It’s be a long summer from us here at Ironmark’s Megagame Research Division. After our summer open playtest we went back into the lab to make some final adjustments to play. Here’s a taste at some of the changes…

The Model for a Modern Major-General

There was always something a bit cumbersome about Combat whenever we playtested the game. Over time players would get into the flow, but even for people who had played the game before, we were seeing players having trouble grasping the battle phases in the first few rounds. We wanted to change that to make it more tactical while still keeping the synchronous play of the original design.

So we opted for a more unique direction with combat gameplay. Our first change was the dice. All dice will represent combat units on the board. d6’s will represent standard troops while d8’s will represent artillery. All units will now hit on a 5+. The physical dice change will make it clearer what kind of threat players are dealing with at a quick glance. And the different sizes makes it easy to figure out which units hit when attacking.

We’re also changing the order of phases to allow for a more tactical experience. The new phases will be as follows:

• Organization (5 min) – Determine where commanders(players) will be on the map, as well as play any Colony/Espionage Cards face down near a combat location.
• Resolution (1-2 min) – Resolve cards and combat
• Command (8-9 min) – Discuss and submit orders for next round

Now all the deploying and movement will occur at the same time at the end of the round. Control will then take all the orders and execute them on the board to be resolved for the next round. This will allow some more time for the commanders to survey the land and make decisions about which region they would like to focus their forces. We’ll also be creating an order form that should make it simpler to issue commands all at once.

Rule(s), Britannia

The British game seemed to work very well during playtests. We’ll be adding a bit more to the Foreign Influence portion of the game by giving the players more interesting decision to make with how they manage their boats. Now instead of just stacking boats in the East Indies to gain more resources, different ports offer different abilities to the British. For instance one port may simply give food to Britain, but another port may provide a place to buy artillery at a discounted price. Deciding which ones to utilize will take some strategy and coordination.

There’s even more changes being made to the game, especially in the Spy module department, but we’ll let future Stefan deal with writing that post!

Don’t forget The World Turned Upside Down will be December 3rd! Tickets are on sale now! Do not throw away your shot…