Designer Notes ItM #3

Hey! Curious about board game development? What's going on in Into the Mountain v4.0? 3 new players and one returning player got to tackle new strategies and find optimal decisions. I still enjoy seeing the game through fresh eyes.

Some of the things I'm focusing on in this iteration:

• obtaining (pledging to) the clans during the game

• melding the working placement with the mountain

• increasing player interaction

• bringing the theme to life

I've been researching more about the very successful board games on BGG. What became very clear after reading comments was the players who thoroughly "love" the game is rarely about the quality of the play, but the game tells the story of the theme. Personally, playing Terraforming Mars makes me "feel" like I'm in the theme. I understand it seems far fetched, but I feel the game experience takes me to what the story of the game is.

I'm laying the groundwork in Into the Mountain for a major story arch, but I'll get into that more another day. I do care about if the game feels the theme.

How was the play experience? Pretty good, I think. Manuel gave me the comment "it's really digging into the deck-building mechanic", which is definitely what I've been going for. Zoltan commented that he was "really building a good engine". It was fun to watch Zoltan play, because he claimed to have played "500+" games of Terraforming Mars. He was constantly trying to optimize his decisions. He recruited all 4 of his dwarves in a single round with the "correct" order.

I gave Alexander the advice to seize the opportunity of pledging to clan Cherk (lead by queen Doralin). I further offered the advice that he should also immediately capitalize on the advantage of 6 crystals as soon as possible. If I recall correctly, he was last in the player order, so his dwarf could only go to the factory, which allows one to build a construct. I think that was unfortunate, as well as he should have spent almost all of his crystals right away. He later reflected he wished he had done so.

I really found the plays and recognition of strategies by Corina to be interesting. She had played v3.0 before, and stated seeing the changes and improvements in the design. She had pledged to clan Berlag (lead by steamforge engineer Brynnia). Berlag benefits from upgrading mines (triggers a card draw). She leaned into the upgrade and steam strategy. The drill (red resource) and gear (green resource) archetypes are starting to shine, but steam remains a bit undecided. It's split between card draw and science (mine upgrades).

I understand I'm focusing a lot on the positives. What was I frustrated with? The new area control rules aren't fully fleshed out. Players need a good reason to create "presence" on a mountain tile. A reason to compete on majority domination. And also they must, must have incentive to go wide. Building many tier 0 mines as possible. In the v3.0 design, going wide on mines was 90% the winning strategy. I'm thrilled that's finally died, but I'm not satisfied with the current state.

Also, the game(s) have been going a tad longer than I intend. I mean, I love a good 3 or 4 hour heavy game; but the previous games closing near 2 to 2.5 hours seemed better. I had done the math and the count of tunnels required to finish the game should have been similar, but it just wasn't shaking out like that. I deleted a row of tiles during the game and it still felt like they could have finished a 10th round. I'll keep that in mind as I fine-tune to v4.1.

Thanks very much for reading. I wish you the best in your board game plays or designs in the future!

Cheers,

Kevin