Post originally by Christopher Allen at 2004-06-17 16:08:22
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Once a week or so a number of players gather at Shannon's home to help him review new games.

I was at the the playtest of Smugglers of the Galaxy that Shannon based his review on, and I'm also a friend of Daniel Strain, the game designer, who gave me a copy hot off the press for RPG.net to review.

I have to agree with most of the points of Shannon's review, though I think I liked the game better then he did. Shannon knows his personal preferences for games, and tries to compensate for them in his reviews knowing that not everyone has the same preferences. Thus after each playtest the players have a long discussion about the merits of the game play. I think everyone there at this playtest agreed with his essential issues.

My personal take on Smugglers of the Galaxy is that if it was a 1 hour game that was relatively inexpensive, it would be reviewed differently. However, it is a multi-hour game that is at the upper end of board game prices. Thus it doesn't qualify as a "family" game, where the randomness and lack of strategy isn't quite as important.

So one set of solutions is to make the game shorter, and less expensive. My most basic ideas about how to make the game shorter this is to add one or more starports that are large (but not military), say at the center of the board, and make the Braxian weapons less expensive to obtain. However, I'm not sure that this is enough to get it to an hour game. As far as getting game components cheaper, going more Cheapass-like is the only suggestion I have.

The other set of solutions is to make the game more strategic. Again, I have some basic ideas:

* Make it so that the cost of buying upgrades is progressively larger amounts, but don't put a limit on the number of upgrades. And/or have different ship types that have different limits, ala various train games. These changes are required because any strategy of differentiation goes away when everyone tops out their upgrades before they get there 5000 raised to buy Braxian weapons.

* Find another mechanism for player-vs-player combat that doesn't suffer the problem that the current hull rules have (i.e. fighting someone makes it easier for the a different player to attack next time)

* Make it such that large bounties have larger effects. We found that the large bounty that Xun the Psychic Alien had little influence, because he was able to avoid most bounty events, either because he could avoid the destiny cards (his talent), or because he had items that allowed him to avoid bounty events (which he got faster because of his talent). If every 1000 bounty you had required a second roll on the bounty tables, that would have made bounty more interesting (and would have made us increase bounties on other players more often -- we only payed for it to give them their first bounty).

* Make it such that the planets stayed a bit longer. Maybe for 3 sales. Or maybe the tables start at their starport size, but go down each time the starport is used.

* I'd seriously reconsider the various super-valuable destiny cards.

* I'd take another look at the various character cards. I'd make sure that either everyone's powers were available through a friend destiny card, or make sure that none were. Having the friend card that gives everyone what the Pilot has as a talent, but not having a similar way for everyone to get Xun the Psychics talent, is unbalancing.

I'd also consider making it both shorter, and more strategic, and combine all of my ideas.

-- Christopher Allen