Endgame

The Queen Must Die is a long game.  Not Twilight Imperium long. But well over an hour, realistically two even without the shackles of Tabletop Simulator.

For the first half of the mentorship that was my big goal – to trim the game down. And I knew it was happening – but I really couldn’t know for sure to what degree thanks to the ‘playing-one-handed-with-an-oven-mitt-on’ experience of playing on-line.  What was important was that the game had been trimmed enough that I was no longer feeling like that was my main issue.

I even said, out loud, that I felt like the low-hanging fruit was getting to be pretty small. Never say that stuff out loud. Right?

I knew that I needed to play the end of the game more. Due to the length it was not uncommon for us to not get to the endgame in a playtest. And the endgame is one of the outstanding ideas of this game. And not by a little-bit. Consistently it was what people who I explained the game to keyed in on as the most exciting element to them.

Sidebar: I’m not holding out on you here – I just don’t want to get away from my narrative here – I explain the endgame at the bottom.*

So my mentor, Jonathan, and I decided it was time to commit to getting playtests through to the end. Period.  Book excess time.  Forge through.  Make sure the play testers know that’s the plan.  So we did.  We set aside a (ridiculously long) 4 hour block on Sunday and made it abundantly clear that we needed a commitment to the whole time. Jonathan decided that it was time for him to see the whole thing at work too, so he was going to join for the first time to play.

It was exciting and a bit intimidating.

The time came and I ran through my “what you really need to know in order to play” explanation – having refined it to a pretty trim teach for the size of game of just 15 minutes. Mostly this was to make sure that all my play testers were on the same page as far as changes since they last played – and also for Jonathan who was broadly familiar, but had not played yet.

We dove in. And the game practically flew for the first two hours… then we hit the endgame.

And the game started doing things that it never had before.  Weird stuff. Game breaking stuff. Stuff that seemed obvious when it happened. The worst of which, I cannot lie, had previously been a concern… but I thought I had designed it away.  But I guess I had just buried it – and now, with players who were getting savvy to the game, strategic choices that newbies would never think of bubbled back into play.

And the last ¼ of the game took almost as long as the first ¾ - (largely due to break-off discussions about what was failing). It was an epic fall. Totally demoralizing to have the game so completely crumble for the first time in ages the day that my mentor shows up to play. I got to the point in our post-game debrief that I really couldn’t process any more and started to mentally shut-down.

Bed time came and I lay awake thinking about the resurfaced problems… though really it was mostly a litany of expletives dancing around in my noggin.

Eventually I fell asleep – no new answers really.

Just in case I wasn't being blatant enough...

My morning shower – you know how showers are… a private zen moment away from other distractions. No kids, no phone, no TV in the next room. Just they hypnotic pellets of water drumming into your skin…. And then - *SNAP* like the clock of my fingers - there it was an idea – a path forward.  As though everything that had been destroyed the day before had been set right. Something I’d been subconsciously processing as I slept coalesced into a workable idea. Something that might just vanquish the dreaded game-killing strategic patterns that had come back to haunt me. Something that would lead me forth out of my despondency.

I don’t know that it will solve my issues, but it seems promising. I’ll bounce it off Jonathan tomorrow and do a quick build on it so we can playtest it on Sunday. If only I could fast forward the first ¾ of the game so we could try it out right away, but its not the kind of game that easily lends itself to jumping in without the emotional build up and investment.

*ENDGAME: As the endgame of The Queen Must Die approaches, players must ask themselves if they think they have outdone their opponents in the act of saving the Queen.
“Wait? But doesn’t title say she MUST die?”
Yes, it does. But strictly speaking she doesn’t have to.  Players are trying to save her from marauding adventurers, and as they do they gain prestige in the Kobold clan. In the end either the adventurers are vanquished, or the Queen is. If they Queen dies, the Kobold with the most prestige wins – ‘cause they get to take the throne. If the Queen lives, she knows she can’t trust the most effective of her subordinates – so she puts the Kobold with the most prestige to death. They lose, while the others celebrate a group win. So it is in the most Prestigious Kobold’s best interest to betray the Queen and help the Adventurers.
The real catch is that the stuff you need to do in order to save the Queen gains you the prestige that is going to make you want the Queen to die, and while you are busy back-stabbing (sometimes literally… well, literally in the abstraction of the game) the Queen you aren’t gaining any Prestige, while everyone else is as they try to save the Queen.