So, I had a rather unpleasant discovery lately.

I've taken to checking the BoardGameGeek website occasionally, making sure that my game's name remained available. Sure, there are other games out there named Nebula. There's an old game from 40+ years ago simply named "Nebula", but I wasn't worried about that. For recent games, I see "Nebula Rush", "Via Nebula", "Eclipse: Nebula", "Nebula's War"...  any many others. But those are pretty much just older games, expansions, games that never really got any distribution, or games that were different enough that I wasn't worried about any confusion. (Via Nebula is the only one that I had even heard of, and the theme of that game is so different from mine that I figured there's no way there could be any confusion.)

And then, it happened. I searched BGG again a few weeks ago, just after I got back from Atlanta, and there it was. There's a game simply called "Nebula" coming out in 2023. While the description is light on the details, what little I could find makes it seem like that game has just barely enough in common that one could possibly be mistaken for the other, at least at first glance. And that's what I can't have. Sure my game would have been named "Nebula: Pull & Write", but in a way that might even be worse, as my game could be mistaken for a roll and write version of the other one.

No good.

So, I guess I'm on a quest now for a new name.

Problem is, I'm *terrible* with names. It took me forever to settle on the name and final theme for Manaforge. And I guess I'm stuck jumping through that hoop again here, trying various permutations of scape or sci-fi themed names and making minor tweaks to my game's theme to make it match up. Ugh.

At least I can be a little liberal with my game's theme. Space and sci-fi? Definitely. Stuck on a damaged spaceship? Yes, I've put too much work into the 'ship' layouts and graphical design to back out now. Repairing using random raw materials? Check, that fits the game's mechanics. Floating in a Nebula? Eh...  there's some room for change there. So it seems like the setting could be different.

• Stuck in the gravitational pull of a black hole? Good tension there.
• Drifting close to a star that's about to go supernova? That works too.
• Surrounded by an asteroid field? That plays into the 'random resources' mechanic of the game very well.
• In the middle of what was a space battlefield? Also plays into the random resources idea, lots of good bits to salvage from your surroundings.

Void Drift. Shattered Space. Dying Star. Cosmic Salvage. Stellar Ruin. Lightspeed Wreck. Lots of ways to throw words together, but none of them have really clicked for me so far.

But then, I guess I was pretty set on what I had. Gonna take me a bit to change course (ha!) on that.

Is there anyone out there that's good at names? I could use some more ideas. :)

We have returned home safely from our trip to Atlanta. ProtoATL was an amazing convention! I'm happy that we got to reconnect with old friends, meet new people, make new contacts, and of course play lots of games. I got to try out a lot of other designers' prototypes while I was there, and while some were definitely better than others, the point is that I was able to offer feedback that could hopefully make their games better.

Of course, Nebula got played too. I managed to get in 7 playtests of Nebula while I was there. I'd like to think the game went over well; I had many players compliment the game when they were done playing, and I even had a couple of players approach me days afterwards to tell me that Nebula was one of their favorite games of the con. Success!

Of course, Nebula was not without flaws. I had to make an on-the-fly rule change to the game's goals, as that mechanic was confusing players. This will end up being an overhaul of a relatively small mechanic, so hopefully I can make it better and easier to understand this time. I also received a ton of suggestions for visual improvements to the game, which I passed along to my graphic designer; hopefully we can settle on the game's look and feel and get all of the visual confusion ironed out in the process.

I'm still crunching through all of the feedback I received on Nebula. Working on making a list of what changes I'm going to make next.

​Oh, and I'm suffering from con crud now. Yuck. Hopefully I'll be well again soon. Lots of work left to do on this.

Quick post this time.

We're currently gearing up for a game prototype convention at the end of this month. It's called ProtoATL, and it's located in Atlanta, Georgia. We've been to one of these before, and it's totally worth it. Lots of other designers, playtesters, and publishers all gathered in one place. Great opportunity to get lots of crunchy feedback on Nebula, meet new people, and develop lots of useful contacts. While it's most useful for designers looking to get their games signed by publishers, there is something useful for everyone there.

I'm currently busy prepping my game for the convention. Making some last minute game tweaks, printing out promo materials, making sure I have enough spare supplies in case I need to make changes while I'm there, and gathering pads and forms to take notes and get feedback. Not to mention planning our route and food and such.

