Finally, this weekend it was time to test a lesser renowned hero, and I chose Nevenka to represent Lyra as I already had my fun Lyra deck together.

• Going into this my biggest worry was that a non-top tier deck would get really massacred by the scenario.
• I still have some concerns about the events on the cards with only one biome. It adds complexity that may or may not be required.
• The new site path idea seemed to work okay last test, but I want to cement that with a few more plays.

Nevenka Deck

My Nevenka deck is a fun deck that relies on dice rolling. Now I thought with the right set up and good rolling on All-ins that it could cope with the challenge.

First Run Through

The Nevenka deck started slowly, losing two battle events, but then started to slowly pick up wins. Most of the wins were grindy but it was enough to advance. The turning point was the Everchanging Tumult expedition where the deck managed to win on both sides against the random pulls from my mana. It was fortunate that I have a couple of beefy unique cards in the deck.

Once it got going, the deck got into its stride with two Ouroboros out at one point until one of the events killed the second one just after this event, which I managed to win on the Companion side with a lucky ‘Off you go!’ draw.

When it came to the final Musubi ceremony I had 3 events I’d failed that meant that I had two 3/3/3 druids as well as losing a man orb. That meant that I had to overcome 18 on two stats which I felt I had a chance at since I had an ‘All-in!’ in hand, a martingale and an Oroboros in my landmark section. With a couple of good rolls, I could win this. My rolls were good, but not quite good enough and I ending up with two stats on 17, which meant the deck had just failed by one.

Changes for Second Test

I decided not to make any major changes for the second test. The only real change I made was to test out reducing the overall difficultly back to 10/10/10 this time around.

The Second Test

The second test got off to a bad start, failing the first four events. It was at this early stage that I knew this run was not going to go well. In total I ended up with around 7 lost events and this resulted in the loss of 2 mana orbs, one permanent, 2 3/3/3 druids and an Ordis recruit that all had one boost. This was a target of 20. Looking at my Croupier in reserve, a couple of 2/2/2 cards in hand and nothing much to boost them, I knew I was going to be on a loser here. I think that 8 against 20 is my record loss against the scenario. Thanks, Nev!

Lessons from the Tests

Okay Nevenka really gave me a real varied test as you’d expect. The first thing I noted was that there were too many events that had an issue still if you weren’t playing first. I think I’m going to add a new rule into the comprehensive rules that if the scenario has the first player token it will perform an After You. This will stop some parts of the event being next to impossible for some decks.

Secondly adding the events in the A section made yet another thing to have to think about and I think I’m going to reduce these Tumult tokens to only be put out into the B region. This will make less cognitive load until later.

Next there were a couple of Permanent tokens that were referenced that are not in the physical components. These need to be added to the next component set. Also I found there were some tokens where there weren’t really enough of.

Finally, I think I need to start thinking about more events to give a little bit more variety and potentially more allow for other decks strategies to shine where necessary.

Double Check on Goals

The goals that I started with are starting to come together.

• Create a fun solo immersive experience for an Altered player in 45 minutes or less – Mostly MET. The first Nevenka game was around an hour. I didn’t time it properly as my wife interrupted me wanting to know about the game, so it got paused for twenty minutes whilst I explained the game to her. I figure it was around an hour though. The second one went a little longer due to losing so many events. It may be that the game still plays a little long. Taking out the A Tumult event may help, but I think there may need to be more ideas to cut down the time.

• The game needs to be challenging but not impossible to win at – MET, but more testing is still required. I’d love others to try it too!

• 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 to do some more immersive events. I will start looking at creating some more events for the next test.

• Make it a product that has less than 45 cards and a few tokens for easy print & play – MET. This is getting better and working well now.

Conclusion

The testing shows that the scenario is not far off from working. I’m a little concerned about the tweaks and extra little rules adding a lot of cognitive load on top of playing and the time to play is still a little long. Next time I’m going to try it either with a Gulrang deck or an Afanas deck.

I’ve not yet had any feedback from people trying it out for themselves. I’d love to hear how you did. The latest file version Musubi Meeting Musubi Meeting v0.06 is here.