Cowboy game

So I got a couple playtests in this weekend with the super awesome Donnie Clark and Jasmine Tan. They were agreeable to go with my new idea of having a gunfight every round in the cowboy game. What Donnie noticed was there was no way to mess with the other players during their turns. For a light dice fest this is a problem that can be remedied.

We also played with the idea of having more dice to roll from the beginning and drawing 1 card every round. This half worked. I think it is going to remain at 3 dice to start, but will keep the draw 1 card every round. That being said, there is a LOT of dice rolling now. Too much in my opinion. What I think I'd like to do is do a discard to play the cards. I'm thinking of a matching system a la London. Put instead of a straight up 1 for 1, I think some of the more powerful cards will need a 2 for 1 or 3 for 1 maybe even 4 for 1. To help the issue of non-matching cards I'm going to use the idea of matching two cards to make a different card. Okay, that's not a good explanation, here's an example: Player 1 has a Blue card he really wants to play and it costs 2 Blue cards to play. Player 1 only has 1 Blue card and 2 Red cards in hand. So Player 1 can pitch all three, pairing the Red cards as a wild card and the Blue card as itself to make 2 Blue cards. Tah-dah! Then the card comes into play and starts doing stuff. That was another option that came up.

Since this is a light game there shouldn't be a reason cards do not take instant effect. Right now they delay for a round. I think I'll keep the board cards, because they add the nice dimension of drawing something you really want (another nod to London). I think there may have to be a limit of cards on the board to take from, maybe 5. The trick will be figuring out which ones get replaced when cards are added to the board with the discard to play actions.

Did I mention the gunfights worked like a charm?! It was super great to roll six poker dice (cowboys and their six-shooters) and then make the best 5 card poker hand. The problem we ran into is the cards have costs using 3 and 4 die straights, which are not acceptable poker hands. So I think I may push those two into a rank above a pair, which makes them slightly harder to kill. We initially played that they were below a pair which made them wicked easy to kill. I also may up the hands on the red cards and I can drop the hands off the other cards.

That's it for this post, I guess stay tuned for more ramblings from game design land.