It’s early March, we’ve finished up our largest playtests yet, and that means it’s time for a progress update on Card City Critters!
Here’s the short version: We’re still plugging away at the game. We’ve run two larger scale playtests that are closer in vision to what we want the final game to look like. We’ve added dozens of cards, a bunch of activities and puzzles, and we’re working hard to add more.
Now for the longer version.
After Boston FIG, we were confident that people enjoyed the base battle card game. As a result, we’ve been focusing on some of the other components. In our minds, the final version of Card City Critters is a longer and slightly more involved experience, something a bit more like an escape room or immersive theater.
We’ve run two playtests of this version of the game. These were 2.5 hour events at local game stores, where players started out by getting a deck, and then solved puzzles, challenged their fellow players, and dueled NPC’s to earn additional cards for their deck.
These have given us a lot of great feedback, but also illustrated some pain points in our current design.
A lot of our puzzles are hit or miss. Some people really enjoyed searching through bulk cards, other folks found it frustrating. Most folks have enjoyed our scavenger hunts, but felt let down when someone else solves or gets the grand prize first. Our “find lethal” puzzles are too difficult.
We’re also still working on our grand finale. At Boston FIG, this was a boss battle with the Magnate. For our first playtest, this was something similar, but we found it didn’t work well with a higher player count. For the second one, we tried something new (but no spoilers)!
While this worked much better, the boss cards were overtuned, and the result was a sweep for the boss. Whoops! Still, some of these boss cards seemed to work well, so we’ll be revising those ones that worked well, and redesigning the few that didn’t.
Probably the biggest thing that we’re still grappling with is how to balance puzzles and dueling. Right now, people feel like if they do one, they miss out on the other. We’ve tried a few fixes for this, but none have really worked. Solving this is our next big challenge.
Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to just focus on what isn’t working, so let’s talk about what is! First up, we’ve got a shop, and over a dozen unique shop cards.
These include some unique and powerful cards, and players have enjoyed them. It also has our first set of non-standard emblems that you can be swapped out for the base ones! (You might recall that emblems are our deckbuilding restriction: you can have one of each color to go along with your deck, and choose any to flip over. Each emblem you flip prevents you from playing cards of that color in your deck, but gives you a permanent bonus instead.)
Also, we’ve added a set of cards called fossils! These are cards that you can collect, and then fuse together into powerful dinosaurs, becoming more powerful the more fossils you find, and these have also been quite popular. I need to redo the art on a few of them though….
So yeah! We’ve been up to a lot. While we don’t have a date yet for our next big public playtest, we’ll be at Granite Game Summit later this week with a smattering of decks and puzzles for folks to try out. We’ll be there on Saturday, March 7th at 10am, so if you happen to be swinging by, feel free to give it a try!
As always, more updates to come as we continue to plug away on this thing. The best way to stay up to date is to join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game, or to join the game’s mailing list here.
We also might be at PAX East in Unpub! Maybe! Not quite sure yet!
As always, thanks for playing our game, and more info to come in the future.
