Citywise Update

Hello all, its Dave here again with the latest update on my games. Last week, I just gave a general introduction to myself and the games that I’m working on. This week I’ll focus on the work that I’ve been doing on Citywise, my game based around a city in a dystopian future.

The first major changes have been to the board, instead of lots of small spaces for the players to move around in, there are now 25 larger squares representing entire city blocks or sections of streets. Of course, I have had to reduce the movement rate for characters as well, but that’s no big problem. There are a lot of advantages in increasing square size; it means interaction between characters is more likely and so is an encounter with a riot or police patrol.

After a playtest with Jack we came upon the idea of a ‘moving’ element of the game, such as riots spreading throughout blocks or patrols roaming the streets. I tried out some ideas and settled upon these being moved by players during the action phase after a re-ordering of the turn sequence. I have also had to extend actions throughout the whole game to ensure that patrols and riots didn’t get stuck in one location for the final third of the game.

I have increased all the characters statistics from a maximum 10 to a maximum 12 and made them all movable. This ties in with the rationalisation of item cards as I can now reduce the types of dice in use to D6, D12 and D20.

The problem that I have had when developing this game is to ensure that there are plenty of options for the players, without presenting too many decisions that would slow down the game.

As an example, one worry that I had was that people would go to a shop to buy items only to spend ten minutes searching through the item deck to see what was there. I considered providing a list of all items so that people could window shop, but that would cause just as many problems. The best thing to do was to rationalise the items in the shops, so instead of having 6 different types of weapon, there are only 3 types available, the same for Tech items as well. Though to ensure that the ‘chrome’ of the game remains intact, I will be ensuring that each class of weapons has a range of different pictures and descriptions.

I had another solo playtest last night, and all the elements seemed to gel together in a good way. The next step will be to rope in my playtesting buddy Jack (you may have heard of him) to give it a try. See you all next week.