Here’s the revised print-n-play file with the new terrain piece 4:

Over the Next Dune – Print and Play – 7-25-14

If you get a chance to try it out, let me know what you think!

Terrain piece 4 needs to go. It doesn’t create interesting situations in play, and it’s difficult to work with. We need to replace it with something that leads to challenging decisions, and preferably the replacement should be a simpler shape that doesn’t raise rules problems.

Of course, saying that the new piece should “lead[ ] to challenging decisions” isn’t very useful by itself. How does a terrain piece do that? We need to develop some new rules that tell us how terrain in Over the Next Dune works before we can figure out what will work well.

1. “Thick” terrain pieces and “thin” ones involve different decisions.

Take a look at piece 6. It’s a 5×3 block. Moving across it vertically will bog a player down for an entire turn, plus part of a second. Getting across it horizontally is . . . well, suffice it to say that that’s not a good tactical move.

In my experience, piece 6 is usually treated as if it just walls off the spaces it occupies. No one wants to go near it, lest they end up in a turn-wasting slog. The decision players make when they look at it is, “how do I get where I’m going, given that I can’t use that part of the board?”

Piece 1, by contrast, is very small–a 5×1 line. Players don’t love crossing it, but they’re willing to do so if they’re already close enough that going around would be slower, or if the searchers make going around unwise. The decision here isn’t about how to avoid the piece, but rather whether to avoid it.

2. Terrain with a variety of widths creates different incentives in different places, and is more interesting as a result.

Piece 5 is as thick as piece 6 in some places, as thin as piece 1 in others. In my experience, those differences in width matter. Where piece 5 is thin, the players consider going over it; where it’s thick, they avoid it. This single piece combines the decisions involved in the other two, and makes each of them more interesting: is this spot thick enough that it should be treated as walled off? Is there a route across the terrain that’s more favorable? It’s much harder to develop a simple rule of thumb regarding piece 5, and that makes the piece a lot more engaging to think about and deal with.

3. Both terrain’s vertical and horizontal lengths are relevant during play.

In general, the solution to terrain in OtND is to shift sideways before getting to it. Piece 5, however, creates a vertical channel as well as a horizontal barrier. It therefore makes the sidesteps that are effective against most terrain pieces tricky. Getting around piece 1 is much harder when piece 5 is in the way.

Terrain piece 3 can do much the same thing. Players are much more inclined to go left around it than they are to go right and cross its vertical length.

Since sidestepping is so effective in general, I think it’s healthy for the game to make it more challenging when an opportunity to do so arises. That means more pieces with a significant vertical dimension.

4. Bigger pieces have more of an impact than smaller ones.

This is probably obvious, but it’s worth noting so that it’s not overlooked. Piece 1 is easy to work around. Piece 6, by contrast, strongly pushes players away. Terrain piece 5’s vertical length affects more decisions than piece 3’s. If the goal is to have a terrain piece matter, making it bigger is a good place to start.

Those rules leave a lot of possibilities. What about something like (pardon the terrible art, please ignore the underscores):
x x x x x
__x x x
____x
__x x x
x x x x x

That’s big, has lots of vertical length, and has different widths at different points that capture both the “thick” and “thin” decisions. We could also make it more complex:

x x   x x
__x x x
____x
__x x
x x x x x

Both of these have a flimsy middle–not as flimsy as the old piece 4’s, but potentially a problem. How about:

x x   x x
__x x x
____x x
____x x
x x x x x

Hm. That looks like it has potential. Let me know what you think, and if there are no serious objections I’ll update the print-and-play file with the new piece.

Terrain piece 4, you’re going on trial.

Facts: Terrain piece 4 is a zig-zag of difficult ground:

Over the course of many playtest games, this has been the terrain piece with the least impact. Since players can move diagonally and still make progress just as quickly as they would if they moved straight ahead, it’s easy to dodge through the clear spaces left by the zig-zag. No player has ever been hindered by this terrain piece.

In addition, terrain piece 4 can be confusing to new players. Every other terrain piece occupies only the squares it affects. Terrain piece 4, on the other hand, needs reinforcing “crossbars” that extend into neighboring squares. Those crossbars mean that terrain piece 4 half-occupies some squares, leading to questions about whether those squares are clear, difficult terrain, or some hybrid of the two.

With all of that said, terrain piece 4 is visually interesting. Over the Next Dune’s board divides into clear spaces and blocks of rough ground. Terrain piece 4 provides an intermediate texture that mixes clear and rough, making the board feel more realistic.

