ED

For this week's tutorial, we had a choice of playing and adapting another board game but this time something more complex. My group chose Carcassonne, beginning with learning the games rules and playing for a short time.

Our Changes

We did not include the farmers in our gameplay as we found this to be unnecessarily complicated for new players. Farmers could easily be reimplemented and this was only a decision we made to speed up our design process.

One conscious change we made was to give players a choice of what land tile to play each turn. Like Ludo, we wanted to make the game slightly less about chance. We started by allowing each player to have 7 land tiles in their hand, replacing them with a new one when they're used, however we found this to give too much choice and made the game too easy with no real element of risk. Reducing the hand to 5 had the same effect, however we found 3 to be the perfect amount which made the game fair and still having some element of chance.

Possible improvements

When players picked their hand randomly from the pile of land tiles, it was often the case that they'd have all city tiles, or all road tiles, etc. Perhaps a way to stop this from happening would be to hand out land tiles with one city tile, one road, and one cloister. The specific tile would still be random but categorising them would give a fair starting hand to each player. After the game begins it would be possible to keep these categories with players choosing which to draw from (no matter what they just placed) or it could remain unpredictable to keep the level of chance a bit higher.