With some luck, Nebula will come back better than it is now. Or, at least, I will have ideas for improving it. (I'm not really sure what would constitute an improvement; I'd like to think the game is pretty well off as it is. But I know it's not perfect.)

​Game on!

Happy 2023 everyone!

Only a week in and it's been an interesting year so far. I've been stuck on a problem with Nebula for a little while now and I think I might have solved it. The current issue I'm seeing concerns the game's balance. This problem is manifesting in two ways.

The first problem came to light when I noticed that the final scores when playing the game are too high. Now, normally that wouldn't be much of a problem; just adjust my expectations of what a 'good' score should be. However, the underlying problem was that it was possible to make too much progress in the game. The players should never feel like they've accomplished everything there is to do. Finishing all of the objectives should be something you just barely accomplish with no resources to spare. Completely filling the ship tracks should be limited to just one track, not two or more. Filling up more that one tech ladder shouldn't be possible (unless you're playing the blue power, which specializes in gaining tech points). But playtesting the game I noticed that any and all of these would happen frequently.

The culprit there was due to power creep. Without realizing it, I had been slowly increasing the amount of resources available to the player. I added in the objectives, which necessitated adding in rewards for completing those objectives. I tweaked a couple of the tech powers, so that it's not possible to get a power that is completely worthless, but in doing so made them stronger. (A couple of the income powers were like that, if you got them on the last round when income would not trigger again; I changed that so you always get something, even if it's small.) But for each of these tweaks, the players would get a little resource boost. And those boosts added up. The solution was to go through the ship tracks and remove some of the extra resources there.

The second problem is that the ships are not consistent with each other with respect to how powerful they are. Sure, the various ship layouts will never be the same. Some are large, some are small. Some are easy, some are more difficult. But all of them should have roughly the same amount of potential for progress. And I'm not quite seeing that. Playing a few games on each layout and averaging them together, I noticed that a couple of the ships consistently scored higher than the others, and one scored consistently lower. And not by a small margin...  we're talking +/-10 points, where the range of 'good' scores I'm targeting for Nebula is around 60 to 70 points. If the difference were just a couple of points I probably wouldn't worry about it, but a ship layout automatically adding 10 to your total is an unacceptable imbalance.

I'm still working on correcting this. I've been focused on the Kraken ship (shown above) so far, as it tended to underperform, but I will be addressing the other ships soon. The Rhox and Xyxzx ships, in particular, seem to have higher than average scores. It might just be a matter of removing some of the candies from the board (looking at you Rhox), or reducing point values or icons in various spots (you're next Xyxzx), but regardless of the actual tweak needed I anticipate a lot more playtest-fix-repeat cycles before I'm done.

Now, I'm very aware that 'balance' is a rather nebulous (ha!) concept when it comes to board games. Many games have certain cards, player powers, strategies, etc. that are known to be weaker or stronger than the others. And while a small amount of imbalance might be unnoticeable or at least ignorable, when an imbalance gets so bad that 'everyone' knows about it, I feel that that detracts from the fun of the game. I'm trying to avoid that, a gross imbalance problem.

And that requires a lot of playtesting. I think over the past few weeks I must've played Nebula solo 50 times. And I'm sure I will need many more tests before I am done.

The good news is that this level of balance tweaking means that the major mechanics of the game are pretty solid. I'm very much hoping that this is the last of it, and soon I will be able to start moving from polishing Nebula as a game to turning Nebula into a product.

Crowdfunding this year? I would like that a lot! I keep saying to myself every year that this is the year to publish my second game, but this time it feels like that might actually be in reach. Here's hoping!

Two posts in a week? What's the world coming to? :)

This is an idea that came out of a recent online playtest I did. One of the players commented that the objective system I had before, where certain colors of ship sections would get boosts to their victory points, felt like a wasted opportunity. As in, while the objectives before accomplished the purpose of giving the player some sort of direction at the beginning of the game, there wasn't actually all that much incentive there; under some circumstances the players could simply ignore the point value of the objectives and just pursue whatever scores them the most on the map.

Now, in way that makes sense. I originally designed the objectives to be simple to understand, and to provide the players with a nudge in a particular direction, one that they could ignore if the so chose. But, after thinking it over a lot, I realize that the player had a point; there was an opportunity to do something more interesting.

And so, here is the result.

