All my design goals are recorded in part 1 of my diary. As I finished with my Kojo playtest I had several concerns (outside of wording changes).

• The scenario took a bit longer (1 hour 10 mins) than I’d ideally want.
• This playtest only played the scenario against it with one deck. I really want to see how it copes with different hero decks.
• One character proved very strong against it (Sun Wukong rare). There may need to be events included that may mitigate this.
• I have a concern that the best strategy seems to be only partially winning an event to ensure that you build up more mana (and taking longer).

The New Decks

I built a new Sierra deck as I wanted to test an entirely different type of deck against the challenge. With so many Permanents and Brassbug making cards I wanted to understand whether this would really detract from playing the events or really help it.

The second deck I wanted to test was a Teija deck with a fair bit of anchored technology to see whether that would prove too strong against the events. That deck though will be in playtest diary 3. Both these decks are very different strategies, and I wanted to take a pot shot at looking at whether certain strategies are too strong or not.

The First Test

The very first test I wanted to try the Sierra deck up against the version 0.02 of the scenario. I’d made some fixes, and I wanted to first of all see whether they were any good. The Sierra deck lost three out of the first four ‘A’ events as it just couldn’t get things going fast enough and it needed to setup. Once it had set itself up though, the deck didn’t look back and never lost another event. At the final Musubi Meeting event, I think that it achieved over 20 stats in every biome before I decided that enough was enough. The Culprit? Brassbug Hive of course. With two of them out at the end the scenario just couldn’t cope with it.

Easy Mode?

I realised that there were a few key reasons for it winning so easily.

1. The scenario took an hour and a quarter to play and allowed the deck time to build up. Anyone letting a Sierra deck build up like that should know that they are in trouble.
2. There was insufficient pushback on Permanents in the event deck. Although the deck did manage to remove one Hive, I got the third one before the end and I’d been through most of my deck.
3. The challenge of the Musabi Meeting was just too easy despite me failing two battle events and a Mystical event.

Changes for the Second Test

I therefore made the following adjustments in version 0.03.

• I have shortened the expedition path to make the game shorter and prevent decks being able to build up too fast. I also turned the text around on the path so I could read it.
• I adjusted a number of events that just didn’t work. The clone event was laughable against my deck and has been fixed.
• I have added a bit more permanent removal as well as clearing of the reserve. Both these things could be issues and may still need to be increased.
• I upped the difficulty of the Musubi Meeting to 12 and increased the strength of the druids to 3/3/3. Now this would still have meant Sierra would have won, but it would not have been such a big victory.

The Second Test

With those changes all reprinted I was ready next day for the second test. Going into the test I was worried that Sierra would still be too strong for the scenario. The first event out though gave the deck a real battering and I think its probably a bit too strong in its current form. This is the one main change coming out of this test, scaling the Expanding Terror depending on how many days you’ve had. Seeing the writing on the wall for Day 1, I chose to get out a Brassbug Hub instead and set up.

The deck then lost to the next battle event as well. This meant it had two battle events against it. Sierra scraped along against the next couple of events getting sided wins thanks to getting a Brassbug Hive out. With protection from an exhausted Hub (then a Icebound Hollow), I was able to keep my Hive in play against the scenario which more aggressively attacked permanents now.

I was able to scrape a win on one side against the clones, which had two 4/4/4 tokens on either side against me which got Oddball to the Spindle. I then had to survive two more harsh events with yet another battle event occurring on the region that had that I needed the major success to avoid getting the card on it. So, although I did manage to win the hero side and advance to the Spindle, I still ended up taking a third battle card.

The final Musubi test therefore did not go to plan for Sierra. No longer having two Brassbug Hives, she was only churning out 3/3/3 Brassbugs. The cards in hand all mostly have decent reserve abilities on them and didn’t really help me beat my target of 18. I had a Kelon burst that brought the target down to 15 (taking a druid out), but I only had 9 mana, and I could only reach a high stat of 10. Thus, my second Sierra attempt was a failure.

Lessons Learnt from the Tests

The second attempt with Sierra with the shortened track played in about 50 minutes which is the target time. This shortened track also had the twin bonuses of not giving me too much mana AND not allowing me to go too fast through the deck to get all the hives out. With more proactivity against permanents around I was happy that she was being more challenged, though I do have to wonder if it’s a bit too much.

Events

Other than the one event “The Expanding Terror” which I have amended in the v0.04 file to scale, I now think most of the events seem balanced. I have a worry around the “Mountain Goat” event being an automatic failure if neither expedition is in mountains, and have therefore added some errata to redraw a new event if both the expeditions are not in the mountains.

Tokens

The number of tokens means I had to search through to play against the deck meant if often took time to find the right one. I feel I may want to consolidate them somehow, though have yet to conclude how I’m going to do that.

Power Level

Given the wide discrepancy between the two plays, I now wonder whether I had a very lucky first play and over buffed the scenario against Sierra. I will need to see and check the difficulty when I next test against Teija.

Region Path

I’m not altogether happy with the new site path, but its ‘good enough for now.’ My concerns are around the fact that there is only partial randomisation of cards at present (as there are only two types of each) and also that the region cards are currently built to be a certain way up (due to the text). This also makes events currently chain together and I want to make this more variable and less predictable.

Double Check on Goals

• Create a fun solo immersive experience for an Altered player in 45 minutes or less – MET

• The game needs to be challenging but not impossible to win at – MET, but more testing required with different heroes

• Make the experience very different to a normal Altered game but still mostly using the Altered rules so that I’m not replacing how Altered is played – MET

• Tie the game into the Altered lore as much as possible – MOSTLY MET, but I’d like more immersive events. I will probably add 4 more of A and B events when I’m happier with the overall scenario.

• Make it a product that has less than 45 cards and a few tokens for easy print & play – MET

Conclusion

As usual feel free to test the scenario yourselves and let me have any feedback that you have. The latest version 0.04 files are here.