First playtest of… Military & Aliens

Over the December holidays, I took a week off and I thought to myself, I’m going to get to chill out, relax and play lots of games. Turns out I spent about 3 days solid prepping for the playtest!

This is the moment when I think designing and running a mega game is not for everyone. It’s a heck of a commitment. I am maintaining a master list of components and it seems to grow by the day. Here’s an excerpt:

For Chief of Defense Control:

• Manilla folder with CoD Control sticker

• CoD Rules

• CoD control notes

• Nukes rules

• 8 Table place markers

• Control Name tag

• World map (4x9)

• Turn order list

• 8 Nation strength tracker sheets

• 32 Strength tracker tokens

• 8x3 Interceptors

• 8x3 Fleets

• 8x3 Ground Units

• 5 Riot tokens

• 5 Insurgents/NPC ground troops

• 5 UN Crisis tokens

• Damage Tokens

• Artifacts (4 blue, 8 red, 2 black)

• Pen

• 8x2 tokens to represent patrol range

• Dice: 8d4, 10d6, 8d8, 8d10, 8d12

• Clipboard

• Turn order chart

I essentially have a list like this for each nation, each control member, each human role, the alien players and the lead control. So in preparation for the playtest, I needed the component lists for Chief of Defense, CoD control, Aliens and Alien control. I then set my main games room table for the military map and in my guest bedroom, set up another table for the Alien player. The idea was he’d be in the guest room with Alien control, work out what he wanted to do, then come back to the games room where we’d play the military game with Military control running the show. Here’s what the table looked like the morning after:

So here’s my key takeaways and outstanding questions:

• I need the war room phases very visible.

• Somehow we have to incorporate the UN events into the military game.

• Rebasing interceptors needs a lot of rules clarifications.

• What happens when a country is completely destroyed?

• What happens if a country gets so many blockades that they can’t go backwards on the income track any more?

• Where/how do you repair units?

• The alien map needs to have twice the detail on it (to make the aliens life easier.)

• We made the alien game REALLY fun. I played as a couple of nations in the war room but kept going to see the alien game and every time I did, I was a little jealous I wasn’t playing as the aliens.

• I think we nailed the number of fights the aliens go into. I.e. Humans were able to cover enough of the map with the units available to make it challenging for the aliens but whilst not screwing them over. It also felt like a major win when we shot down an alien spacecraft!

• I think I need to tweak the terror track and/or the terror generation. The aliens were not generating as much terror as I thought and as a result, the terror track is unlikely to have any effect on the game.

• The main map needs to be at least twice as big!

All in all, it was a really fun time. A little chaotic but there was a lot to learn for us all. I think we’ll need to repeat this playtest at least twice over before we feel good about the entire game.