Public Armageddon testing
about 5 years ago
– Thu, May 02, 2019 at 10:16:44 AM
At the weekend - we had our first kickstarter backers playtest Plague Inc: Armageddon!
A number of brave people assembled in London to try out genes, the bioweapon and the fungus disease types. A big thanks to everyone who came along - it's very helpful to see people experience the expansion for the first time!
The good news is that everyone really enjoyed themselves and the new parts of the expansion.
- The favourite new Event Card was 'Scavenge' which lets people take an event card after someone else uses it.
- Genes fundamentally changed people's strategies
- Fungi spread around the world quickly but some people struggled to deal with its reduced infectivity. We also saw a number of huge puffball explosions!
- Bioweapons killed a lot of countries but sometimes struggled to get their festering corpses generating enough DNA
I came away with various minor tweaks to text and gene balance that I wanted to make - however, the biggest thing is that I'm considering replacing the gene auction with a simpler mechanism that lets people pick their genes based on who has the most DNA. I think this gives a lot of the benefits of gene auction whilst not letting people accidentally under/overbid during the auction. I'm hoping to add the auction in as a rules variant still though for hyper competitive people! Do let me know if you have any thoughts on this...
A few extra photos below and I've got more playtests happening this week in Bristol so will see how they find the new gene rule. Print and play testers have also received the new rules now!
