‘Ohana proa has its first public playtest last night. All prior play attempts were with me, myself, an I (ie solo playtesting).

Players: Me, Randy, Bruce and Rolf.

Notes on the players:

• Randy and Rolf were familiar with the cultures of the Polynesian islands (Rolf quoted Margaret Meade to me in regard to the Trobriand islanders)

• Randy is a widely respected game designer and analyst (outside of boardgaming) and has studied primitive gift economies and in particular the Polynesian gift economies

• Bruce strongly dislikes games which suggest Analysis Paralysis or games in which there seems little chance of recovery once in a bad position

• Rolf is a professional mathematician (crypto) with good realtime visual search and topology skills

Summary of play:

• 45 minutes rules explanation. I believe this can be reduced to around 25 minutes with little effort

• Playtime was 4 hours. The graph is simply too large and the single edge nodes acted as timeclocks for the end-game conditions. Without them I expect that the game would have been approximately an hour shorter. Some polish will then reduce playtime towards 2.5 hours, which is acceptable for now.

• Bruce was eliminated on the second turn as he had insufficient resources to explore. This was due to a poor rules implication understanding. I gave him a charity fish and shell to allow him to continue.

• Many exclamations (mostly from Randy) over how heavily and even thickly themed the game is. Mostly this was in surprise as the group knows my thinly-themed abstract tendencies. More interesting was that all suggestions were in the direction of more thickly theming the game. I don’t think these two facts were contradictory.

• Randy and Rolf quickly caught on to the concept of placing one’s base in a central location which many of your deliveries will then traverse. Both subsequently produced fish and shells hand over fist in this manner (a dozen or more of each per turn). This resource surfeit allowed them to dominate route bidding and kula production.

• Ultimately Randy and I were eliminated on the last turn of the game with 20 kitoum. Bruce had 21 kitoum and Rolf had 24. Final scoring gave the game to Rolf by 4 VPs.

Primary comments:

• Took too long. (see above – this can be addressed)

• The bases should be renamed to “Big man” or Kahuna. (agreed)

• Kula gifts reward the giver too heavily. They need to also reward the recipient. (agreed)

• General dislike for 5 markets awarding kitoum. (I believe this dislike was primarily a reaction to my poor explanation)

• Bruce had a particular problem with the way that the route claiming auction affected turn order. While the mechanism as a way of controlling turn order was liked, the manner in which it was accomplished was not. (agreed – it needs a simpler implementation of the same mechanism)

• Resource management and allocation for turn order control versus Kula generation was interesting and effective. (agreed – but maybe too interesting/effective compared to other mechanisms)

• The route claiming auction needs to be simplified (which we did in an ad-hoc rules rewrite mid-game). Specifically the player to spend the most across all their routes goes last (and thus first in deliveries).

• Not enough cooperation in the game. Too much incentive for the players to form sympathetic reinforcing pairs rather than to operate in an opportunistically laissez faire fashion among neighboring players. The rules around bases (required kula and double production) and delivery expenses (pay for using other’s routes) exacerbated this. (agreed – the game may also be best with odd player counts)

• Several proposals that kula should reward the giver with kitoum and the recipient with VPs. This were part of a general and much larger discussion around moving many of the game decisions away from negative or zero sum to positive sum. I largely agree.

• General confusion over terminology. Too many new unfamiliar words: kula, kitoum, proa, etc. Simpler and more familiar words like “present”, “prestige” and “boats” were suggested. (equivocal – I’m a wordie after all)

• Shell kula item values scale too slowly. (agreed)

• Bases should be renamed Kahuna or “big man”. (agreed)

• Base rules for doubling production worked well. Base rules for enforcing/requiring kula gifts were ineffectual (asked players to do what they already wanted to do). Base rules need to be entirely rethought and made more gift-centric and gift-promoting. (agreed)

• Insufficient concentration on gift giving. Too much reward to the giver (VPs and kitoum). Too much reward for creating new kula (extra kitoum) Not enough reward to the recipient (potential future VPs). While the current system works it poorly creates either the trade of positional advantage or the desired negotiation-through-board-movements that is desired. (agreed – this is the biggie)

• The island scoring is simply too complex, time consuming and unintuitive. (agreed – it needs to be excised from the game)

Action items:

• Remove ~5 nodes from graph, especially leaf nodes

• Rename bases to “kahuna”

• Rework base rules to emphasise coopetition.

• Simplify turn order control (ascending order of largest bid).

• Rework delivery/production rules to be simpler, more intuitive and more encouraging of using other’s routes more often.

• Remove island scoring

• Rework/represent thematic vocabulary (kula and kitoum especially).

• rework kula gift results to reward both giver and recipient

• re-examine 5 market benefits

• Fix shell kula item value scaling

• Subtend specialised terms with English equivalents

• Increase value and activity of gift giving earlier in game. De-emphasise two-party reciprocal partnerships.

Yet newer rules:

• When all the routes to an island are claimed instantly move all remaining development queue items to the island. (Reversed the new rule added last night)

• Kitoum points are now worth 1 VP in the endgame. This forces VP trade-ins to be at a loss. Shells are worth just over 1.5 VPs, fish just over 0.5 VPs. Discarding 6VPs thus generates 4VPs in direct resource value (if expressed in kula) plus a kitoum. If the kitoum were worth 2 VPs then the VP trade-in would be positive sum given the marginal gain for 4/fish and 6/shell kula items. Dropping the net to 1 VP gives 5 VPs (4+1(kitoum)) for the discarded 6 VPs: a small net loss.

• Players may now have up to 2 bases. The expectation is that adding a second base will afford interesting trade-offs both for the purchase and movement of the bases. This could be a colossally Bad Idea, but I’m not sure where the balance point is between base movement and placement.

