Hey there Card Folk! In today’s Dev Log, I want to talk about the Stegosaurus elements of the game. They’ve been pretty tricky to get right, and I want to share the process.
The Stegos being movable obstructions that both players and Putin could interact with was another very early idea from “Torch”. It was one that I really liked and so did our art director Aneta (@LadyAnimeNet). I love the little hats she gave them!
From a gameplay standpoint, getting the Stegos to feel right has been a challenge. They need to be intractable, but still hinder player mobility. Putin needs to be able to move them too, but in a way that’s easy to understand and won’t result in the dreaded “legal phase”.
To begin, let’s talk about the Putin side of the equation. Initially, Putin could move through his Stegos and only had one card that interacted with them, “Fearless Leader”.
This initial set up wasn’t very good. Putin was far too mobile and was hard to corner. In addition, it felt like the Stegos didn’t do a great job of protecting Putin when he would just waltz away from them at the drop of a hat. Also, the lack of interactivity with the Stegos meant that more often than not, those game pieces wouldn’t do anything to impact the game.
To try and solve this, we then made it so that Putin couldn’t move through his Stegos, but sadly this brought in new issues. A single instance of “Fearless Leader” would make it so that Putin would totally freeze in place, unable to move. This removed one of the core things that makes the game fun, Putin’s random movement. So, it was even worse.
In the end, I think we found a compromise. Putin’s North, South, East, and West movement cards can now hop over Stegos, but the rest of his movement can’t. This brings in the best of both worlds! I’ll keep you posted on how this version turns out with more playtesting, but so far results are positive.
As for players, I put in options to allow for players to move the Stegos around. However, most of those options were not strong enough to be impactful. Most of them would only move a Stego and not a dinosaur. This left the cards feeling boring and un-fun as the player wasn’t moving THEIR pieces around. This was an easy fix!
As it stands, I am feeling much better about how the Stegos play into the game and so are the testers. I’ll keep you posted if anything more changes about this element of the game.
If you want to follow the game’s development and release, please check out our kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1557798155/eat-putin-comedic-board-game