Another Turn of the Crank

In the previous installment of this series (and you can catch up on the entire series here), I made a few changes to the game, providing for more control for players around their Reserve forces, a boost to the player that's losing, and a change to the end of the game. If you're confused about what this all is about, this post has an increasingly inaccurate summary of the rules, although it's probably close enough to follow along.

For the last set of tests, the big change was going from treating the Reserve as a small deck to an auxiliary hand. After the Battle site has been chosen, setting the size of the Battle and the trump suit, you could go through your Reserve and replace cards in your hand with cards from the Reserve. The very first thing that happened is that I forgot the new rule right away. This is a hazard of game development - you start becoming so familiar with your own rules that you forget how they work, or you blend versions together, or recall old rules. It's a real mess. Anyway, after a restart, I had a go with the visible Reserves and immediately liked the effect. You had a lot more control over how particular hands would go, you could make a decision on when to deploy your good cards in the Reserve, you could decide to make a big push or lay back in a particular battle.

There were a few secondary effects that popped up. First, the ergonomics of it were a little awkward. On one occasion, I got my hand mixed up with my Reserve and ended up getting stuff horribly crossed up. I'm slightly worried about that, but not worried enough to do anything about it. I think it will probably prevent me from making the Reserve very big, but that's probably fine. And it's unclear how much of a problem this will be in practice, since I'm running multiple positions and it's easy to get crossed up and that won't be true of players of the final game. One thing that might help is keeping captured tricks face-up, giving one fewer thing to get confused with. It's something to think about in the future, but not something I'm going to tackle right now.

The second thing that emerged is that there were opportunities to bluff. If the player who picked the Battle doesn't draw from their Reserve, they might have an exceptionally strong hand. They might convince their opponent to over-commit, and burn some of their Reserve unnecessarily. Bluffing as an emergent property of the Reserve is delightful, and I'm very happy that it's popped up.

The final observation is that you might end up with useless cards in your Reserve and never really get to use them. It's not a huge problem, but it can be a bit disheartening to have a 2 in your Reserve (or a couple 2s!), realize that that suit isn't available as trump for the rest of the game, and know that that card is almost certainly worthless. I'm considering giving each player a point for each leftover Reserve card if the game ends on points instead of Routs, which might fix things. I haven't decided if it's necessary or not yet, but it would provide a bit more incentive to manage your Reserve carefully.

Overall, the open Reserves are very neat, add to the decision space, and provide for some fun opportunities to confuse your opponent. Even if your opponent is yourself. Yes, I did successfully bluff myself.

The other two changes were both successful as well. Having the player behind on points pick the next Battle seemed to work pretty well, in that being able to match the choice to what your first two cards are is a small advantage. There's a little bit of a drawback in that you sometimes don't want to play the first lead card, but I might change it so that the person who selects the Battle gets to choose who leads the first trick. It's a little bit of extra complexity, I think, and I'm still trying to decide if it's worth it.

Finally, the "you can't win on a Rout" hasn't come up. But I'm happy with it anyway, as a bit of a Hail Mary thing in the game. On a theoretical basis, it's pleasing. Overall, the game is progressing nicely, and at this point, I think it's time to tackle adding some additional flavor, get some more Napoleonic stuff in there. In particular, I want to evolve the deck from a classic French deck to one with suits for infantry, cavalry, and artillery, and have commanders and scouts mixed in. Creating a custom deck gives tremendous opportunity to really shape how the players interact, and it opens up the next big stage of development. The custom deck for Fox in the Forest is super important to how the game works. I've got my 12-pack of Bicycles ready, and I've got a first draft of the deck, and it's time to give that a whirl. For next time.