A few months ago, I took a board game prototype with me to Protospiel Minneapolis. I called it Mine Rush, and it was something that I had sitting on the back burner for a few years. I put it together in 12 hours, and quickly realized the early iterations were rough. It needed a lot of work. Over the span of that one weekend, I played a good dozen games of Mine Rush with different people and got a bunch of good feedback.
The early iterations involved reaching treasure nodes (marked with a yellow "T") where you could try to roll a die to acquire a gemstone that you could bring back to the entrance for some gold. The first couple playtests were ploddingly slow, this game was seriously lacking in the fun department. As I iterated, I figured out a press your luck mechanic for acquiring gemstones definitely helped speed things along. It was good!
After that weekend, I found what I thought was a sweet spot. Gameplay was snappy, the risk-reward of the mining worked, and it was overall decent. A couple publishers took notice of the game and liked it too. But there were a few lingering problems. For one, a bunch of people disliked the "roll to move" mechanic. It's not for everyone, but when I tried limiting the number of moves, it didn't feel like it worked the way I wanted it to. It still felt too slow.
Second, while looking into the costs of producing this game, I realized that the number of cards and parts is too much to fit into the packaging that I'm targeting for this game. I needed to get the game components into a more compact grouping to keep production costs down.
To do this, I made a pretty big rework. First, I removed the gemstone cards and the order cards. The only deck of cards is now just the Event cards. I instead added some gold tokens that can be used to keep track of things. Second, I removed the roll to move and instead added a limited number of actions. These can be spent moving around or digging for the gold.
The results were massive:
The game moves a lot faster now! I played two rounds with my wife and son last night. We were done in about half an hour. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either! I might add more ways to slow people down, we'll have to see on that. But the game is progressing nicely. Here's hoping next month's Protospiel leads to a publisher picking up the game. It's a long shot, I know. But one can always hope!