Kentucky With Friends

My old gaming group from the midwest has been doing an annual “week of gaming” for the past couple years. This year, we meet up in Kentucky. I brought a couple prototypes with me and we tried it out, this being one of them. Some of my friends were people I used to play Magic with long ago, so I knew they enjoyed these sorts of card games.

One significant change to the gameplay is that instead of having a single group of five cards representing your whole presentation to the duel, you had five PILES of cards (a few in each) and these piles represented five different guard positions (high, low, etc).

Another one was that the “weapon” type was eliminated. Musashi unambiguously considers the longsword to be the superior weapon for melee fighting, particularly in a duel. Since this game is meant to be “a dueling game based on Book of Five Rings”, I realized it didn’t really make sense to have any other weapons as primary options.

The problem we noticed in earlier playtests was that there was just a lot of chaff (cards that were set aside and not really used) which made the choices during the dueling phase feel a lot less meaningful.

There still continues to be the problem with information overload – every card having essentially 3 modalities, AND having no repeats, means there’s always a ton of text to review anytime you see a card. This was overwhelming, even for me, as the designer, when playing it.

It’s a lot.

My friends had some good feedback about ways to make interactions more meaningful and to improve pacing.

One bit of feedback that I found particularly poignant:

The cards need to go away faster

One of the foundational thematic aspects is that I didn’t to have health or hit points – I didn’t a situation where the goal was to reduce your opponent to zero of a resource. But I am ok with the idea of attrition, that you are spending resources to try and defeat your opponent – this felt good.

So conceptually, we settled on “the attacker has to play a card from their hand, for its element value, to initiate an attack”. This would prevent the situations we had encountered previously where an attacker would just spam a single attack and burn down the opponent. In reality, stamina is a thing, even with superior technique, and eventually an attacker would need to catch their breath.