Talk:Day of the Thing

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Revision as of 16:49, 29 January 2009 by Kevan (talk | contribs) (adding a bit more writeup)
Asher Stuhlman said:

I worry that the Things can become too powerful. If a Thing knows where the equipment is kept (which might happen if a scientist becomes a Thing), they can just tear up every Radio part.

Robert Yang said:

I agree. Seems like the "exponential" growth of the Things will make things too easy for them.

Also, an idea for a final phase of the game: once the radio is built, only 4 scientists can fit in the rescue helicopter. Scientists have to decide who gets to go in the copter to warn civilization. If 2 or more scientists are actually the Thing, then the Scientists still lose. (To give more incentive for Things to be sneaky in late game.)

Kevan said:

Ah, although this got lost slightly in the writeup, I was imagining that "the laboratory" would be a single room known to all the players. So everyone would know where the radio was being built.

Perhaps it just needs a rule making machinery cards indestructable - a Thing would have to grab the cards and run, rather than tearing them up, which would give away their identity, and let the scientists give chase.

A helicopter endgame might be good - I was originally going to reuse an endgame mechanic from another Thing game I made (the scientists only win if they can identify all the Things), but felt that actually building the radio was probably difficult enough. Picking four seems like a good compromise - I'll certainly keep it in-hand for playtesting, if it turns out that the radio is really easy to build. It might make for a good "major victory / minor victory" ending.

Alex Fleetwood said:

This game looks great - can't wait to play it!

Kevan said:

In case anyone's reading this but not the events page, I'll be playtesting this game at Sandpit #7 on October the 29th. Given that it's nearly hallowe'en, I'll be rebranding it as Night of the Vampire, and making some tweaks to the cards.

Kevan said:

Big changes as a result of playtesting - collected "radio" cards were handed over to the game moderator, so there was no scope for a Thing player to steal them (and no need for an actual, bored player to have to stand around guarding them). Exponential infection did turn out to be a problem on the night, and this has now been fixed by giving the Thing players a limited number of "Infection" cards, which they have to use up to infect people.

For the record, the good guys only collected four of the "coffin nail" cards, in Night of the Vampire, and the game ended with all but one player infected, all of them milling around outside the churchyard's only entrance. There was a lot of good drama before it hit that point, though - in the early game, two separate groups of five or six players slowed their approach to one another along a street, before both deciding to flee. And the two vampires (who'd each been slipped notes giving the other's identity) were brazenly chatting by themselves right outside the churchyard in the opening minutes, with nobody (apparently) suspecting them.

193.190.253.149 said:

We ran this as "Night of the vampire" as a game in youth movement (10 12-14 year olds + 3 adults + game moderator) which worked pretty well. It was slightly re-themed to make the search for cart parts ("you want to escape from Count Dracula's castle but the cart has been sabotaged") instead of coffin nails. The group really enjoyed the game - while they are pretty passive usually and a bit reserved while I was explaining it, they played this with much enthusiasm and there were quite some discussions at the end.

We used 2 starting vampires (one teen, one adult) with 4 cards each. By the end of the game, there were 8 vampires, 2 of which were killed, and a lot of holy water was wasted (one of the vampires claiming half of the stash at the start of the game). It ended up as a narrow victory for the vampires, with the humans missing 2 car parts to escape.

All in all, a success.