Mutant Pizza

Hi friends (and enemies);

Psychic Battles is broken! Woe is me? Nah. It’s fine. This two-player tableau building showdown is broken in that good way, the way where it was explicitly stress-tested to find the faults. Now that these cracks have been identified, it’s time to fill them with gold! In other words: it’s time to fix the problems in this game so it plays better. (Also, good job for anyone who got my kintsugi reference. You deserve a shattered star repaired with gold.)

I was able to get Psychic Battle to a table at my local board game hall, here’s a concise bulleted list of issues for those tl;dr-minded folks:

• Discarding cards at the beginning of the match for early balance, only for someone to be able to recover those broken cards, essentially for free, is too powerful
• Stealing cards and forcing others to discard cards they just played to their Order (their tableau) can put folks at a massive disadvantage, where it’s difficult for them to catch up
• The “take two actions” economy needs some tweaking; it’s too powerful to be able to raise your attack power twice during one turn, then a third time on the subsequent turn
• People didn’t want to boost their health, opting to focus heavily on damage and somewhat on energy for buying cards

That might sound like a lot of imbalance, but those are easy fixes, my friends. Let me tell you just how easy it is to fix those things with an eloquently-worded-but-never-proofread subsection below.

How to kintsugi up this bad boy

Psychic Battles is a card-driven game. What that means is the overall rules are simple and the abilities/powers that make up the game are in the cards themselves. You buy and play cards to your tableau to boost Energy (for buying cards), Attack (for slapping your enemy), and Health (for staying alive) stats. But the cards also grant you cool powers like stealing cards from your opponent or recovering cards from the discard.

A lot of these powers simply need to be given harsher restrictions or come with a better cost. Maybe only low cost cards can be recovered from the discard, or maybe a player has to pay energy to use that particular power once it’s activated in their Current. One possible fix is to make the “recover from the discard” power something that only expensive cards have. I have a few ideas to test.

Two/Too many actions?

In Psychic Battles, there’s a list of simple actions, such as buying a card, playing a card, or activating a Current (row) in your Order, and you can take two actions, or one action twice.

Well that’s just too much power to possess on a single turn. Like I said up there somewhere, someone can activate their Current twice, such as their Mind — or attack — Current, then activated it a third time on their following turn; only to attack with a massive amount of damage that can’t be mitigated.

Instead, I’m going to switch to something that limits the amount of times you can raise your attack power. I’ve got a few ideas, but the simplest to implement is limiting activating a Current to a once per turn action and coupling that with a rule that prevents players from activating the same Current two turns in a row.

Tangent: One of the designers who playtested the game metagamed the ever-loving shit out of it, opting to request to go first or second based on the cards they had in their hand. It was hilarious, although I almost felt bad for their opponent. Almost.

Whoa, I’ve never put a border around text in my design journals before. Look at me, I’m growing. Anyway, I’ll be tweaking and testing the action economy until something feels right. This is mostly about the tempo of the game. I want this game to be on the faster side and reward aggression, but also have interesting defense and catch-up options for those who need them.

No one wants to be healthy

Players only wanted to try and boost their health when it was too late, opting to sink most of their efforts into boosting attack and some into getting more energy to buy cards. I need to incentivize and encourage players to want to plan ahead a bit more and to make attacking with high damage values not so easy or strategic.

Ultimately, I want each Current: Mind, Body, and Soul, to operate differently. Right now, all three act as simple number-goes-up when that Current is activated types of systems. I want boosting Energy, Attack, and Health to look and feel different when the Current is activated and when the value from that Current is used. For example, what if Mind wasn’t about pushing to get the highest value, then draining all attack power to do max damage. What if it was more about gaining a certain value to increase an attack level instead, sort of like increasing a “strength” stat when leveling up in an RPG. OR — what if the attacking player was required to attack with 30 Mind, and anything over that didn’t matter, and Body wasn’t an overall HP number but “pips” or “wounds.” So if you attack with 50 Mind, your opponent takes 1 wound (as opposed to taking 50 damage). Then the game becomes more about whether you want to sink cards into “leveling up” your attack or doing something else.

Body can work in a similar way, possibly, with gaining more “wound slots” or something to that nature so you can take more hits. This is a way to rationalize high values down as well so folks don’t have to do so much math — even though the math isn’t really a problem anymore for players to calculate during play. It’s more about having to say 50 minus 30 being a tad anticlimactic versus saying “you take one wound” of damage.

I’ve also been toying with the idea that the amount of cards in your Body determines the amount of cards you’re allowed to have in your other two Currents, which would be an easy way to get people to use it and may feel rewarding, giving folks the need to expand their Order and introducing another challenge. On the other hand, it could feel annoying to have to sink cards into Body just to have the ability to put them in your other two Currents. I’ll see how it goes!

All right, that’s all I’ve got on Psychic Battles for now. Time to tweak and test and tweak and test and tweak and — you guessed it: test.