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This was the first ever game of Kotay back in 2013?

Sreeja had suggested the egg designs and Sud had spent days just 3D printing this set. Mehrab, Anagh, Niraj, Janani, Anand and Nitesh were the first ever play testers one Sunday evening

This is from Christmas Day 2015 

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Around Christmas, 2016

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LBIG 2017

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• These playtests took place between late 2016 and early 2017 when games were an emotional rollacoaster for me. Some of the pics are from the retreat that the Brain Infections Group went on. With each game it felt like Kotay would die and sometimes it felt like it just had like a tiny spark of life left! Madness!

We played two games of Kotay on July 15^th, 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.

Chris recently told me that Kotay is a 4Xs game. “4X is a genre of strategy-based video and board games in which players control an empire and “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate” (Wikipedia).
Unsuprisingly the problems we had developing Kotay are also the general problems in this genre.

We played an unfinished (maybe even unfinishable!) game of Kotay from the evening of June 27th to the early hours of June 28th.

Players: Karthik, Kshiraja, Pavan and I.

The game progressed well until Pavan built a fort in one of the middle squares (with borrowed gold) which was taken down by Karthik. This particular attack made it clear that there was something very wrong with the attack dynamics.

Here is the modification I made which proved lethal to the attack dynamics.

All attacks were with D8 , multiple attacking units got an entire D8 i.e. If there were 3 attacking pieces, the person rolled 3x D8s

And

All defenses were D6 – three defenders got 3x D6.

This was terrible.

It disproportionately increased the strength of the attack.

Taking out both “tension” as Kshiraja put it and playability (as I astutely 🙂 observed) out of the game.

Another modification I introduced – was two lives for a capital – we did not really test this out.

In any case, Pavan then withdrew from the game. Assisted with pen and paper he started working out the different probabilities of attack. He has come up with a set of combat rules which should resolve the attack dynamics. We plan to test this out really soon.

We also spoke a bit about the steps in evolution of the game – how much should it be driven by feedback, and trying to appease? Things that came up were – Why are long games bad? Why can’t there be some complex rules?

We came up with quite a few alternatives – such as replacing dice with wheels or cards, merging cannon and cavalry into a single attack unit etc.

Karthik suggested character transformations – for example, an explorer enters a fort and becomes a military unit.

Kshiraja came up with the idea of catastrophe cards and Pavan had ideas about setting up treasure hunts as an extension of exploration.

All of which we agreed could become other games.

Some of the comments apart from the breakdown of the attacks –

1. Having two attack units from the beginning took away from the building element of the game

Kshiraja and Karthik noted that exploration, terrains, resources and the act of building were less significant in the present version of the game, since a Cannon and Cavalry are provided right in the beginning of the game.

2. Extending the board to allow more time for military expansion

3. How much defence should a capital get?

4. Range expansion – particularly the attack radius of the fort came up multiple times

In summary, I think with the new dice combinations delineated by Pavan and decreasing the “plentifulness” at the start of the game may help take the game to completion.