Mystingo Game Developments

Mystingo Game Developments

We decided that point end-game triggers would be to hard to keep track of during the midst of the game. Especially since we encourage players to place their enemy's captured faction members face down so other players won't be able to keep track of points. We came to a solution to place an antidote for the Mystingo virus in the middle of the board. If your leader reaches the antidote, then you win the game. If two leaders are destroyed, then the battle ends and the player with the most points win.

We decided to remove the arch mage from the game since it slowed down game play and prevented specific routes to get to the other team. However, we also had it so that the arch mage was automatically in the team. An additional option was to include the arch mage as an optionally member to include, make it worth but to decreasing the attack range to 3 and allow it to move 1 space. Additionally, we removed the gargoyle to limit the time of selecting characters so that during the play testing in class, it would speed up the process. However, we want to add the gargoyle so that it only has melee attack all around that can only attack for 1 attack range, but can turn to stone for one whole round so that it cannot be attacked or destroyed during that round.

Additionally, we used a white board game piece to pass around to indicate who's turn it was. As well as creating reference cards with the battle triangle, what you can do on your turn, and explaining the different symbols on each card and what the ability does.

During our 3 play tests in class when we had professional game testers test our game, we found that the learning curve was steep for casual players from the class, but the professionals won every round. This was expected since Mystingo is a carefully created strategy game and the professional play testers picked up on the game rather quickly and defended their leaders. The game ended the first play through with a close game where the two leaders were destroyed. The second game ended rather quickly where two players left their leaders wide open for attack and the other two players differentiated by 1 point deciding the victor. The third game ended with a player receiving the antidote and winning the game even though they did not have the most amount of points if the game would've ended by two leaders being destroyed.

There was plenty of feedback from the professional playtesters that we would want to consider when publishing this game. The antidote could be worth a certain amount of points and the game wouldn't actually end when one player receives it. There could be cards that have a decoy 1 or 2 point character on the back of it and actually be a 4 point assassin or other character that can be flipped for deception. There could be a rule that you may choose to rotate only one tick and not completely in whatever direction you want for a cost of one movement point. These are great suggestiosn that should be considered when playing a full game. However, an incorporated set of additional rules that was not included in our game was that there would be Mystingo Decisions cards that would be drawn after the first round of the game. This would effect how the game will be played and change strategies involved on who will win the game. This adds endless possibilities for replay value to the game. The battle portion of the game is what we aimed to perfect and now that it is balanced and we proved that it can work, we can focus on adding abilities to characters, additional characters, and balancing points with movement more effectively.

For example,

Cavalier with 4 movment and assassin with 4 movement be decreased to 3 movement. Additionally, elemental archer have increased range of 3. These would all be 4 point cards.

MYSTINGO: There are 4 factions in Mystingo. Faction A, B, C, D (Fill in whatever name you want)

From now on, you are the leader of your faction. Make your own decisions.

Enough Talk! There’s a virus spreading across Mystingo. You have an antidote for the virus. You must steal an antidote from another player’s leader in order to save your faction or receive another antidote from the middle of the board.

Choose your faction members now. You only have 20 points to use. Each faction member is allocated with points.

Strongest Team with most point values:

4 + 4+ 4+ 4 + 3 + 1= 20 points. 6 members + leader = 7 tokens total

Balanced Team with all points:

4 + 4 + 3 + 3 + 2 + 2 +1 + 1 = 20 pints. 8 members + leader = 9 tokens total

Lowest Cost Team:

1 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 = 20 pts. = 11 members + leader = 12 tokens total.

Teams consist of 7- 12 members.

Place your tokens inside your base. The back row of the base can be used to place tokens face down.

Mystingo Deceision : You will now choose the type of leader you want to be.

The Chosen One: Protect your faction at all costs. Your objective is to win the battle. If you survive the battle, you receive the antidote.

The Coward : You agree to give your antidote to another player. Choose the player's color and place it under this card. At the end of battle or if you are destroyed in battle, you give your antidote to this player. Your remaining faction members die of the virus, you lose the battle, but your leader stays alive and if a player destroyed you in battle, they do not receive your antidote.

