A Weekend Passes and with it much feedback

The awesome team at [Playtest UK[http://www.playtest.co.uk/) hosted SixGamesInATrenchCoat at this years UKGE for the first real crunch time of VolleyBrawl. We had 90 minutes and chance to demonstrate to 5 new players. Overall feedback is wonderfully positive with many good questions over rules in being Bit, receiving penalties, how team cohesion operates, and how we might make more use of Skills. Lets look into this a little more .** Im writing this up here and will come back to update he core rules in a bit.**

Bites vs Block

There can be an occasion when the Haggis is Angry and your mini is within reach of the Haggis. In both cases this is a lose for the team. However the current rule idea was to suggest that the unbitten team gain point and the bitten team suffers a loss to team cohesion and skill. It did not feel “good” though that the about to be bitten player was unable to consider if they would rather not be bitten.

We talked this around and the overall feeling was that in this edge case , unlike being directly punched by a Haggis, the Player should be able to test to see if their player has enough skill to decide NOT to touch the angry haggis. In which case What I think should happen is you have a luck test and if you pass then your player does not block/intercept an angry haggis. In which case it lands and the point is still scored. I might go further and use the lob template to decide if the Haggis after landing RUNS off in a direction and creates a risk of another player being bitten. Which lend a chance to a Spike being a risk. You win he point but take a bite as well.

Penalty Vs Bonus

On the occasion a players team mini is bitten they suffer consequences in loss of Team Cohesion AND loss of skill. It was suggested that this penalty was a little too severe plus it made it harder for the penalised team. The suggestion offered up over the weekend was to give a bonus to the team that caused the bite. At the time I felt this was a good response to stop the game slowing or becoming a loss leader but in reflection I think I’m going too far the other way. It occurs to me what should do is.

• first reduce the skill of the player bitten.
• Second improve team cohesion on the other side.

Additionally I should reduce the values a little and focus only on Bites 1 and 2 since bite 3 would be a 3 point and a win to a team.

Team Advantage and Deck Control

Im going to change the rule and enforce swapping the decks each Round ( Point Scored / Foul occurred ) since I want to ensure the distribution of the deck is maintained excluding luck.

Lets see how this looks in the next release which will be out in a couple of days