Talk:Barrakesh Express
Add topicPlaytesting Notes[edit source]
Initial playtesting is promising, in terms of overall balance and playability. --Carthoris 13:00, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
Features for Final Board[edit source]
City names will be typeset and pasted up on the board, instead of my penciled "Martian calligraphy."
On the final board, the route squares will be redesigned to indicate both the number of card points and the number of pyramid pips needed. In the meanwhile, the algorithm relating pyramid pips to card cost is as stated in the rules. As an example, route squares should end up looking something like this:
| [Spade] 17
4 [Pyramid] |
Modified Board and Tickets[edit source]
I took the liberty of making a cleaner version of the board in Microsoft Publisher (mostly in hopes that it would help convince someone to try the game with me). Taking the comments above into account, pips were added to the squares indicating how many pyramids are needed to claim the square. "#" was used to for the "any suit" squares since I was having a hard time finding a symbol that matched that of the prototype board.
While I was at it I changed some of the suits and values slightly to better distribute the weight of each suit and break-up how far you could travel continuously by only collecting a single suit. For example, on the prototype board you could travel from Manator to Cydonia (3 stops) using only Hearts. Additionally, I made a new set of destination tickets with a more normal distribution of values and fair usage of cities (it seemed like some of the small cities were kinda ignored...).
Lastly, I overlaid the whole thing on a gray scale version of a publicly available map of Mars made by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) satellite. I think is gives a nice feel to the map and was quite impressed with how naturally some of the cities seemed to be located (e.g. Argyre looks to be situated on the top of a large plateau where one might imagine a city being built).
Sadly, after all this work I still have yet to play the game... I hope to fix this soon!
Update: here are the files. Let me know what you think!
Modified tickets --Umjahwa 21:50, 12 Sept. 2014 (UTC)