The Project

One of the things I wanted to do after playing Altered was to do an immersive solo version of the game. As an amateur game designer this was a challenge, I thought I could do. I will let you decide on the results yourselves.

My design goals for this project are as follows:

• Create a fun solo immersive experience for an Altered player in 45 minutes or less.
• Make the game challenging but not impossible to win at.
• 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.
• Tie the game into the Altered lore as much as possible.
• Make it a product that has less than 45 cards and a few tokens so that it so that it is easy to print and play and that it could be published if anyone wanted to take it on.

Designing

Events

I set to work on the design and came up with the idea of ‘Events’ that are drawn each turn that act as your opponent’s turn based on a theme. I decided to divide them into ‘easier’ and ‘harder’ events which I have labelled ‘A’ and ‘B’ decks to provide more difficulty as the player gets more powerful through having more mana. The events I decided would be formatted in terms of an Altered turn with: –

1. A noon event that happens which will either benefit or set back a player’s turn
2. An afternoon section, that has three actions that the event does during the afternoon.
3. A Dusk section where you decide whether the player has fully achieved the event (move on both sides), partially achieved the event (move on one side) or completely fail to do the event. Failing an event means you take that event card and the symbol on it will then apply to the final event, which is the Musubi Bonding ceremony at the Spindle.

Event Symbols

There are four different symbols that represent different types of encounters. These relate to: –

• The cog represents mechanical or structural building issues
• The sword represents combat challenges.
• The Person represents social challenges with other people
• The Mystical symbol represents magical or otherworldly challenges.

Site Path

I decided to make the path slightly longer and had to change the middle of the path to being the Musubi Ceremony event. So consequently, I needed two cards on either side of the spindle. This meant that I had have more cards to represent the path. Originally, I was going to have two sets of normal path cards, but then I decided instead to have my own path cards as I could have more flexibility on them and indeed little abilities on them that could interact further with the events to make things different each time you play.

Design Worries

Going into the first playtest my biggest worries are:-

• The game will be too easy or too hard and isn’t tuned correctly. This is something that can be changed to make events easier and harder and will only be cured by lots of playtesting.
• It won’t play well with all heroes. There may be a couple of heroes that the game won’t play well with, but I will have to see as more people play with it with more heroes. If so, I will need to add some things to make it more or less friendly to those heroes.
• There will be something not working as intended. Not sure what that might be, but I will have to adjust in future iterations.

The First Playtest Run

I settled down on a wet and windy afternoon to start playtesting the version 0.01 of the scenario. My trusty Kojo and Booda deck was all ready, a bunch of tokens, dice and things to represent all the various other things that the scenario will throw at you. Finally, I made a cup of tea and started to adventure.

The game started out by me achieving all the A events I came across. I won’t say that they were easy as I only managed to move on one side each time. It must have had a lucky start I guess, as the A events tended to fall pretty well for me. However early on I had to mana a Haven to be able to achieve one of them and this is something that would come back to bite me. I noticed a few minor issues with events that I corrected as I went along.

Issues

One problem in particular were some events that checked for things as the action to gain a counter. The problem was that if you were going second, you had very little chance of achieving the first event. So, I amended the ‘At Noon’ part of the event to include you taking the 1^st player token as well. This made the events a bit easier but also more sensible to actually work through properly. There were some other wording issues that I noted on the card.

The problem for my little expedition started to come in once I hit the B events. I managed to fail three of them, but Sun Wukong was doing really good stuff for me. This was that the only way I could get a fleeting for one particular event was to not give him the 2 boosts and lose fleeting, which meant that I lost him to future events.

This together with the accumulation of 3 failed events meant that I lost a mana orb and my Booda on the Musubi meeting. Whilst my little expedition did its best (and succeeded in mountains), it was still 2 points too low in forest and way behind in water. Thus, my first attempt at the scenario was a failure.

I did not though that the social event failures were not as bad as they should be since you had to have characters in play at noon for them to hurt you. I made a note that there needed to be an alternative punishment if you couldn’t achieve it for later.

The Second Playtest Run

My second attempt with the same deck found me having completely the opposite experience. I failed my first three events early on, but I got a Haven and a Foundry into play early. After that I started to pull things back and I didn’t fail any more A events or any of the B events I encountered. So that when I got to the middle, I was able to get two of the three biome scores over ten. This time I had two social event loses and I didn’t have any penalty at all (as it was the opponent going first and I had nothing in play). I made notes that this was an issue and indeed looked at a second potential penalty as something that could be strengthened.

When I finished, I checked the time. Just over two hours and ten minutes for the two games, which was slightly longer than I really wanted.

Changes for Version 0.02

The second version of the print and play has a number of changes.

• Added some clarity to the 2-page rules document including making a standard rule that you can only proc an ability up to 3 times to prevent abusive unique cards.
• Made some amendments (buffs, nerfs and clarity changes) to events
• Amended some of the wording on timing on the sites to clarify them a bit more, though I’m still not 100% happy with them
• Buffed the people and gear penalty abilities on the Musubi meeting to actually matter more. The gear one made need looking at again, but I’m going to leave it for now.
• Added an optional difficulty factor if you are finding the scenario too easy.

Things that Need to be Checked

I have only run the scenario twice and with the same deck. Whilst I was relatively happy with the playtest I have some concerns.

• The scenario took a bit longer (1 hour 10 mins) than I’d ideally want. This is because it has a longer expedition path AND it requires you to get both expeditions to the centre. Also, if you fail a lot of events, you’ll be playing at it longer.
• This playtest only played the scenario against it with one deck, and I really want to see how it copes with different hero decks. Next playtest I will use two different heroes from different factions and see how that works.
• I did playtest with random events and some of the events didn’t show up (due to randomness) so they are still to be adequately tested.
• One character proved very strong against it (Sun Wukong rare) and there may need to be events included that may mitigate this a bit more.
• 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). To combat this I may restrict mana when you meet up at the Spindle, but I’m not going to make this change until I’m more certain about this.

A Double Check on Goals

• Create a fun solo immersive experience for an Altered player in 45 minutes or less – NOT MET

• The game needs to be challenging but not impossible to win at – MET

• 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

• Make it a product that has less than 45 cards and a few tokens for easy print & play – MET, but I have a lot of tokens at present that may need to be cut down

Conclusion

In conclusion I was happy with the first playtest, but there’s still a lot to do. You can give the version 0.02 playtest a go yourself. The word document with all the bits you need is linked below. If you want to give me feedback, then it would be useful to know: –

• The hero you used
• How long the scenario took
• Whether you won or not and by how much
• Any events with problems
• Anything that is unclear with the rules

Musubi Meeting v0.02