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2 juin 2008 1 02 /06 /juin /2008 17:38
I managed to get in a playtest of Metro Pittsburgh last night. I foolishly forgot to bring my digital camera along, so I have no pictures to post, but I can give a brief report of how the game went:

The central urbanization mechanic works almost exactly as I expected it to. In our playtest, most of the cities ended up being urbanized in the central triangle area and the east, which is not surprising statistically because only about 1/3 of the towns are away from the central area. The lonely blue city did end up being stuck in an interesting spot though, the top left corner, and a bit of a race developed to build there.

In the first playtest I opted to give us 15$ to start with and to cap the shares at 20. In reality, the 15 share limit seems fine with the 15$ starting cash. The terrain on the map is tough, and it tends to create a constant need to spend the money that is coming in, even into the late game. The map started out with First Build, First Move, Loco (standard), Engineer (4 track or free bridge), Stroll and Repopulation. Repopulation is definitely getting the axe because it is too similar to Stroll in practice, and the map already seems like it has too many goods. I might cull it back by 2-3 before the next playtest. I have to come up with another role to replace Repop so that there are at least 6 role to choose from right now. One of the playtesters astutely suggested a mechanism to change either the particular city or the location of the to-be-placed urbanized cities, but I'm torn about that. It's a neat mechanical idea, but it reinjects power over the urbanization that would create some in-system chaos, and I'm not sure if I want that in this particular map. The most likely short term fix is to split the Engineer into two roles: 1 to place 4 track, and 1 to get the free bridge. The only risk here is that almost all of the roles are useful, and the auction has problems again. Loco is still almost explicitly the best role for the early game, but the free bridge is effectively 6$ in the bank, so it's not a bad second choice. I will probably end up toying with the auction again to see if I can come up with some solution beyond the normal tweak.

Overall I'm pleased with the first playtest though. I am relatively optimistic that the development of this map will be shorter than Montreal, mainly because I was able to base the initial draft off of things I already learned using the central mechanic (albeit on a smaller, more limited scale) while designing and developing Montreal.
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