The Researcher - You will spend bountiful amounts of time researching another antidote. If destroyed in battle, you give a full antidote to the player who destroyed you in return for saving your faction. You die of the virus.

Mystingo - You are the virus, you do not recieve an antidote and you destroy any collected antidotes. If all factions die, you gain +10 Points and you survive the virus. Otherwise, you are consumed by Mystingo.

After 1 complete round,

MYSTINGO ALERT!

Mystingo Decision Example: Choose who you think will be the winner of the battle.

(If you think the game will end with two leaders destroyed, then you could not choose yourself, but if they receive the other half of the antidote, then you would also be correct. Or if you think you will obtain the antidote or be in the final two characters, then you could choose yourself. You could even pick someone else and sacrifice your leader.)

You will receive 5 points at the end of the game if your decision is correct.

Mystingo Decision Example: Give a Tier 2 PowerUp to another player. They may use this power up at any time during the battle for one complete round

Tier 2 PowerUps:

Dark Book - All faction members receive protection from melee for 1 turn.

Golden Sword - All faction members receive protection from ranged for 1 turn.

Lightning Arrow - All faction members receive protection from magic for 1 turn.

Only two players can win the battle.

You have survived the virus. + 5 Points

If your faction survives the virus. + 5 Points

After two factions win the battle, the two remaining leaders reveal their leader types beginning with the chosen one, then the coward, then the researcher, then mystingo.

MYSTINGO ALERT!

What is Mystingo?

Choices:

A. The Planet

B. The Virus

C. The Antidote

D. All of the Above

Enjoy!

Week 4 - Class Wide Playtest

During this week of development, we got to test our game against new players. During these playtest rounds, we realized a lot about the difficult aspects of our game. At first our game seems very difficult to understand, however, after a few rounds, players easily got the hang of how to play. 

Some of the problems that we faced were certain characters had a high movement speed, plus a greater attack range. To balance this out, we kept the movement speed the same, since moving across the board slowly. We lowered our attack range on our ranged attack. 

Another point that was brought up during the playtest was the lack of information on the actual tokens. During the game, it would be easier for players to make decisions if they knew the attack range and the point value for each character right on the board as opposed to having to reference the cards continually. 

The last thing that we noticed during our play test session was that the games were taking too long. We needed an alternative, shorter end game trigger rather than the traditional 2 dead leader approach. We are currently working on a solution to this issue via playtests and thinking of point related end game triggers. 

Week 3 - Playtesting and Game Mechanic Development

After we settled on the fact that the board game should be played with octagonal board and character pieces, we playtested our board game for the first time. After a couple of turns, it was apparent what some critical flaws of our board game were. Some flaws that we noticed were that despite making the board smaller, the game was still progressing at a slow rate and that taking another player’s piece was quite difficult and tedious. 

A multitude of ideas were presented when we were trying to solve the problems that the board game had. Some examples of suggestions included changing the amount of attacks each character piece can do to two instead of the initial three at most. This suggestion could help give our board game a theme and give characters an identity. One idea to counteract the slowness was to give players an option of either moving two character pieces each turn or move one character piece twice in one turn. However, this idea ended up not working due to the fact that it was already taking a long time for a player to finish a turn when they were only moving one character a turn. If a player had an option of what to do each turn, it would only prolong the time it takes between turns as there are even more options for what to do. In addition, moving the same character twice each turn seemed like it could become quite overpowered. Another idea to help speed up the game was to make two characters with the same attack kill each other in that interaction instead of instigating a stalemate where nothing happens. We also decided on doubling the movement of all the characters. Instead of the one or two tile movement that we had initially, we changed it so that characters either have a two or four tile movement. While we did not play with that mechanic in place for long, it did speed up the game like we had hoped for. 

