At the time of writing, there are 35 days left until the Stonemaier Design day. More precisely, about 826 hours. On top of this, I need to sleep at least 8 hours a day, work a 40 hour a week minimum day job, and going out of town for 8 days total in between now and Design Day, I actually only have about 472 hours, or about 19.6 days left to work on M.E.C.H.A. And that’s not counting dedicating time to be a normal human and doing groceries, house stuff, husband stuff, and other nerd stuff. Shit’s getting real really fast.

On Friday, I was able to playtest a new version of M.E.C.H.A. (v4.4.) with my friends Sloane and Jacob. This will be the first playtest of M.E.C.H.A. where the playtesters aren’t active/regular game designers.

Some of the newest additions to v4.4:

Back to the Bag

I personally felt that the bag felt the most like digging through rubble of a fallen building. And with us repairing the mech, it felt like my original narrative of “this is Kaiju vs Mech Round 2” was more in line with how I wanted the game to feel and operate, so I went back to players drawing resources from the bag.

New Kaiju Target Deck

The Kaiju Deck now has 6 cards in it: 3 Mecha Hangar, and 1 of each of Most Workers, Most Citizens, Nearest Building.

New Kaiju Deck

The cards are more simplified, theoretically letting the Kaiju move and deal damage to buildings more often.

All map spaces give you something, but anything can be destroyed by the Kaiju

Building spaces give you a lot of things, while regular map spaces give you a little something. The Kaiju now has a “Stomp” card in the Kaiju Deck, making it was standing on be destroyed and now unusable for the rest of the game.

Schematics cards no longer cost resources, and are either an Upgrade or One-Time Effect

Something I forgot to mention from Patrick’s playtest was upgrade cards needing Resources to be played felt super punishing, since they were the same resources needed for the win-con of building the mecha parts.

Schematics cards can now be placed on your card by going to the Building space that allowed you to upgrade. You get 1 upgrade per worker on that card.

New Buildings

I changed buildings to refit the bag-resource drawing and schematic cards, while also allowing you to rescue citizens to gain workers.

How it went

We played and won the game, it lasted about 47 minutes (not including teach time, which was about 10 minutes).

After playtests, I always open with “In your opinion, what was the most fun about the game?” When I asked this question,

the room went silent.

For a solid 6 seconds. Big gut punch. But that’s okay! It’s a playtest, and I need to understand why it’s not fun to make it fun. Luckily, Jacob broke the silence on the 7th second and said he liked upgrading his workers.

Okay, that’s something. This version had schematic card titles to fit the flavor of what the card did (previous versions only had the Kaiju Deck have flavor titles). Most notably, he had his workers with a Motorcycle (Your workers can move 2 spaces) and the Jeep (You can carry up to 3 Citizens when you move). Now, this pretty much broke the game – he had the ability to move several Citizens so fast around the board that it Crisis was no longer an issue. So much so, that only 1 Region (the Region the Kaiju starts in) went up. It was good that he felt strong and powerful, but it was so powerful it basically erased an aspect of the game that is there to feel scary.

Jacob also used the term engine-building when looking at the upgrades to his squad. Now that’s really something. Could there be a way for me to improve this feeling? That Schematic cards can allow you to build a mini engine within your player board? This is something I very much need to explore.

Furthermore, now that we were able to get more workers, once we each got to 4 workers the game fell flat on its face and then sunk into the molten core where the kaiju was probably born. With 4 workers, everyone was able to camp out in buildings that brought them what they needed. Super lame. While this was accentuated by the 2 of the Building’s worker powers being busted when you have a worker on each of them, it still doesn’t erase the fact that with 4 workers felt like you didn’t need to much.

We all also thought the Kaiju wasn’t scary enough. He was too “distracted” with the Target Cards. I designed the Target Cards in conjunction with the Kaiju Cards for the Kaiju to be unpredictable. Jacob said he liked that aspect of the game, but Sloane felt it was too unpredictable to the point it felt like the Kaiju was distracted. The Kaiju got halfway through it’s second District before we won. It getting closer to the Mecha Hangar should feel scary, but there were a lot of cards (both in the schematic deck and kaiju deck) that caused him to change targets. That, combined with the 50% chance of him not even going towards the Mecha Hangar each turn, made it feel like reaching the Mecha Hangar wasn’t even a threat.

This was super helpful, as I now feel like I’ve given too much power to Players and not enough in the game to make him scary. I need to find a way to accentuate the feeling of “suiting-up” the workers while also making the Kaiju an actual threat.

We started playing around with the idea that the Kaiju deck changes as the game goes on. Perhaps theres a Level 2 and a Level 3 Kaiju deck. Then, Sloane came up with a brilliant idea…

She brought up the point that the Kaiju stepping on Citizens and not killing them (removing them from the board) was lame. I agree. So in brainstorming, she thought that instead of just removing them from the board, they should be used on a separate track as if they’re getting eaten. I dubbed it the Tummy Track.

This new Tummy Track will now store Citizens that got in the Kaiju’s way. Once it reaches a threshold, the Kaiju will get stronger and more effective at moving and destroying.

I also now am going to reduce the 3 regions back into a single Crisis track – and instead of increasing it 1-to-1 with how many Citizens he gobbles up, it just goes up by 1 for each time does the gobbling regardless of how many citizens he gobbled.

Lastly, Sloane wanted to pilot the mech in full, not just the parts. She wanted a mini-game of sorts to happen at the end of the game, where we all pilot the Mech and fight the Kaiju. This is very interesting. When I first started designing the game, I didn’t want the Mech to be the focus, but the Agents of the M.E.C.H.A. Agency to be. She basically equated that both the title and win-con of the game was like Stanislavsky’s Gun, saying “You mean I build the giant mech and I don’t even get to pilot it? Boo!”

I want to give this more thought, but I am 90% leaning towards changing in favor of piloting the mech as a whole. 1 playtest group understood my initial focus and suggested being able to pilot the Mecha parts, like individual parts of the Megazord. This playtest group wanted the full on experience of using the Mecha. All in all, people want to pilot mechs. Hell, I have been one of those people since I was 5 years. So why deny it?

This does allow for an interesting design space. Perhaps at any time, you can challenge the Kaiju, even without it fully built, as a last ditch effort to defeat the Kaiju. This does require a lot of changes, most notably a whole “part 2” of the game to be designed where you and your fellow agents pilot the mech.

I have another playtest in about 2 hours and need to draw up some changes I mentioned above, so for now I’ll bullet some other feedback gathered from M.E.C.H.A. v4.4. Thank you for reading!

Most Fun:
– Upgrading Squad
– Kaiju was Unpredictable

Most Un-fun:
– Overheating Mecha parts is too punishing
– Target changes is too frequent
– After getting 4 agents, the game is easy
– No one cared about upgrades that changed the target
– Have a more solidified Player and Kaiju phase steps

Playtester Ideas:
– Have the map in a cone or circle rather than looking like a city
– Recovering from the Med Bay and taking a space action is one of the Player choices, in addition to Move, Place on the Board, or Recall.
– Kaiju gets stronger as the game goes on
– Going to the Mecha Hangar: You must choose whether you are repairing OR taking a Mech Part action