Collapsi Devlog - A Whole New Level!

So we quickly moved away from the printable grid.  That was not a permanent solution, but a fast and easy way for us to test tiles with special powers.  The powers were pretty underwhelming.  As I was preparing to move back to a plain grid of numbers, the idea hit me: double sided cards!  With this idea, each tile can be landed on twice.  After leaving the card for the first time, it is flipped over and a new number is revealed.  After leaving that card for a second time, it is removed from the board.  We tested this with a 3x3 board and it was a hoot!  

This turns the multiplayer game into a 9 card micro game which is pretty cool.  Both Cristina and I felt the game could be more, so we added enough cards for a 4x4 grid (which could still be an 18 card wallet game).  We played that you cannot wrap around if cards are missing from the outer perimeter of the column or row (just as if the cards were still there upside down rather than missing).    The first 4x4 game fell flat for me.  It felt like the first half of the game was pointless.  I felt like I was running around flipping cards just so I could get to the real game.  Not wanting to give up on it, we gave it another go.  This time my strategy was to purposefully cut the board in half by really digging into the middle of the grid or one of the edges depending on my starting position.  Oh, and we added magnets to the cards...

So as we played through our 4x4 game, Cristina mentioned that the game needs one more thing.  One more piece to add a layer to the game.  After some thought, we landed on shifting tiles.  After some more thought, we landed on putting images of magnets on the cards to designate which way that card would pull.

This turned out to be very enjoyable.  We were left with one question while we played, should both sides of the same card be magnetic?  As it stands, if a card has a magnet on one side, it does not have a magnet on the other side.  There is no way of knowing which card exactly has a magnet on the back.  This does add a nice bit of chaos to the game, but I am not sure if that chaos robs players of their ability to strategize.  Our two play-throughs with this randomized setup didn't feel too wild, but I also could not plan for the backside of the cards.  I feel like that information should be on the front of the card.  But that also seems like too much information, and I run the risk of encouraging analysis paralysis.

Here are my action steps:

• Make a deck that allows for perfect information
  • this means the same number on both sides of each card
  • magnets on both sides of the same card
    • magnets pointing the same directions on both sides
• Start settling in on the theme/flavor of the game