Let the games begin!

Today we conducted our first playtest! For this round, we left out buildings and utilities. First, we didn't yet have pieces with which to simulate the toppling of buildings, and not all of the utilities were decided upon. Since combat is such a huge part of the game at this point, we felt it would be wise to jump into playtesting it right off the bat.

This, we found, was a good decision. We found plenty of small issues that would be relatively simple to fix. Chief among them was that there wasn't quite enough anxiety in terms of player death. We fixed this by cutting player health in half. We also came across a few rules that needed more explanation, a few skills we might need to nerf (weaken) - like when someone stacks a ton of movement upgrades and could sprint across the board and never be caught.

Roll off!

We also found out a few things we were doing really well. We all tried to specialize in different areas and make diverse types of mechs to play with. This was easily accomplished, and played well into our individual preferences. Upgrades came at a reasonable pace (except for Phillip who has the worst die rolls known to gamer-kind). And, best of all, the group was laughing and getting excited, and screaming happy screams of pleasant frustration often and loudly enough that we were asked twice to tone it down a bit.

We take this as a good sign.