First Playtest

I invited my good friend and long time collaborator over to give the game a go.  He and I are both experienced card players and were responsible for loads of powerful winning decks in our past.  If anyone was going to be able to put this game through the rounds it needed, it would be the two of us.

The game was simple enough to be able to pick it up right away, the gameplay was smooth and the mechanics made sense.  There were, however, some problems with the game that I could see right away.  I didn't really expect to have the winning formula on the first shot, and after some extensive playtesting, I already knew some things I needed to change.

1. Difference in power levels between the cards.  This was to be expected, and much of this was just shaking the rust off of my old card-playing chops.  This is also the most detailed part about designing any game in my opinion.  The game needs to be balanced, and the only way to really figure that out is by trying to break it.  You're not going to know what's broken until you abuse the hell out of it.  I had forgotten some basic  principles of competitive card games that came flooding back to me with crystal clarity after just a few plays.
2. "Monsters" didn't play the way that I wanted them to, the player that was ahead would generally defeat them to put themselves even more ahead.  This was really a complicated problem that I hasn't fully thought through, but when the issue surfaced it made complete sense.  We tried a few variations on how the monsters impacted the game, the players, their rewards, etc.  But about halfway through the playtest, after at least a dozen games I removed all the monsters from the deck to put them on the back burner and focus on the rest of the game.
3. The synergies that I wanted to exist between the cards to make the choices interesting and not just obvious just weren't there.  This was probably the most disappointing thing that I encountered, because this was the biggest focus of the game that I wanted to develop, and I found that I wasn't anywhere near where I wanted to be.