There are two parts to this new mechanic. The four colored boxes on the left correspond to the ship section colors. The number of checks in each box denotes the number of ship sections of that color that the game wants you to repair. Each time you repair a section of one of those colors, you are considered to have 'scored' an objective, up to the number of checkmarks on that color.

For each objective you score, you gain a mark on the track on the right side. This has two effects: this gives you victory points at the end of the game (listed below the track), and unlocks the ability buttons in the gold area below. Each padlock gives you the ability to use one of the buttons, but the buttons are not in any order; each padlock lets you use any one of the three buttons, still subject to the rule that you can't press a button more than once. (So with three padlocks checked off, you can use all three abilities one time each, but you pick the order in which you use them.)

I haven't played this version with playtesters yet, but I have played it solo many times. This new version is significantly more challenging. Since you know how many of each color of section you're going for, it really forces you to plan out your possible routes through the ship at the start of the game. Of course, the colors of cubes you draw from the bag don't always align with what you need, so there's also the puzzle of trying to figure out how to accomplish your objectives with the resources you have. I think this take on it requires more strategic planning for the players.

Once big drawback is that I'm having trouble actually describing how the mechanic works to other people. And one of the rules I've heard about game design is that if you can't properly explain a mechanic to the players, then it shouldn't be in your game. (If you understood the paragraph above that describes how many of what section colors you should repair, then congratulations! It doesn't seem like everyone gets it on the first try.) I hope it's just a matter of finding the right wording and sticking to it, but I think that will take some work and maybe a little bit of luck.

Regardless, I'm happy with this new direction for the game. The points need balancing, and the abilities might change a little, but overall I think it's an improvement.

Quick blog post, just to show off...

Introducing the newest ship design, straight out of the shipyards, the Kraken!

Playing with some new ideas for making a ship unique. The special mechanic for this ship is that it has 'airlock' spaces at the edges of the ship that let you jump from any airlock to any other. And they are conveniently placed near the ship sections, the most important areas on the ship to repair. However, they do cost energy to use, so they're not exactly free. They are still faster and easier than having to make your way across the map normally.

I'm also playing with the ship layout, placing ship spaces slightly off the standard grid to help sell the 'squid' appearance of the ship. (No additional mechanics needed, purely aesthetic.) If this works well then I might consider trying to apply this concept to other ships.

The point balance feel a bit off for this, but that's pretty typical for a new ship. It'll get ironed out with playtesting.

Who wants seafood? :)

Wow, it's been a looooong time since I posted. I guess I just got out of the habit of it, what with everything that's been going on. And it has been a very eventful year. New job, family issues, health issues, and tons of distractions. The amount of time and energy I've put into designing has suffered quite a bit.

But I haven't actually stopped designing. Slowed, definitely, but not stopped. Nebula wants to be made, and that I occasionally get pings from various people asking me about the status of the game just proves that. This is what I've been up to all this time:

