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 . . . .)

So far we’ve got one player ability for Over the Next Dune:

Pop a Tire: If this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers at the start of the Sneak Phase, choose one of those searchers to be affected by terrain during the next Search Phase. (Any time during the next Search Phase that searcher’s movement would cause it to enter one or more squares with terrain in them, the searcher must expend two squares of movement instead of one. If it does not have enough movement remaining to expend two squares of movement, it stops moving.)

We need at least four more to cover all five players. I’m going to run through the untested concepts to see if any of them are workable in light of the rules for player powers. Then we’ll come up with as many brand-new powers as needed.

To keep them firmly in mind, the rules for player powers are to include them when

1. the game benefits from a certain amount of something, but no more;
2. the unique ability provides very different game experiences; and/or
3. the unique ability creates new, interesting decisions.

A player power should not be used if

1. the power would undermine the game’s mechanics; and/or
2. the game is at a complexity limit.

Comparing the old concepts to these rules, it seems like some of them pass and some of them . . . aren’t good avenues to go down.

“Hey, Over Here!”–When a player token would be captured by a searcher, you may instead center that searcher over this player token. This player token, and any other player tokens covered by the searcher, are captured. Direct the searcher “down,” toward the starting line, just as if a player had been captured normally.

I still like this. It provides a decision (should I take one for the team?) that was previously only available when playing the “wall” strategy. A power that makes the game more interesting for the player using it always has some value.

Unfortunately, this ability has the potential to undermine the searcher-tricking mechanic. The “wall” was dangerous in part because it replaced maneuvering the searchers with constant rescues; a player could use this ability to do the same thing anywhere on the board. A gate is needed to prevent this ability from dominating the game:

“Hey, Over Here!”–Once per game, when a player token would be captured by a searcher, you may instead center that searcher over this player token. This player token, and any other player tokens covered by the searcher, are captured. Direct the searcher “down,” toward the starting line, just as if a player had been captured normally.

That isn’t a very interesting gate, I admit. However, I think this ability is very powerful and that a sharp limit is necessary.

Throw Something Shiny–Once per game, when this player token is adjacent to one or more searchers, choose one of those searchers and point it in a direction of your choosing.

Looking at the rules, I don’t think this makes the cut. First, OtND doesn’t need this sort of redirection. Second, being able to choose a searcher’s facing does not provide a substantially different game experience; the player is still fooling the searcher, he or she is just doing it in a different way. Finally, while the decision behind TSS is new it’s not very interesting–there will often be clear good and bad choices, and players will just pick a good one. This power needs to be replaced.

Coordinator–Once per game, when this player token tricks a searcher, the searcher does not capture player tokens it moves over. If the searcher is occupying any player tokens’ spaces when it stops moving, it captures those player tokens.

I don’t love this one either. Again, there’s no reason to include it. This ability is an easy out for difficult situations. OtND doesn’t need that in any amount. Nor is this a different game experience–the players will approach the game the same way, they’ll just have a “get out of jail free” card. Interesting decisions aren’t in the offing either, since players will be able to bail themselves out of otherwise-challenging problems. Off to the scrapheap with this one.

No One Left Behind–Once per game, when this player token is adjacent to another player token, you may choose to move the adjacent player token along with you for your first square of movement using the same rules as apply when tricking searchers.

Here we go. I’m a big fan of this power, because I think it’s most likely to create a different experience. The player with this ability sees a much different board, one with many more options. It’s fascinating to ask what can be done with it.

This power is so neat that I’m inclined to take the gate off of it so as to encourage its use. While the wording’s changing I’d also like to clear up how this power relates to the searcher-tricking rules. I don’t want this to become an easy out, so people who are in trouble should still be in trouble after this ability is used.

No One Left Behind–When this player token is adjacent to other player tokens, you may choose to move one or more of those tokens along with you for your first square of movement using the same rules as apply when tricking searchers. Those tokens will themselves trick searchers during this movement.

OK, that’s two out of four and a total of three powers ready for testing. Not bad, but now we need to come up with two more from scratch. How about:

Hitch a Ride–When an adjacent searcher moves during the Search Phase, this player token may move along with the searcher, always maintaining the same position relative to the searcher.

It’s common in OtND for one player to want to move backward, usually because that happens to be the safest place to trick a searcher toward. However, that player can end up unable to catch up before time runs out. This ability isn’t complex, but it creates decisions by making it possible to go backward late in the game. I suspect there are also other imaginative uses that I’m not seeing right away.

For the last ability, I’m thinking about this:

Caltrops–During each Sneak Phase you may turn one clear square adjacent to you (at any point during your movement) into terrain.

Terrain is generally bad for the players, so being able to create it forces a different approach to the game. This ability also teams up with Pop a Tire in a way that promotes team play, a general rule for OtND.

With that we have five player abilities for testing. Let me know if you see any issues right off the bat, or if you get a chance to try these out!

A short update today:

– I’ve updated the Print-n-Play file to reflect the changes in the latest set of rules. If you catch any errors, let me know.

Over the Next Dune – Print and Play – 6-27-14

– Part of the reason why this update is brief is because I’m working on a how-to-play video for Over the Next Dune. Have thoughts on what I should include? Leave them in the comments!