Play Design and Learn - Vlog 1 - First Play Through

Hello,

A mainly unedited video of our first play through.  Run time is over 40 mins with a battery dying in between and phone call that was edited out.  Otherwise all clips joined in post processing into a long video.

First Play Through Video

First Scenario - Endless Waves of Minions for 5 rounds

Objective: Protect treasure in base from waves of minions.  If the minions touch the items they take it and it is removed from the board. 

Win Condition: Defeat all waves of enemies

Losing Conditions: Enemies take all treasure or eliminate all heroes.

Game setup:

Place three rows of minions at the far side of the board.  They will all advance 1 space forward at the start of each round and new minions will be placed on the back row.

Each player will select one hero and place them in the base area to start.  All minions have 1 health and heroes start with 5.

Shuffle commands deck and glitch deck and place on the Mice and Mystics page/clock tracker board.

Every 5 minions that are defeated place once cheese marker in the clock space.  After 3 cheese tokens(15 kills) draw a glitch card from the glitch deck.  Read the card and this will affect all players.  

Draft 4 cards from the commands deck to each player.

Players decide how to place the commands on their programming board.

Person who last ate cheese is the first player.

During their turn, players will execute in order from slot 1 through 6 on their programming board and move their hero according to instruction.  Orientation on how the miniature is facing is important.  After the program is complete play continues clockwise to the next player.

Once all players have executed their program, move all minions on the board forward once space.  If any hero is next to a minion after they move remove one health for each minion next to a player.

Replenish the back row of minions.

Draft new command cards for each player.  By default 1 to each player but other powers may affect the number of cards drafted later in the game.

Continue until win or lose conditions are met.

What Worked

After all players figured out how to program their boards the game went fairly smoothly.   Things like healing and damage we're figured out in realtime instead of before we started during rules explanation.  Other than that players enjoyed the mashup version and it's been requested to play again asap.

What we are going to change for the next game

We found that this mode was a little bit long; around 75 minutes, and towards the end some players both children and adults started to lose focus.  We are going to try a finite version of minions on the next play through with 5 or 6 rows of minions that do not get replenished and see if that helps.  We would like to get this down to 20-30 mins playtime and play twice instead of a long session.