Playtest Dry Run

We had some great discussions last week after the playtest kit launch (check it out here – we’d love feedback!). But there’s no substitute for playing the game ourselves. Thanks for Nico and Kerrie for a fun spin of the chips – see the photos below!

The game was 3 player on our custom printed board. Kerrie (yellow) and and Nico (red) both have 4 stones of handicap advantage and place stones first. Blue (Steve)  is forced to be pretty aggressive and pays the price in the mid-game!

Handicap moves give Yellow and Red a head start

Blue is being aggressive and pushing out

… but gets punished by Red by an invasion

Not looking good for Blue. Red is building out on the far right. Yellow looks solid.

Heading for the end game we ran out of tokens so some more colors are added

Ah what is this Blue group doing?

Boom – Blue manages to break the Red groups up and stabilize on the bottom left

Nearly the end game – things look good for Yellow

Some cards add to the total score at the end of the game…

A gap develops on the top right of the game board though and there is a big fight for territory. Blue manages to snatch a chunk of territory to split Red. Yellow ended up consolidating really well though.

In the end game, the open territory spots surrounded by each player are counted and so are prisoners. A few cards in the game also add points. Blue ended up with 25 points, Red with 23 and Yellow with over 60. That’s a handicap point off for next time Kerrie!

Game runtime: 2hrs15mins (a little longer than ideal).

A few interesting things we learned:

1. Prisoner exchange cards are a little ambiguous: unclear if you can only exchange them for prisoners of your own color. We decided yes for now.
2. On this board the game takes a little too long for 3 players.
3. A multi-way chess clock would be very handy to stop deeply pondered moves!
4. A little old Go knowledge can get you out of a tight spot (Steve!).

We’ll be posting more playtest runs here shortly.