December Build Review
It's coming together!
Today the team did a review of the Mr. President build - a lot has gone in since Thanksgiving! I want to run down some highlights from that review and show how some of the digital elements we’re building will make the game more accessible to players.
No more forgetting to apply your start-of-turn presidential attributes!
We’re putting some rules call-outs in informational hover-buttons, so players can drill down to see how some of the more complicated game-state changes work, without having to break flow and access rulebooks:
Likewise, the digital version parses the board and finds your die roll modifiers (DRMs) for you:
On Crisis cards that involve custom player choice (e.g., choices that don’t just mirror other types of choices, like picking a terror group on the map), we’ve added buttons right on to the card. Note also the stack on the left; that keeps track of where you are in the current Activation Segment, so you always know what’s next:
Another example of showing players the full table that they’re about to roll on, right when they need it, so they can see not just results but the range of possibilities:
Some actions in Mr. President allow you to spend up to 2 Action Points (AP) for additional die roll modifiers. Rather than come up with a clever approach, we went with the least confusing one, since this doesn’t have to scale up to larger expenditures, and just give two separate buttons:
Next week, I’ll write about some wider design questions, and share some more about what Early Access gameplay will look like. After that, we’ll see some Wars and Rogue States in action, and the critical Year End sequence, which rewards or penalizes you for the state of the world.