Frontier Scoundrels has been in development since July and I think I've hit another key milestone, though it's not necessarily a good one. I've held a few complete start-to-finish playtests of the game, and while I think the game is finally mechanically sound, it's too complicated, ill-focused, and lacks the fun element it needs to have. I'm not sure I can fix the game in its current state.
The past 5 months haven't been wasted though; I know a great deal more about what works and what doesn't. More importantly, I know which of my core mechanics need to change, though that means I need to discard some of my original design focuses.
This will be a long post, so here's a quick table of contents to show you what to expect. Another thing to note is that I aim for this post to be useful as a design exercise for folks and it hopefully won't require prior knowledge of Frontier Scoundrels.
Table of Contents
- The Current Frontier Scoundrels: Summary of the game flow with a link to the complete rules
- Why It's Broken: A breakdown of what's wrong with the current game
- Mulligan: Details on where I'm taking the game next, including a mind-map.
- Thinking Time: Questions for which I need to find answers
