Friday, April 27, 2012

SFAR -first playtest

Well, we playtested SFAR last night at the Baron's Chateau. As a play test it went fine. Found out lots of stuff as soon as we got started. I like playtesting if everyone is in the mood to test. And I enjoy trying to come to grips with why you did what you did. Somethings click, somethings don't. I took many notes and will incorporate them into the next version. Some things to work on.

There was some struggles with group activation and units. Nomeclature I think as I am approaching it a bit different than a normal set up. Must ponder this.

Artillery - I did the artillery rules litterally in 1 minute before I printed last night before the game. they need much work to be able to be feroucious, and still maintain balance. They were killers and too powerful for sure.

ECM. Not sure if this is mdeled the way I want it. But it did force some maneuver, hunti9ng of reece units, etc. so I'm 50/50 on it.

Fire and hits definition.  Again I think nomeclature held a few people up. I need to rename some things to make it more clear as to what the intent is to make it simpler for the players.

Number of pieces on the board. I had forgotten how small 6mm is and the effort it takes to maneuver them.  we had about 12 units a side and it was an effort to move them all.

Length of time for a turn. I would like to have a much quicker game. turns took a long time. Part of it is a new set of rules, part is the sequence. I may look at going to alternating unit moves, or doing unit to unit firing, and just having a fire factor for a unit. i.e. Add up all the gun factors(say 1 per tank). so a uit of 5 tanks would have a fire of 5. roll that against the armor of the opposing unit. distribute hits against the unit(attacker chooses). It would quicken things up(instead of model to model firing) but takes the level of the engagement(looking down on the battle, think of a satellite or camera lens, I guess resolution is a good work too) up from 100' to 1000'.

Anyway. It was a good test. It was a little soon for a 6 person test, but I learned a lot. Some folks didn't enjoy them, but that's ok too. I will keep working on them until they are what I want. Thanks to the Generals for their input.

2 comments:

Essjam said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Essjam said...

Ken, I thought it was a good play test. It held up pretty well with 6 players. One suggestion on arty, if you shift targets on the second volley, I think the penalties should be increased. Traversing guns, movement of target would lead to bigger in accuracy I believe.

I used that 2nd volley rule to advantage, I felt arty was too strong. HTH, Scott