A few months ago, I dusted off my Riders of the Pony Express prototype. It went over really well with my current playtest group, which is always nice to see -- they don't love every game, and it makes me feel bad forcing them to play the ones they don't enjoy enough to "finish" them.
I played RotPE a couple more times lately, and tried the changes I listed in my last post:
1. Increase value of Bears from +2 to +3. I wanted to make the Bears more different from the Bandits (which are +2), and I wanted to make the Shotgun item better... a shotgun can be discarded to remove a bear or bandit from the board, but that's really not worth using ever. This change to +3 accomplished both of those goals, though the shotgun STILL wasn't good enough. Yesterday I tried an improved version of the shotgun: ONCE PER ROUND you can "kill" (turn face down) a Bandit or a Bear. This way you can use it twice, for 2-3 each time, which is a little better - maybe worthwhile. But I'm considering not even having that limit (after all, removing the tile helps other players too!)
2. Deal mandatory parcels face up instead of face down, they don't use up inventory slots. This change seemed good, and simplifies the rules quite a bit. Along with this change, I reduced the max inventory back down to 4 items. Of course, this means you must deliver it before the end of the round.
3. Instead of random parcels for rounds 2 and 3, let players draft from a face up supply of N+1 parcels when they arrive back at the post office. This worked well. It might be a little awkward to have to deal more cads out when you're done auctioning cards for the turn -- maybe better is to deal them at the same time you deal he cards to auction (put the auction cards on one side of the board and the new parcels on the other side)? Anyway, it seemed like a good change.
4. Movement change: Move from town to hazard, or hazard to town... This was proposed by Hoss because he did not feel like it made sense the way I was doing it (move from town to hazard, and on your next turn, finish moving into the town you were heading towards). However, we found hazard-town-hazard to be sort of tedious, and didn't like how that felt. As a compromise, we went back to what I had, but explained it a little differently: you move from town to town, but you ACT at the BEGINNING of your turn, not as you arrive in a town. So you move to the next town, paying whatever cost (by moving your time marker). Then next turn you deliver (if you have anything, costs 1 time), buy an item (if you want, costs 1 time), and then move to the next town (costs some amount based on route, hazard tile, and items you have). This format worked well, and I think it communicated better also.
In addition to those changes, one of my players had a good suggestion: the time track started out going down $1 per space, then later along the track it went 2 spaces per $ drop, and eventually 3 spaces. Aaron pointed out that that felt backwards... once you're already spending a lot of time, spending even more time didn't really cost you anything. So I reversed that... now at the beginning of the track you move several spaces before your reward drops, but farther along the track you lose $1 per space, and near the very end of the track you actually lose $2 per space! I also added a dead stop at the end of the track -- if you hit that, then your delivery phase is automatically over, and you lose $10 for each undelivered parcel. Those changes have all helped combat dynamics I didn't like in the game, and they work toward making sure players care how much they bid for things.
As I mentioned above, I beefed up the shotgun item, which is a definite improvement (side note, it combos with Spurs now, since you can remove the hazard AND then get your spurs discount). In addition, I tried changing the maps to say "ignore the hazard tile when moving to town X" rather than a discount of 2. This made the maps a little more variable, potentially more attractive (at least in some cases), and reduced some of the match involved in calculating your route. As it turns out, this makes maps better for Mountains (+5) and Bears (+3), the same for Banidts (+2) and Lost! (+2), and worse for Snakes (+1) and Rivers (+1). At first I didn't like that (I fear the maps are already not good enough), but you CAN discard them to any Lost! tile, and players seem to think they're worth getting, so maybe they're fine. I think I'll try the "ignore hazard" rule again to see if I want to keep it.
Similarly, Compass should say "ignore Lost! tiles" to help minimize the arithmetic in the game.
Finally, one of the worst parts of the game is the fiddly setup -- drawing a million square tiles and placing them on the board, then removing the tumbleweeds and snakes. Then in week 2, adding more tiles, only to remove tumbleweeds again, etc. I'm looking for a way to do bigger tiles that each cover several hazard spaces, so that setup can be simpler but the map board could still be somewhat variable with respect to where the mountains, rivers, and Lost! tiles are.
It would be cool to make the map not look like a schematic/grid as well!
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