Progress with Skirmishing

In the last design blog, I talked about swapping out the straight trick-taking of the previous versions of the game with something adapted from Durak, a trick-taking game popular in Russia based around "bouts" of back-and-forth card play. The new version of Napoleon, Blown Apart would use three suits in a strict arrangement, would have the bout structure of Durak (called "skirmishes"), and would have a flatter distribution of ranks in the deck.

I assembled my new deck and played out a couple of games with the rules, without tinkering, to see how things would go with the new rules. And I'd judge it to be a mixed bag. Some notable things are that the attacker bias seems to be gone. Of the Battles that I played through, roughly half were won by the attacker, which felt pretty good. I was sticking with the Battle chooser being on attack to start, as it felt like a more natural structure for things, but I could set it up so that player chooses attack or defense at some point. Different hands might be better suited to one or the other, and giving the player the choice might be another way to privilege the player that is behind. But that's a piece of complexity I could add later if I think it's necessary.

The second notable thing is that Routs were back. One of my games actually ended with a Rout victory, with one player winning Routs in a 7 and 4 sized Battles to score the win. The previous version basically was impossible to tally a Rout in, and it was nice to have that come back into play.

There were some small things as well. There these extra little bits of drama whenever you drew a card from a Scout that were kind of fun. Fishing through the Reserve to decide what to pull into your hand felt like a significant decision again. The range of Battle sizes seemed pretty reasonable. Overall, things were in decent shape, and the game was interesting again. I was starting to get a little fatigue in my purely solo testing, which will eventually happen. I was going to start losing my ability to judge fun just on my own soon.

There are also some issues to address in this version. The first is that Commanders are a bit of a problem. Their ability to always be played on defense is super powerful, but they're pretty iffy on attack. Sure, you can extend the skirmish, but they mostly didn't help you if you were in trouble and only amounted to improving your opponent's reward for winning the skirmish. In addition, scouts were totally worthless on defense. On attack, they felt good, but on defense, they were absolutely worthless. Both of the special cards would need some work.

But the other major issue with the game is that it felt a little bit static. Most Battles would consist of a big skirmish at the start, pushing back and forth, and whoever won that skirmish would almost certainly win the Battle. There was decent drama in that skirmish, but the rest of it seemed a little bit like an anti-climax. There needed to be a little bit more to things, a bit more of push-and-pull throughout, and a few more tactical choices to the resolution.

So those are the problems to fix: get the commanders and scouts into a place where they're useful in both positions, and get a bit more tactical interest in the game. Scouts seemed to have a clear potential fix, permitting a player to discard a scout on their turn to draw a replacement. It was a weaker version of their ability to help on attack, but it meant they weren't necessarily dead cards. A potential improvement is that you could make them draw-two-keep-one when discarded, which would give them a different utility for the two modes.

Commanders were a little trickier to fix, and perhaps thinking about the static nature of things first would make a fix obvious. One potential change would be to swap the attacker/defender roles during a skirmish. As it stands, when a player trumps to a more powerful suit, the skirmish can't drop back down unless a commander is played. But a possibility would be instead to make the players swap roles when the suit changes. That would actually change how commanders work as well, and you could always shift roles on play of a commander. The ability to seize the initiative in a battle might result in enough dynamic play that it could change how things work. It wasn't clear if I needed to retain the inability to drop back down suits, I'd have to test it both ways.

That, then, is the changes for the new version: attacker/defender roles swap when the suit changes or a commander is played, and scouts can be discarded to draw-two-keep-one during your turn. I'll test this new version and then re-evaluate where things are. Potential things to update in future versions are the composition of the deck, the power of commanders (I'm pretty happy with scouts), the size range of battles, and the attributes of the battle cards. And, of course, there are various numeric parameters to fiddle with when things settle down more. It still feels like the game is making progress, although not as quickly as the early versions.