Mitropia Two Player Playtest

With Mitropia now available on Tabletopia (click here to run your own game!) we’ve had a blast playing against friends from around the globe! High priority has been trying out different combinations: a special shout out to all those that have generously spent time with us!.

One of the combinations we didn’t know would work well was a two player. But thanks to an enterprising player (thank you @lindbrandon!) we found out! We’ll be testing more of these, but the first game went surprisingly smoothly….

With two players, we used a 9×9 board with the corners cut out which is the standard Mitropia setup at the moment. Other elements of the setup:

We used handicap rules to give the yellow player a small head start.
All players had to start one step in from the edge anywhere on the board for the first move.

Here’s how the game unfolded…

Blue started with a solid advantage and began building on that straight away, with Yellow having to defend.
As the game continued Yellow tried to attack on the top right of the board.
… and slowly established a second stronghold there.
Blue cut through the line however to separate the two groups.
Yellow also managed a dash along the right hand side which in the long run likely proved decisive in the game.
Late on, Blue tried attacks top left and bottom right but Yellow was too well established for these to stick.

There were some close moments in the game where Yellow or Blue could have gotten significant upper hand!

On this size board, for two player play, a few things were not optimal:

Certain cards were very powerful in gameplay (e.g. “place three”).
After a certain point, dice rolls reduced in relevant since both players had spread relatively far across the board (this actually affects games with more players also).

All in all however, the two player version played very much as a three or four player game. They gameplay was also significantly differently from standard go, with cards used multiple times to thwart plans and change the course of the game.

More play-tests coming up – thank you to our brave play testers!!!