Issue: Should terrain piece 4 retain its current form, or be changed?

Rules:

1. Decisions players make must be interesting.

2. As a corollary, things that reduce the number of decisions or the interest of those decisions, or that delay getting to the decisions, are disfavored.

Thinking it through: The fundamental problem with terrain piece 4 is that it’s only interesting once: the “a-ha!” moment when a player figures out how to get through it. That opportunity for system mastery is good. After that bit of mastery is achieved, however, terrain piece 4 becomes entirely irrelevant. It never provides an interesting decision again.

None of the other terrain pieces have that problem. Their impact varies–the large piece 6 is more of a challenge to work around than the small piece 1–but they have all continued to create interesting decisions over many plays.

Bringing little interest to the game is a damning critique in and of itself, but the rules problem puts the final nail in the coffin. Explaining how piece 4 works might be worthwhile if it were making the game better; a line or two in the rulebook would be sufficient. Since it’s not, those extra lines are just unnecessary barriers to getting through the rules and on to the game’s interesting decisions.

Piece 4’s aesthetic qualities are nice, but they don’t make up for poor gameplay. OtND’s visuals can easily be improved later when the board and other components get proper artwork. Interest and challenge, on the other hand, are much harder to add. Each game element needs to pull its weight in those areas, and piece 4 is falling short.

Terrain piece 4, then, needs to change–but to what? We’ll take that up next time.

I’ve been able to sneak in a few more playtest rounds of Over the Next Dune. So far, the win rate for a six-turn game is hovering at about 60%. That’s lower than the rate for longer games, which is good; it suggests that we’re succeeding in increasing the difficulty. Sixty percent is still pretty high, however, and the player powers are yet to be incorporated. OtND is going to have to get harder.

Further reducing the number of turns is tricky business. As the amount of time the players have to reach safety declines, their choices regarding their movement become more and more restricted. (At four turns, every player’s every move would have to be in one of the three forward directions!) So on the one hand, having less time makes the players’ decisions more interesting because each one is very important–but on the other hand, they have fewer options to choose from. Limiting the players too severely risks leaving players feeling like there are not enough strategies available, or like the game is boring simply because it’s impossible to win.

I’m going to try going down to five turns and seeing how that affects play. There’s a point on the dial where we tip over from “interesting challenge” to “frustrating exercise.” Locating it will tell us exactly how much the difficulty can be increased by shortening the game, and how much weight will need to rest on other tools.

Following up on last time, I’ve been testing the worst-case scenario to see if it’s beatable in only six turns. The answer turns out to be yes. It’s consistently taken the full time, but it’s doable.

If anything, having all searchers moving toward the players early has been easier to deal with than having them spread out. Once the players are past the initial wave the worst-case scenario presents, they’re more or less in the clear. The endgame is generally straightforward, with only one or two searchers reaching threatening positions.

While this is good news, it doesn’t mean testing is finished. I still want to make sure that the six-turn limit is sufficiently difficult to serve as “hard mode.” Mathematically the turn limit can’t go much lower, so if this isn’t enough of a challenge I’ll have to add difficulty in some other way.

I’ve been testing reduced turn limits as a mechanism for increasing Over the Next Dune’s difficulty, and have been happy with the results. The games have been interesting and fast-paced. Also of note, they’ve been harder. 😉

Tighter turn limits have had the beneficial side-effect of discouraging boring strategies. I didn’t anticipate this, but in retrospect I should have. The end run generally involves at least one turn of slipping to the side without progressing forward, and other slow-boiling approaches to the game tend to rely on waiting while the searchers move to favorable positions. Having fewer turns means players have no choice but to plunge ahead and then figure out how to escape the resulting sticky situations.

I should note that I’m doing this testing without player abilities. Adding those at this point would be putting two independent variables into the same experiment. Solidifying the difficulty levels before adding player powers will help me judge the impact of the powers accurately.

One pattern I’m noticing is that having a searcher move close to the players early makes the six-turn game very difficult; in fact, I haven’t won a game involving that situation yet. That’s a worrisome sign. It’s OK for the game to be more difficult with some setups, but it’s not OK for it to be unbeatable. I’m planning to do some testing akin to what was done for the worst-case scenario to make sure that that isn’t an auto-loss for the players. (Speaking of which, the worst-case scenario will need another look . . . .)