• Clarified that bases don’t double production on the delivery round they are built.

• Entirely removed the Auction Routes phase (was deprecated).

Aside: The narrowing of the graph from the centre sections toward the edges has the interesting effect of increasing the import of early game decisions, decisions which are made when the game state is also most unclear. I’m not sure this is an advantage, but it is interesting.

New rules.

• Added an acknowledgements section. There should be few surprises there.

• New rule: When all of an island’s routes are claimed anything left on the development stack is discarded. This can happen when two different player’s initial starting routes touch the same island.

– Entirely removed the Auction Routes phase. Possibly temporarily. As it was defined it was extremely interesting about 3 times per game and that’s simply not often enough to require a whole phase for every turn. I’ve rejiggered the turn order controls in response but more development may be needed.

• Rejiggered turn order setting. The result is that the bids during Explore Routes are effectively once-around for turn order. I’m still not entirely happy with it, but it is better. The handling of delivery versus claim order is at least better this way.

• Kitoum now scores in the end-game. Otherwise the incentive was to simply not be last. May be too rich. There is now also an incentive to be first and to have kitoum in general.

• Added phase aids to the map

• Added an Explorer track to the map (should be a bit, but I’m out of convenient bits that aren’t also silly sized). No rules annotation for this yet.

New rules.

• Removed and greatly simplified the remnants of all the MUST-DO rules.

• Added a simple (if harsh) bankruptcy rule for forced exploration.

• Added a Closed Markets track to the map, added related logic to Deliver section and thus greatly simplified the end game definition.

• Rewrote the Deliver section as regards bases.

• Allow players to pass on one of the delivery rounds in order to use double proas in the second round. (I may need to add a cost for this, but doubt it)

• Turn order now reverses during the Deliver section. This is surprisingly important, mostly in that it makes the route claiming action both important and subtle.

• Cleaned up the token type requirements for kula items. I’m still thinking about dropping the requirement for at least one shell kula token and am mostly but not entirely convinced that’s the right way to go. The basic argument is that shells are produced at the same rate as fish but are worth 3 times as much for kula and twice as much for bids. Ergo players should migrate towards near pure shell production rapidly – but I’d like to keep fish actively in the desireably balance…

First targets for development:

• The route auction may be removed. Most of the time it will be a no-op but I’ve left it in as in a few cases it clearly isn’t a no-op. Are those few cases enough to justify an entire phase for every turn? Frankly, I doubt it…except that when it is needed, such as when a player on initial setup is geared to make (say) 11 VPs plus 4 fish on the first turn of the game (maximal possible opening)… To remove the route auction (which was a hold-over from Lancashire Railways FWLIW), perhaps all that’s needed is an auction for turn order for the first turn and let later turns take care of themselves?

• The special case rules for the cases when players don’t have enough resources or discardable VPs to satisfy the various MUST rules need to be cleaned up and simplified (must explore at least once, must delivery, must buy a proa if can’t delivery, must give kula to bases etc). I expect that I’ll simply disallow deliveries to bases without matching kula, allow proas to be bought for straight VPs without resources, and simply mandate deliveries if possible.

• I already removed the constraint on how many VPs may be discarded per turn. I’ll probably also remove the constraint on kula items having to have both fish and shell kula tokens. The bonus value for shell items is already large.

• The costs for upgrades (5 fish or 3 shells) feel a bit too high. I’m not sure if that’s the real cause, but the game feels lurchy.

A place holder intended to encourage me to document one my earliest game designs: Keystone Escape.

New rules.

Three primary rules changes:

1) Added bases which must be bought, may be moved, double production at destinations and enforce kula gifts (bases promote late game arc, complexity and tension variance)

2) Changed default exploration bids ands VP/resource exchange rates in order to resolve previously noted ratio problems

3) Changed first turn and turn ordering to be a little more fair. First turn windfalls are still possible but can be bid against.

More minor changes:

• Tweaked setup to add more fish

• Determined distribution of market types

• Rewrote route claiming bid resolution section for clarity

• Simplified must-deliver/can’t-deliver rules

• Revised/reversed turn order controls

The prototype is complete. The kula tokens are chits cut from picture matt with the size of the chit proportional to its value, and the colour representative of type. This works surprisingly well. The markets are 12mm in diameter so I’ll probably need to scale the map bigger again (and it is already quite big). At the same time I’ll put claiming token locations on the routes. A quick trial run of three turns suggested that the economy richness is not far off right and if anything may be a little too rich.

1) I still need to redo the VP_discard/resource ratio as already noted. This will likely have a sympathetic effect on all pricing, mostly upward.

2) The idea of a home base token is growing on me. The implementation would be relatively simple:

– Players don’t start with a base

– There is one base per player

– A base may be bought during any delivery phase and placed on an island delivered to

– Deliveries to islands containing the player’s home base produce double resources (this may be too rich)

– Bases may be moved in the same way as markets but base movements earn nothing

– A player making a delivery to an island containing another player’s base must give that player a kula item. If there are multiple bases on the island the player must give a kula item to each base’s player.

3) 151 markets in the game suggests 4 market colours with 30 tokens and 1 with 31. Fair dinkum.

A conversational comment to David Boyd about arc in games, “Right, the optimal funnel should narrow and the variance of potential gains should increase,” got me thinking. Sometimes I type faster than I think. In this case the clear implication is that the special powers and roles should, nay must have limited use lifespans. Doh, of course!

New map:

The main change is the loss of the Market Development Charts as described below. The little yellowish spur bits are where the markets that will be priced on that island are placed during setup in a stack (must remember to update rules to that effect). Each small yellow circle contains a number which defines how many markets are to be placed there during setup. Simple!

An interesting aspect of this is that I can tweak the numbers of markets in specific locations downward to change the weighting of the graph if needed.