• The idea of a tech 'tree' really took off. I went through a bunch of iterations of it, trying out various layouts, adjusting the amount of complexity, seeing if I could make it more interesting and appealing. And you know what I learned? Simpler is better. While adding a tech tree was the correct solution to bring together all of the various disconnected elements of the game, it also shouldn't overshadow the main point of the game, which is repair ship -> get stuff. The most successful iteration of the tech tree so far is where I pared it down to just three independent lanes, shown above. No track prerequisites or unlocks.
• The number of currencies in the game jumping from two up to four was not a positive change. Originally I had cubes and energy, and then I added command points and tech points specifically for interacting with the tech tree. (Tech points gave you new abilities, and command points determined how often you could use those abilities). Yeah... no. Keep it simple, stupid. So, command points went out the window. And, while tech points are still there, there is no more hoarding of them, no more counter you slide around to track how much you have. Tech points now must be applied as soon as you get them, just like any other track icon. (The only difference is that you can choose which track to put them towards.) Instead of command points, the tech tracks now have single-use 'buttons' that you can 'press' (by crossing them off) to activate their abilities. Much less fiddly.
• To add more variety to multiple playthroughs of the game, I felt it necessary to add three additional variables. First, each player gets a couple of free tech points on one of the tracks. Second, each player gets one 'skill', which is a once-per-round ability mechanically similar to the single use abilities on the tech tree. There are four such skills in the game. And third, there are now 'objectives', which basically make ship sections of a particular color or colors more valuable; these bonuses apply equally to all players. All three of these variables are randomized at the beginning of the game in a pre-game 'round', where players draw three random cubes from the bag and must decide which cube to apply to which variable.
• The main sheet is now separated into two halves. This accomplishes two things: it allows me to print the ship layouts separately from the tracks (less redundancy on the sheets), and it establishes a 'standard' size of the sheets in the game. By doing so, I was also able to squeeze the tech tree onto a sheet of the same size. So, three sheets, all the same size, equals three pads of sheets all the same size in the final product. The box might end up a little taller than expected for a game of this type, but what it gains in height it easily sheds in width and length. The overall volume of the shipped box should be quite a bit smaller when I'm done.
• Even though they might look similar, the ship layouts have been completely rebuilt. I realized that some of the creative limitations I had been placing on my ship designs were unnecessary when I made one ship that broke the mold, so to speak. (The Aaraka ship is short, extremely wide, and utterly flat; no crawlspaces at all.) With that boost in design space, I went back and rebuilt two of the older ships, and I'm currently taking a close look at the others to try to decide if I should rebuild them as well with some new ideas or just scrap them entirely and try something else.
• I'm at the point where the game's mechanics are stable enough that I'm starting to incorporate rule guides in the components. The ship tracks sheet calls out the four phases of each turn. The energy tracker has a small symbol guide built into it. Ships that have a unique mechanic now have a callout stating what the mechanic does, rather than forcing the players to read the rulebook for each special rule I build into the ship layouts. Even something as simple as the single-use buttons, with the mechanic that you must cross out the ability to use it, which gives an immediate visual cue that you can't use it again. I'm currently on the lookout for other ways in which the game can help you play it, because I know that it's not a simple game. (The mechanics individually aren't particularly difficult, but there are a lot of them to keep track of.)

And that's just the major stuff I can think of right now. I've made a bunch of other little tweaks and balance changes, and I'm sure I'll make a lot more before I'm done. But overall, Nebula is in great shape.

The only problem right now is that I'm in a bit of a lull. Since the mechanics are solid, the next step is to get in a lot more playtests, see if I can tease out any remaining balance issues. I know I'll never get the balance perfect, but I'm trying to at least expose any large problems. As of right now, I think the various ship layouts might not be balanced against each other. For example, I've noticed the Terran ship often scores pretty high, but I don't know if that's a consequence of the point values being too high, or the ship being too easy to play well, or maybe just dumb luck. (It is still a random and write game, after all.) My day job has been pretty draining lately and it makes it difficult to muster up the energy I need to do playtesting in the evenings or on the weekend. Still, I'll get there eventually.

And, I'm also hoping I'll find the energy to keep doing these posts. Ten months is an unacceptably long time to go between status updates. :)

Welp. It happened again.

Another idea hit me. This time it was the fault of another designer. I was at an in-person playtest a month back, and some of the feedback I got after a playthrough of Nebula was something along the lines of 'have you tried doing a tech tree?'.

.
.
.
Click.

No, I hadn't considered that. And now I'm wondering how I didn't think of it. The idea resonated with Nebula on so many levels, both mechanically and thematically. (I mean, a spaceship is just a big ball of technology, right?) The idea just fit so well that I had to so something with it.

After that session was over, I went home feeling like my head was going to explode from all the possibilities. Once home, I sat in front of my computer and started ripping a lot of the game out. Every mechanic that had always felt out of place or bolted on was fair game. Upgrade and goal tiles? Gone! Auto-repair bonuses? Bye! Tile storage? Don't need it anymore! Unlocks? Nope! Special ability tracks? Deleted! Color prisms? Poof! Generators? Scrapyard! Repair bots? Recycled!

What took the place of all of that? Tech tree time! Well, okay, maybe not a tree, exactly. I did some research on games that have a so-called 'tech tree' component to them. What I noticed is that the majority of games actually have tech tracks. It's a small but subtle difference. Mostly, tracks don't branch. Or merge. Sure, you don't have as many choices. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In games that have a complicated tech tree, the tree can often become the main focus of the player's attention. (You want a full-blown tech tree? Look up a game called 'Progress: Evolution of Technology' sometime.) While I do need a place to put all of the mechanics I removed, this new component shouldn't overshadow the rest of the game.

So, tech tracks then. One or more of these tracks, and you move forward (up, down, whatever) on them in response to something, and each step you go gives you resources or abilities. Huh, that sounds awfully familiar. Not like my ship sheet already has tracks...  ohwaitamin...

