Mutant Pizza

Hey Humanoids,

I’ve been able to playtest this tableau builder over the past few weeks, solo against myself and with other folks, and I’m excited about how it’s shaping up. This is going to be a super concentrated Thanksgiving cranberry sauce type of update.

Let’s jump into it.

Gameplay flow is smooth, my friends

The games are still too short and can quickly become one-sided, I think, but the overall flow of the game works. Players get what they’re supposed to do quickly and move through the phases of their turn. It’s excellent.

Math, then math, then math once more

One thing that’s not so great is that during your turn, you’ve always got to work through, from left to right, each row of your tableau. That means you’ve got to do one row of math (it’s simple math, but scary number-fiddlin’ nonetheless), then do some stuff, then repeat that two more times.

During a recent playtest, another designer suggested I work it in such that players are only allowed to activate one row per turn. So they have to choose wisely which stat they boost. I like that idea and I’m going to combine it with some form of action economy. Cue segue.

Action economy!

Both designers gave feedback around slight pacing nitpicks, despite the overall smoothness. Fair. This feedback has been bubbling at the surface for a few playtests, so I’m going to attempt to solve this using the wonderful magic of the ‘action economy.’

It’s simple. During your turn, you’ll have two (maybe 3) actions that you can take. I might allow you to take multiples of the same action. The actions you take can be: buy a card, play a card, activate a row of your tableau, or attack your opponent.

Card UI and ability tweaks

Other discoveries I’ve, uh, discovered are that the Matter cards need to be tweaked, again, and WHEN PLAYED vs WHEN ACTIVATED vs AUGMENT cards need to be clearer. Mainly the AUGMENT bit, which attaches to another card to amplify it. This is something simple I can solve with different looking ability text borders, symbols, or some other easy graphical element.

On the Matter cards, this is also an easy solve. People don’t like having to discard a card from their hand or tableau in order to play a card that has a high base numeric stat. I think that makes sense, so I’m likely going to just remove that restriction and make these cards have no ability, only the cold embrace of math.

Okay, that’s all I’ve got on “Psychic Battles” for now. Time to tweak and get this thing to the table again. Until next time, humanoids!