John Paul Messerly
United States
Sherman Oaks
California
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Play Testing
I've been timing playtests of Touchstone:Oubliette for a while to get a better feel for play times. Originally I believed a drive takes from 1-2 minutes, a game around 5 minutes, and a season about 60 minutes BUT today while playtesting most of the games were around 2 minutes which really surprised me...
Away games
Game against Fearmongers
5:35 Lose 10-14
1 casualty
Game against Tricksters
1:56 Lose 10-14
Game against Believers
2:05 Lose 0-22
Home games
Rematch against Tricksters
2:58 Win 14-7
Rematch against Fearmongers
1:55 Lose 0-28
2 casualties
Rematch against Believers
3:42 Win 14-0
Art DirectionI'm still playing with different card layout ideas. I like the elongated shape of the last design but the narrowness of the cards makes it hard to fit more dynamic poses in. I still want to experiment more with breaking the borders of the rectangular cards, making the characters break out of the inner card edge BUT I'm also excited about trying a circular motif. It allows each character to break out of their borders, gives me room for more abstract shapes for them to overlap, and includes a banner for their name. The only drawback of this style of design is it looks a lot like Small World.
New Gameplay Idea
I'm very happy with the flow of the game and the re playability but I've always wanted to find an elegant way to handle player progression. Currently some characters have special abilities and others do not BUT the characters cannot earn new skills during the game. I think I've finally found a system I like for adding abilities...
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Super Dungeon Explored deals with this in an interesting way by having each corner of the card be a specific slot so only one card of each slot type can ever exist on a character. Visually this works rally well because the cards are designed so when the ability is slotted in place only its modifier is showing along that card edge. Placing a card beneath a character with only the new ability showing might be a good solution.
The other approach I like is from Gloom and Hecatomb, where they have transparent cards that overlay on top of the character. Unfortunately this is not Print and Play friendly because transparent cards are hard to make.
The goal is to allow for characters who make truly amazing plays to get new skills or trigger random events. I've been watching a lot of "Allo Allo" and would love to have modifiers and events that create strange, silly, and ridiculous combination's. Fluxx, Gloom, and Munchkin do this very well! Its a great technique to lighten up a game and is a core concept in situational comedy that I think works well in game design as well.
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New Gameplay Idea
