Jorvik - Getting There...

I played Jorvik and couple of times on the weekend with Dunk, and a couple more times last night with Dave. Dunk described it as 'A working game now' and Dave as 'Nearly ready'. Not the most exciting of endorsements, but they show that progress is being made in the minds of my play-testers.

By exploring last night's scores you get some more interesting information. It's a card game, so luck of the draw is a factor, but to what degree? Here are those scores (individual round scores in brackets):

Dunk	Dave	Jack
(10,18) 28		(12,23) 35
(15, 29) 44		(16,28) 44
	(9,18) 27	(15,24) 39
	(15,19) 34	(13,26) 39

What can I possibly get from that? Well, here's a few things:

• There's not a huge amount of luck - my scores don't vary by much and I know what I'm doing
• It's a game you get better at with practice (the most experienced player usually wins, the least experienced shows improvement)
• It's possible to turn things around in the second half of the game (the loser of the first half doesn't necessarily lose the whole game)

The first point has been influenced by a couple of things, a decent hand-size means a player has more choice, coupled with the addition of a new rule which boosts the weaker cards - your draw is less important if all the cards are roughly equal in 'value'.

This probably comes down to working out how to use the priests to greatest effect, and learning the deck composition which helps guide how to position your cards to benefit from likely future draws.

I struggled for a long time with the last point, but in the end it turned out to be as simple as make the first round lower scoring than the second.

I need to do some more testing, and will probably tweak the deck slightly as I work out how the addition of the priests has changed the relative value of each card, but it's getting there. I now need to speak to my Dad some more about the artwork.