We also noticed that none of us were going towards the center of the board since it did not offer any kind of advantage and only gave us a disadvantage of having to tread through more tiles before reaching another player’s territory. Therefore, we thought of putting special tiles in the middle of the board that would give players that had a character piece land on those tiles either a special character piece or some other kind of advantage. A special character piece that we are considering putting into the game is a character that can rotate and thus, is quite versatile in its attacks and defenses alike. We also thought about turning the victory mechanism of the game into a point system rather than taking out all of the enemy leaders to win. Players could also use different strategies to win in contrast with before, where they had to use some of their character pieces to kill the opposing players’ leader. In this case, we could use the points that the characters have as a point indication. It also removed the problem that we had with player elimination as even if a player’s leader was killed, that player can still win and play as long as they have character pieces. 

We met together during the week and developed more of our game mechanics. We decided on making twelve classes of characters. In those classes will be multiples of characters that each player can choose from. We also decided on the movement, range, special abilities, and point value of each separate class in order to have an idea of how each character can be used in the game. During this phase of development, we changed the initial adjacent and diagonal movement that each character had to unrestricted movement in every direction. A new idea of energy was also implemented while we were developing the character classes. We determined that each player is given five energy points to use each turn. Moving a character one space or attacking requires the use of an energy point. If a character can attack two spaces away, he would have to use two energy points to attack that far. If there are leftover energy points, a player can use it to move another character or attack with another character as well. We also decided on some of the effects special tiles can give to a character that is next to it and that the effects would be randomly selected. When a player has a character next to the tile, they draw from a deck that contains the effects. Those effects can be used at any time and grant a buff to the character for one turn and one time only.

               

Week 2 - Mystingo Board Game

                 

                After establishing the fundamental concepts of the game, our group worked on clarifying some of the game's components. The first issue we talked about was the design of the board. The original board was in the shape of a square so that the players could play on the edges. However, we realized that the square board would make the game too complicated since the game allows diagonal moves.  We came up with a new hexagonal board because the hexagon's edges would support diagonal moves. The new board also changed the amount of players from four to six.

                Our next challenge was to make sure that the players select their starting pieces in a fair manner.  We originally thought of allowing each player to choose a maximum of eight out of twenty pieces before starting the game. We liked this idea because it would create a sense of excitement since the players don't know what pieces the others have chosen. However, we were worried that this system may create an unbalance in power between players who select more powerful pieces. Therefore, we decided to assign values to the units, with more powerful units possessing higher values. Players would be able to select as many units as they would like as long as the units' total is under a set number.

                The final point we discussed was on how to distribute powers between the pieces. We decided to spend another week regarding this issue so that we could come up with ideas to create unique characters with a wide range of abilities.  

Areas to work on next week - Characters, cards, tokens, and balance

Week 1 Development

Mystingo Board Game Development

Week 1: First we established the parameters of our game. The parameters are that there had to be four factions and there are equal characters in each faction. This is an established parameter so that there will be no advantages in choosing one faction over another faction. Each player also has the opportunity to choose a certain number of faction members to send to the game board. Each player will place their faction leader in one of three spaces located on the board. The battle system works like a game of a rock, paper, scissors where each approach of offense, defense, and strategy would replace rock, paper, and scissors. Each direction of attack or defense would represent a different approach so you need to be careful when attacking or defending.

In this first week, we decided to change the game pieces and spaces on the board to a hexagonal shape. This will simplify the fighting system by having 6 directions of attack and defense rather than 9 directions. It adds to a sleek design of the faction pieces as well. We also discussed the possibility of adding a bomb that sends a faction member back to their respective base when attacked as one of the two other spots of placement in each person's base along with the faction leader and decoy.

IDEAS TO CONSIDER IN FOLLOWING WEEKS:

-Having certain spaces in the middle which can grant powers such as fireball(expands range x2) or regeneration(faction member can re spawn in base after destroyed). This could add incentive to not stay back in the base and instead go out.

-Should some characters be able to move more than one space with a penalty to direction of attack?

-Should characters be able to attack over walls into another person's base?

-Printing different hexagons out and simply using it for prototypes with the directions.

-Getting board game ordered as soon as possible along with the pieces of the game