I guess now is the time to concentrate on the rule book. Right now it is just a word document and I doubt anyone would be able to play the game right by just reading them! It is a lot of work and usually the last thing designers are excited to do. At least it has been like that for us. But now that everything else is looking so good, we might as well take the time and figure the rule book out as well! Wish us good luck..

The bad? Okay, you got it. Our normal printing place was not open, so we were not able to get our new and tweaked game material printed! We still managed to playtest, but we had to use paper buildings and so on.

Let’s move on to the good. The game rocked! It was awesome. Pretty much all the changes were working amazingly well and we had a fun and tight game (which I managed to win ;)). The only thing that was unbalanced badly was the number of secret maps in the exploring deck. We decided to take half of them away and I think that should fix it.

Now the question still remains.. will we get the new stuff printed for Ropecon? I certainly hope so. I have a backup printer that I’m currently negotiating, so we haven’t lost all hope. Wish us luck and if you happen to be at Ropecon, might as well come and try Cuzco!

We have been busy to think over the last changes and hopefully we have the changes ready for Ropecon. We hope to be able to test it twice before the event, but we’ll see. Time is suddenly become a really scant resource.

The gameplay

One interesting thing was that we didn’t go over all the rules in the beginning, but decided to explain some of the advanced rules along the way. It worked out very well, considering that all of them were established boardgamers. At the beginning of the game everybody were harvesting a ton and consequently thought that warehouses are really important. This hasn’t happened before (not to that extent, at least) and it’s always interesting to notice how very differently different groups play the same game.

The game was tight, until at the end of the third round a luck got involved: A player tried to conquer Cuzco with 8 units, when Cuzco had 5 defending Incas. They decided to put a fight and threw three gold faces with the coin. The result was that Antti got to Cuzco without breaking a sweat and took a lead that lasted until the end.

Another player also misunderstood some of the Royal Order cards and planned his strategy accordingly. Obviously, he wasn’t happy to find out that it wasn’t allowed. But at the end of the game, everyone was still quite excited about the game and thought it’s getting closed to being ready. There are still things that needs balancing out.

Possible improvements

Considering the fact that everyone felt that the game is close to being ready, a bunch of ideas were mentioned. Here are some of the main ones:

• Choosing the player that chooses the starting spot and a starting player. One of the hero’s will always start and the starting player would be so that the player that chooses his starting place last would get to be the last on the final round.
• When exploring, you could take one royal order card instead of three normal exploring cards.
• Extra actions are played before normal actions, so that they won’t get the advantage of being last.
• More different buildings and only two of each. This would make more variety in deciding what to build. Possible new buildings: Small that would give +1 to Inca relations each round, Medium that would -1 from all the harmful cards you get, Medium that would increase your hand limit to 10 and Large that would give you the win in Inca offerings if tied.
• Diseases: same except instead of conquistador returning, two units need to return, but you may choose which ones. Hanging bridge: Three units returns instead of two units and a conquistador. These changes make it easier to have your conquistador to survive harmful cards.
• Third warehouse slot, so all in all you could have seven resources in store.
• Vespucci can take one less harmful card while exploring, instead of completely being immune to them. It was too strong otherwise and might still be.
• Fifth agriculture slot.
• Action card that let’s you put two resources into the Inca offering instead of one.

Conclusion

This playtest gave us the assurance that we have done the right choices and what should happen in the near future. Needless to say, we were glad to find this out and have renewed energy to go forward from this!  Only negative thing was that we were so involved in the game that we forgot to take any pictures. Oh well, better luck next time!

The beginning

The whole idea of designing a boardgame began in first quarter of 2004. I had loved games all my life, but started playing more in 1996-97 when I first was introduced to the Settlers of Catan. I played it a lot with my family and friends, including Antti. But it wasn’t until Puerto Rico in late 2003 that I started buying more boardgames and not just games related to the Catan. It was the same Puerto Rico that got Antti excited over the boardgames and he started to build his own game collection.

The idea

So in 2004 we had had a relatively nice taste of different games out there. One day while talking, Antti mentioned the possibility to make our own game. My first thought was: “Sure, that would be nice, but I bet we won’t ever finish it.” After pondering it more, we began the process of designing by finding out what we could come up with. The main goal in our minds were: What would be the ideal game for us?

It proved to be a good decision. Almost right away I came up with the theme of conquering the new world and Antti had good ideas to add to that. We also thought of different games we had played and thought about different mechanics we had liked the most. We started figuring out how we could use those ideas in our theme. Looking back now, we had no control over our ideas. We put in all our wildest ideas ranging from attack formations to altitude modifiers!

Overall, our designing has followed a pattern: Sometimes it has been the only thing in our mind and we have constantly been improving it, and the other times there has been months of nothing going on with it. This happened in the beginning as well. I think it was in August 2004 that we had our first prototype put together.

The first playtest

We had high hopes for our first playtest. And it sure was a memorable experience. After five and half hours of playing it, the one of us in lead had 3-4 points in our 60+ track of victory points! Everything was just way too expensive to do, took so much time to develop your economy, way too many provinces.. the list could go on and on. At that point, we decided to end the game (originally the game ending was triggered at someone reaching 20 points!). Funny thing was that in the end, the winner had over 40 points, since there were hidden points that players could find by exploring.

Even though the first playtest wasn’t successful as a game, it showed us that there is potential in the concept of the game and it gave us the starting point for making the needed adjustments.. which would turn out to be many! Stay tuned..

The game play

The game played out well. One strange thing happened: I and Petri had too much money throughout the game (later we discovered that one reason for that was that there were way too many gems in the exploring deck!). No one was willing to fight for provinces and everyone was peacefully boosting their productivity.. until the end of round three. AnttiT went to the Sacred Valley, found a temple, but hanging bridge made all his units go back to his capital. Next thing you know, Petri captures the temple and Cuzco at the same time. At this point he manages to get into a nice ten or so points lead and all of us others start planning ways to change that.

So, pretty much our last round was trying to beat Petri and we managed to so quite well. He was forced to leave the temple and Cuzco, couple of his settlements got pillaged and he was forced to place last in the area final area scoring. I was only one point after him when we entered the last Inca Offering phase. There Petri played wisely and passed, although he had six resource tiles. It was the right move, because then Antti did not want to put anything as well, for he would not get any points either and I would score two points. Petri and others scored the sell most gold point and he won with 20 vp’s. I and AnttiT finished with 18 vp’s (I winning the tie breaker with having 49 silver coins!) and Antti with 17 vp’s. The game was almost three hours long, but there was some downtime because of us taking our time. It happens easily when there are close calls and someone wants to optimize his move.

Recommended changes

Couple things that were discussed after the game:

a) I noticed that the exploring deck was unbalanced. Not that many action cards and plenty of gems and gold. It also was too small and had to be reshuffled too many times.

Our recommended solution: Fix the number of gems and gold and add another set of action cards.

b) Temples were deemed too risky compared to other artifacts. The fact that you can lose the two points instead of have one sure point means you have to defend those two points at all cost, and then you most likely miss out on other victory point generating things.

Our recommended solution: Make temples so that the founder gets a vp and the one holding it in the end of the game gets the other vp.

c) Hanging bridge was maybe a little too powerful.

Our recommended solution: Have it return only the conquistador and two of the soldiers, not all of the units.

d) The old excitement of going after the secret maps was pretty much gone. You could just go to one of the sacred valley provinces, which you almost always manage to do, and then find them one after the other.

Our recommended solution: The card will tell the sacred valley province that map can be used in so that you can’t “cash in” those in the same province.

Overall, we were very happy with the playtest.