Nalpha: Why it sucked.

So, my wife gracious tested "Nalpha" with me this weekend.

It was awful.  Simply dreadful.  It's not that the idea that it has grown from was bad, but the implementation was.  Gameplay was marked with tedium, and on any given turn (which should be the high point of "fun-having"), it felt as though the game played itself, rather than you played it.

My wife is honest with her words, but much more so with her posture, facial expression, and overall fidgetiness.  I was convinced that the game was bad.  And that is why I am so grateful to have had her try it out with me.

So where do we go from here?  Well, here's the process I went through:

First, I tried to be sure I understood what precisely wasn't working.  In this case I saw two major issues: tedious physical action (particularly when it wasn't my turn) and lack of options.

I try to look at troubleshooting and redesign in a medical kind of way: is the problem a symptom or is it the actual disease?  In this case, it seemed to me that the first issue was a symptom, and the second an actual disease.

A disease is usually easier to correct; you can address it head on.  Symptoms, by contrast, can be simply treated head on, but that may not really fix the problem.  So, you have to root out the actual cause.

I identified the root of problem #1 as being one of the core mechanics of the game.  That kind of sucked, but in a way I always knew I was unhappy with it; I just couldn't admit it to myself.  Altering it would mean losing a fair amount of the "class-diversity" I had intended for the game.  Nevertheless, a diverse game that's not fun is still not a good game.

So I wound up axing the old mechanic, but I did work out a new one that was simpler, faster, and less tedious.  A little tweak to the format of each turn helped save the class-diversity I was afraid of losing.

As for the lack of options, that was pretty easily addressed by simply lowering the cost of many cards so that more actions were available more often.  A rebalance of the potency of those cards was also necessary, but that wasn't terribly difficult.

So, I've printed a new Nalpha set.  Now, I just need to play a few games and see if the changes take.