Playtesting at Sugar&Dice – what’s not to like

Chris, Simon, Jodie (who replaced Koen early in the game) and I played a super intense game of Kotay today at Sugar&Dice

Game time: 2.5 hours

I got rid of of an unsuspecting Chris very early into the game (first 20 or so min) with a super aggressive strategy of going after his village early on.

After this, Simon and Jodie sort of formed a permanent alliance against me. They played fairly defensive strategies and missed many opportunities to take on each other.

The game ended with oscillations and stand-offs, and the final capital destruction was purely luck based.

And while Simon was able to destroy me and amass a fortune (which he then was unable to split with his ally for “loss during transport” type reasons),  he was defeated by Jodie after several misses.

We also tried different dice and types of rolls today – eight sided dice and six sided dice etc). Simon rolled a 8,8, 6 on 3 dice

Thanks for playing guys!

Some comments:

Th overall feeling from the game was that the battle dynamics need to be more balanced.

One possible solution to the oscillations is make an alternate victory condition – like 15 gold.

Have better representations of what can destroy what – range and which dice to use etc.

Simon initially felt that games like Kotay may need a bit more in-depth analysis to arrive at feedback and therefore repeat testing.

He also suggested modeling the dice outcomes, to actually test which pairs work well. We may not be able to do this for the whole game, but it may be critical to do this for the battle dynamics.

Koen pointed out that Chris’s exit for example was pure luck based, hit-or-miss startegy, and it should be more balanced. I think this is somthing that Velocity had mentioned as well when we played in Sweden. Which was the reason why we brought the cannon power down a bit to match cavalry. This needs to be tested more.

Koen suggested damage on the Capital as an alternative to death in one blow. Which is an interesting idea.

Simon suggested having a flag or some other way of physically representing taking over of another player’s buildings.

Queries: Can allies share personnel support? we have said no to this, this may need to be explicitly mentioned. While we are allowing passage through enemy territory.

About Playtesting at Sugar&Dice

Sugar&Dice is an awesome board games cafe here in Liverpool. People were super friendly and I even got to playtest Koen’s lovely dress-making game.