The tales of a casual games designer: Part 8

Well, played tour. with the in-laws last night. Playing games with them is always an interesting experience as my father-in-law (Barry) spends most of any game we're playing going "Oh I dunno, I've got no idea what's going on" before winning or doing something extremely clever while the fabled mum-in-law (Linda) tends to spend about an hour per turn even if it's the simplest of options. Hence the game taking quite a while longer than past experiences.

At Cast Are Dice with four teams of four cyclists one stage took about an hour and twenty to an hour and a half while two player games with the wife take a little less time. With the in-laws playing for the first time it took over two hours which seemed quite a long time, but people vanished for toilet, making tea, getting crisps etc and most of the slow movement was Linda who just naturally plays like that. Still, it's good to see how pretty much non-gamers got on with the game.

Linda won.

She didn't just win, she annihilated the rest of us. We played most green jersey points as a team won which seemed to work well for a one off race, with 65 points available...Linda picked up 40, Anna got 18, I got 8 and Barry got just the 1 which was partly my fault as I tried to force my sprinter through a space that wasn't there, causing a crash with Barry's sprinter which my guy picked himself up from (after missing a couple of turns) while his was out for the rest of the race. Which kinda scuppered his chances of picking up points on the sprints.

He also didn't use his best cyclist to his full ability while Linda seemed to pick up the concept of not attacking too early and waited until I sent two cyclists off (far too early) before latching onto them, recovering her cyclist's energy and breaking away again, sprinting past the line just before the cyclist's health ran down. Anna's best cyclist came second with a massive charge over the last 40km while my two dropepd back (with no more power OR a sprint to help them out at the end). Barry managed to pick up the last finishing point with an exciting last minute charge and sprint which gave him something to cheer about.

Overall, the tactics of the game felt great again, with breakaways being pulled back in and some cyclists dropping off the back into their own group. Two of mine and two of Anna's were in that gorup so we agreed to work together to catch up the leading group which felt great and tactical and an achievement when we'd caught up.

So yeah, although it took longer than expected it seemed to go down well which is good. Just got a couple of design changes to make to the counters and terminology to make things clearer.