On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 9:43 AM, captncavern <captncavern@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Has anyone tested the game over the week-end? What do you think? I played it a couple weeks ago. It worked okay, but it felt like a winning strategy was just to take as many cards as possible rather than focus on your preferred prey. In particular, taking your opponent's preferred prey is almost as good as taking your own preferred prey, since that means it's one more card that your opponent can't score. On the other hand, it felt difficult enough to look ahead even one or two moves that we were both just playing by intuition rather than really planning any specific targets. So it might be that with some experience, you could focus better on your preferred prey and score much higher. It's interesting that you added the variant about only taking cards when you leave them, because I had the same idea. It's rather awkward to move your frog, then pick it up to take the card, then flip the card below it, then put your frog back. But, like you say, with that change your opponent gets first crack at the newly-revealed card, which might add to the randomness. Another idea I had was to make the cost of moving a covered piece be the number of pieces on top of it, rather than always just one movement point. That way, a large could move 3 if uncovered, 2 if covered by one piece, and 1 if covered by two pieces, which increases the variety of possible movement. It also means pieces can become immobile, which may be a good or bad thing, I'm not sure. Someone who was watching suggested that maybe having more than 5 piles might be better, since there would be less congestion; in particular, with 5 piles, you can have your 2 and 3 in each other's way a lot. I figured you picked 5 piles to correspond with the 5 goal cards, but that's not an issue now that you removed the goal set-up step. Overall, I'd say that the game works, but to be honest I found it a little boring. It feels like it needs some other dimension to make it more interesting, but I don't have any good ideas. It may just be that it becomes deeper once you have the experience to more easily plan ahead. --dougorleans@xxxxxxxxx