We played two games of Kotay on July 15th, 2017
Game 1 – Vignesh, Sai, Pushkar and I
Game 2 – Vignesh, Sai, Shekhar and I
The two games had completely different flavours. Game 2 was remarkable.
Game 1 – A calculated pursuit of gold
Pushkar won on gold – he built 4 villages – and we realized we have set a limit of 4 for villages per person, and that may actually be good given the new win by gold accumulation rule.
Pushkar allied with Vignesh who really believes in alliances. Lot’s of forts got built and taken down, but it became pretty clear early on that Pushkar was trying to win on gold.
Game 2 – Greed for Gold
Kotay has always been a game about personalities. As Jeoffrey once warned me
> “Kotay is an evil game”.
Sekhar joined us for this game and actually created an axis of evil.
He built an economy purely on gold (presumably enslaving his own people) and attacked innocent explorers who dared to come into the range of his cavalry. In fact, this was his only strategy – gold and more gold.
Meanwhile, Vignesh who had initially set out on a quest for gold (by building a village in turn 1) backed out of that strategy to build more and consolidate. However, the change in strategy set him back.
The game was won on gold. Sekhar had cannons at his gate, from Sai and Vignesh. Said convinced him to leave his cannon to fight one last battle in exchange for his gold if he failed.
2 cannons positioned to destroy the enslaving dictator. Who will he take out?
Sekhar spent his moves fending off Vignesh . In his turn, Sai (orange) deafeated Sekhar’s capital with a D4 on his very first attempt. Sai claimed all of Sekhar’s gold as bounty and won the game. The game took quite an unpredicatble turn because of Sai’s unusual offer.
These playtests made me feel that Kotay is ready.
Some of the points that were raised were –
#Adjacent players seem to be allying too often. Should there be a cost for forming an alliance?
For example should it be a one time fee? Or should there be a resource pool between them? Should the allies have some resources deducted from them every turn? We will keep this in mind, probably play out a few variations, but I do personally like the freedom in formation and breaking of alliances.
Kotay 