Kleenex Playtest

Wednesday was our first proper playtest of Dominion with some unwitting volunteers. It was great to finally see the game in action and we received much useful feedback. It was somewhat humbling and we were forced to re-examine many aspects of the game that we had considered solid. Overall however, the core game mechanics worked well but definitely needed some polishing.

The main areas of confusion related to the overall structure of the turns and the combat stage. The turn structure issue would be remedied with a clear and intuitive flowchart, showing the turn phases, their benefits, and what it could mean for the player to follow certain strategies. This could be incorporated into a more informational HUD that would provide all players with all the info they needed at a glance. The previous HUD simply had sections to provide each player with somewhere to stack their resource and research cards. Information on the ship and planet stats were given on a reference sheet. While the reference sheet itself was useful and clear, the need to hand it round to each player every time they wanted to move or shoot was a bit counterproductive. So it was decided to incorporate all necessary stats onto the HUD to eliminate the need for the reference sheet and speed up play.

In terms of combat, this is the area that had the biggest trouble, mainly due to the fact that we still hadn't fully worked out the rules, and when the game was played by people unfamiliar with tabletop wargames, there were several serious problems identified. The main problem was that the combat was very unbalanced, with the attacking player practically guaranteed victory ever time. We needed to balance this much more and work out ways of giving the defending player a fighting chance in combat. Several die rolls such as the 'to hit' roll, shield saving throws and hull penetration rolls were removed before the playtest in an effort to speed up combat and reduce the need for players to spend a long time consulting tables and adding up values. However it was obvious we were a bit over zealous when were excising some of these throws at it made combat too simple and victory too easy. This will require some attention, but should be reasonable to remedy with some internal playtesting.

Overall we were happy with the games presentation

Visually we were very happy with the games look and feel. The gameboard looks good, requiring some polishing but overall looking nice. The counter size was also about right as well as the overall gameboard. Some text could probably be made bigger also to make things a bit clearer. The main thing that needed some changing is the HUD as mentioned above, and finishing off some the racial artwork.

Secondary playtest conducted with some tweaking proved better

A secondary playtest was also conducted that evening with some tweaking to the gameboard setup. Starting situations were also changed to give the players more resources at the start of the game. The different spacial anomalies were also layed out with a more precise layout to give each quadrant a more even distribution of resources and anomalies. This definitely helped to give each player a stronger starting position.

We also plan to introduce some race specific features and statistical changes to make each race different and identifiable. This will need to be done carefully so as not to make one the more superior from the outset. So overall, the playtest was a valuable experience where the users got to express their confusion and issues to us directly. This gave us some important pointers in the way we needed to progress with this final stage of development.