Well, whichever. So my game has even more tracks now. Any place where you gained tiles before (and lots of places where you didn't!), you gain tech points now, which you can spend to move up on these tracks. A few of the upgrade abilities made it into the tech tracks, renamed as command abilities. (Yup you're ordering your ship to do stuff now.) Since previously, each upgrade tile could be used once per turn, I needed some way to similarly limit the abilities that you get now, so now you have command points, which are required to activate the command abilities. Similarly, goal tiles, which gave end-game points, are now sitting at the tops of the tech tracks; you have to finish the track to get the extra points. And, of course, since we have the two new currencies (tech point and command points), we now have two new slide trackers (just like the one for energy) for tracking how much of each you have.

And, just in case you're curious, generators are gone, but repair-bots are still there. They aren't called that, of course, but the 'repair any space anywhere' ability is available in the game as a command ability. Yay!

"Coming soon: Tracks, the game!" Meh. The tech sheet is just another sheet of paper that you will need to play the game (alongside of the other two, the ship sheet and the ship tracks sheet), so it's not a huge component change, it just takes up a lot more table space now.

But, ya know, after some playtests (actually, a lot of playtests), I have concluded that...
<drum roll>
...the game actually works! It's odd, but when I play this game solo now, I actually feel a little enthusiastic about it. (Yeah...  I've been working on this thing for almost two years now. It makes sense that my interest in it has waned a little. But this change has restored some of that.) And when I show it to other players, I'm getting mostly positive feedback about the changes. Even putting it in front of board gamers that are not typically playtesters (and definitely not designers!), I still get positive feedback. This is a good sign! Of course, everyone has some ideas on how the game can be improved, which is fine; this is still an early iteration and I'm certain it's not at its best yet. But just the fact that most everyone that plays it seems to like it, and that players are eager to suggest ways to make it better is encouraging. And that's something I need in order to have the energy to keep working on it.

More playtests incoming! The tracks need balancing, and there is a possibility that I might be able to do a branching structure while keeping it simple. We'll see. But at least I'm still making progress. :)

Oh, and I still want to do public playtesting at some point. Seems like that might be a little farther off than I wanted. Sigh.

Still here. Still chugging away on Nebula. Progress has been a lot slower lately, mostly because my goal hasn't been as clear.

Playtesting

I'm still firmly committed to get Nebula out there as a published game, it's the route to get there that I'm questioning. My plan was, once I got the core mechanics of the game solidified (which I have done), that I would host a large playtest, the purpose of which would be to help flush out any balance issues in the game. (I'm fairly certain there must be some, as the game has a large amount of variables within and between the various layouts; I severely doubt I got everything perfectly right the first try.)

However, I've been informed (by designers more experienced than me) that this may not be the best route, that the data from a large playtest would be better directed towards graphical and playability concerns. This is rather disappointing, as I wanted to button up as much as possible mechanically before I start forking out money for art and graphic design, but it doesn't seem like I'm going to get my wish.

I have started addressing visual concerns, at least what I can do on my own. I'm attempting to make the game look a little more like what I hope the final product will be, addressing visual elements and giving the game more table presence. I'm also still trying to nail down the game balance, searching for corner cases that might 'break' the game or make it not fun.

Still, it feels like I've lost my way a little bit. I'm still doing playtesting, still fixing problems, still making progress. Just seems like there's a little less wind in my sails right now. 

Streaming

In other news, I've started experimenting with streaming! I frequent a lot of Twitch channels, for both gaming and music, and I've had a couple of people recommend that I start a stream myself. Now, I'm not really sure what I could stream that would be interesting for other people, but just on a whim I tried doing a stream of me playing Manaforge solo. It worked...  reasonably well? I didn't have my camera or mic set up, and I didn't advertise or anything, so I wasn't really expecting any sort of turnout. Still, I had a couple of people drop in, and even chatted with one person for a bit. So... success? Definitely went better than I thought it would.

So, not sure if I'm going to make a regular thing out of it. I know audiences like consistent schedules. Perhaps next time I'll hook up my mic. Not sure if I want to be on camera or not...  the way I figure it, nobody really wants to look at me. Maybe I'll try doing the vtuber thing...



