Playtesters kept avoiding a whole subsystem in my game because the other one was clearer. I took a knife.

[wanderingpine@lemmy.zip]

Follow-up to my earlier post here about Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations a medium-heavy thematic Euro about the Congress of Vienna, the salons-and-gossip side rather than the maps-and-borders side. Still in development.

The game has two main routes to influence: throwing parties, and pursuing political goals. And playtesters kept quietly drifting toward the political one. Not because it was stronger, but because it was easier to understand. That's the kind of signal you can't argue with: if people avoid a whole subsystem, the subsystem is the problem.

The party side had three things wrong with it. Too much luck up front a bad opening draw could make organising a party painfully hard through no fault of your own. An unreadable payoff – you couldn't reasonably estimate how many points a party was worth before committing to it. And death by a thousand exceptions – the attractions, the music, the food each carried their own little pile of special-case rules. Elegant in isolation, chaos on the table.

So this iteration was, honestly, mostly deletion. I unified the three sub-mechanics into one consistent shape, cut the exceptions, and pulled the worst of the luck out of the setup. Same feeling as when I cut my rulebook down a while back. I removed far more than I added.

The honest cliffhanger: it's rebuilt, not yet tested. Playtests start next week, and I don't know whether I've made the party genuinely competitive with the political route, or flattened it into something too safe. Ask me in a while.

Attaching entertainment card design – I am still in wireframe mode, but it is much clearer then the previous iteration.

For the heavier-game players here: when players keep avoiding one part of a game, how do you tell whether it's genuinely broken – or just needs a few more plays to click? I read it as broken this time. Curious where others draw that line.