And that's where I'm at right now. I know it's not much for not having posted in a couple of months, but I am still here chugging away. Hopefully I'll have more to report on the streaming front, as it seems like there could possibly be some interest in 'preview' streams of me playing through the prototype versions of Nebula. Or maybe I'll make a thing about streaming plays of other (indie?) games on TTS. Ideas are welcome, of course...  check the About tab of this site if you'd like to suggest something.

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - wholeheartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings."

- Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

​Welp...  it finally happened. This post makes me a little sad, but I know that sometimes these things are necessary to facilitate the progress of a design.

For a while now, I'm been struggling to incorporate some sort of player interaction into my game. I know that Nebula is pretty low on the player interaction scale; it wasn't really meant to have much. Players put so much effort into solving the puzzle on their own boards that there isn't really much mental space left for interference by other players. However, I wanted there to at least be something.

For a while, I was trying to incorporate interaction in using the game's Goal tiles. I wanted players to pay attention to what the other players are doing, and have to make the decision as to which victory point routes they can obtain versus which they have to let other players have. I got a lot of complaints that paying attention to other player's boards is too much to do when you're already concentrating on your own. So, that idea went away.

The other mechanic that has been in the game for a while is a player-interactive version of distributing resources. This resource 'draft' took many forms over the various versions, but ultimately it boiled down to working with other players to determine who gets which colored cubes. This took many forms over various iterations. For a while, I had a modified draft system, where players would pull cubes and then take cubes from each of their neighbors. I tried a cube 'market', where players could spend Energy to buy groups of cubes, with the price depending on where in the order they were. I even tried the most basic form of draft, a simple pick-and-pass.

But, through all of these, I was constantly getting complaints about the cube draft phase. The most common one was that the cube draft, as a mechanic, was not worth the physical and mental effort required to execute it. Being able to choose which three cubes you get at the start of the turn was not a meaningful decision when you're getting another ten to fifteen cubes over the course of the turn. Also, distributing cubes in this way felt like an obtrusive break in the game's flow; everyone had to stop what they were doing to deal with this part of the game.

So, after many bits of feedback telling me that this wasn't working, it eventually sunk in that it wasn't worth trying to force it. With that hanging over me, I ended up removing the entire game phase. This makes me sad, as it's basically the last bit of player interaction in the game. (Sure, there's passing the bag of cubes around the table, and looking at what cubes other players have to try to guess what's left in the bag, but that's pretty minor.)

I've heard the 'don't be afraid to kill your darlings' advice many times. The original quote pertained to writing, but the idea applies equally well to game design. However, I never thought that it would apply to me like this. Sure, I've removed mechanics from the games I've worked on plenty of times. But this one was so ingrained into the game that it didn't even occur to me until this point that it was something I could possibly remove. It took many playtesters doing the verbal equivalent of beating me over the head with it until it finally sunk in.

With that change implemented, I tried playing the game solo a couple of times, just to see how to see how the new flow works. The game felt a little faster, but I got the odd feeling that something was missing without that phase. I assume that, because the cube draft was part of the game for so long, that I was just not used to the new game flow yet. So, I left it to the playtesters to decide if the change was positive.

Wow! Dramatic difference.

So far, I've run four playtests with the phase removed. A couple of players (especially ones that had played before) commented that the game basically felt like multiplayer solitaire with the draft gone. However, that didn't stop them from enjoying the game. A lot, actually. Players new to the game also enjoyed the game quite a bit, and didn't seem to mind the lack of player interaction.

Two very interesting things happened from this change:

• The time it takes to play Nebula dropped noticeably. Whereas before it would take 45 minutes to an hour to play, now it's more like 30 to 45 minutes. Very strange, though...  the draft might typically take a minute, and it occurred seven times during the game, so I have no idea why removing it would reduce the game time by 15 minutes.
• The general feel of the feedback I received from players changed quite a bit. Before this change, players would complain about the game's mechanisms; of course this includes the cube draft, but also stuff like wanting different rewards from the board, the balance of some of the tracks, and how powerful Energy should be. Now, the feedback I'm getting is more about minor concerns: the arrangement of information on the board, the game's iconography, some of the board colors, and of course, suggestions about how to add player interaction. My only guess as to why the tone of the feedback changed is that players are enjoying the game more, and so are more prone to overlooking the game's mechanical glitches? Don't know.

But, regardless of anything else, there's no question that removing the draft was a positive change. Even if it is a mechanic that has been in the game a long time and that hurt to remove. Anything to make the game better.

Now let's just hope I don't have to cut out anything else important. :)