PNP Wednesday 13 - Pao Chuk
Hi, it’s Dominique, the other half of Blank Wall Games. Normally Olivia writes the blog posts and I edit them. This time we switched it up because we took my first game, Pao Chuk, to the store to test.
The premise is such:
The Chinese New Year is approaching, and a catastrophe has occurred in the warehouses storing the fireworks for the celebration. It is up to you and your rival pyromasters to restock the warehouses and put on an amazing show. Hire workers, mine your metals, collect your safety measures (or dare to make your fireworks without them), and leverage the information you’ve uncovered about what the peasants, nobles, or the emperor want to see. The pyromaster with the most favor on the New Year wins the game!
This is very much a prototype in progress so there are no files available for PnP yet. This was the first play through outside of the house and we really wanted to put the prototype through the wringer.
The game was to last 8 rounds (supposedly weeks before the New Year), but when we felt that wasn't enough we played out to 12 rounds. This will have to be significantly tested further after the numerous changes this playtest brought.
The goal is obviously to build fireworks for the general public, fulfill special orders for influential people, and gain the most favor among the three factions so that you will be proclaimed the Greatest Pyromaster in China.
At the beginning of the game, each player is given 2 Hidden Market Information cards and chooses one. This is information you've discovered that, when revealed at the end of the game, affects all the players. For example, you’ve discovered the commoners are really looking forward to the holiday, and all Commoner work orders are worth double favor, or that purple fireworks have been a real rarity lately, so every purple firework made will be worth a bonus 3 Favor.
There are three different Favor tracks: 1 for Commoners, 1 for Nobles, and 1 for the Emperor. At the end of the game, you apply any modifiers from the Hidden Market Information revealed, apply a 10 Favor bonus to the players who have the most Favor on each track, then add up all the Favor. The one with the highest final tally wins.
The game is set up in 5 different areas.
There are cards laid out in a 3 x 3 grid, stacked 4 high. The top cards are the mines you can access. Each card had 4 different metals on them. The metals are representative of what you need to have the firework actually be the color you want.
For example, Strontium produces a red color but is a grey metal. (I know, what a shock!) However, for simplicity’s sake I wanted them to simply be represented by the color they became in a firework. I decided instead of the typical resource cubes to use beads just for prototyping so you could actually build your firework and have it stay together on a trimmed pipe cleaner. (Which is important for scoring at the end.)
The initial idea was you would place your worker on a mine and choose one of the metals on it. Once that mine was depleted, you had dug to a deeper layer and flipped a new card. You can see the changes we made in the playtest section.
In addition to the mines, you could also visit the town, which contains a market, and access to 3 different types of safety materials. Water at the river, charcoal from the forest, and clay from the clay pits. The market allows you to buy and sell metals and safety materials. The price of the resources go down as you sell them, and up as you buy them. We did not get to see much use of the market, but that was through my folly, which I’ll discuss further in the play section. Any number or workers can be placed in any section of the Town with no blocking. Here you can also refine the metals you have to make the rarer of the two colors, not available through a basic metal – purple and orange. They are logically produced by combining the metals that create red and blue for purple and yellow and red for orange. You refine two metals together and get ONE of the corresponding metal. (May require tweaking.) Green is naturally produced by burning Barium.
Here there are (originally) 6 workers that have special abilities affecting gameplay that you can hire. When you hire a new worker, if there are less than 6 workers available, a new one flips out. A worker’s initial cost is 5 cash, then a wage of 2 cash at the end of every turn if you want to keep them. Hiring a worker gives you an additional worker to place, so if you lose the worker card, you lose a placement worker as well. If you fail to pay their wages, the rival to your left can choose to pay their wages instead of hire them on. If no one wants to pay them, they go back to the recruitment office adding to the ones already present.
There are 3 different types of work orders, and fulfilling them provides you Favor with the people whom you’ve satisfied. There are Commoner work orders, Noble work orders, and Imperial Work Orders. Commoner work orders are usually easier and provide some points on the Commoner Favor track and cash. Noble work orders are more difficult, providing points on the Noble Favor track and are worth more cash. Imperial work orders are much more difficult, and give points on the Imperial track but do not provide cash. They provide more points per firework than the lesser orders. Work orders must be fulfilled to be claimed. Once they are completed, a new order takes its place. These are all shuffled together, so a Commoner Order might be replaced by an Imperial Order.
This is a player board, where players build and store their fireworks. There are three different sizes of fireworks you can build; Basic, which requires 2 metals and 1 stabilizer; Improved, which requires 3 metals and 2 stabilizers; and Advanced, which requires 4 metals and 2 stabilizers. At first the Workshop doesn’t offer any advantages, but as you gain money, you can buy enhancements to your workshop, such as the ability to refine and build with one worker or the ability to build two Basic fireworks at once. These enhancements didn’t get any play this game, but hopefully next game they will. We didn’t test it yet, but we also have dice that you can choose to roll in place of having a stabilizer. For each catastrophe that occurs on the dice, something negative will occur. Our current idea is:
1 catastrophe means you fail to create the firework
2 catastrophes mean you lose all materials involved in the creation as well
3 catastrophes means your worker goes to the hospital for the remainder of the week, and at the end of the week you have to pay his hospital fees or you lose him. A rival can pay his hospital fees and take him, but if no one pays, that worker is out of the game.
This was my game. I’ve helped with the others from creation to completion, but this was the first one I had actually thought of and put together with Olivia helping me instead of vice-versa. I was a little nervous, and very grateful for the playtesters who sat with me through the first test.
The first thing we noticed was 8 rounds was not going to be enough time at all. Each worker collected one resource when placed on a gathering point. A basic firework took 2 metals and a safety material. That was a minimum of 3 placements. We extended it to 12 turns but everything went much too slow. Now instead of choosing just one metal when you place your worker on a mine, you’ll gather all the metals that are there. There are 6 different metals that produce color (see below for a reference on what metal creates which color) and then there’s actual gold which when mined gives you cash. In addition, when gathering a safety material, you will now gather 2 instead of just 1.
I’m also changing the cost of workers as well as their wages to 10 cash initially and 4 cash as wage.
I don’t want to make too many changes at once, but those were issues that were clearly a problem, and now that I have a solution, I’m going to go back to the table and try again. I know there will be more changes, especially with the amount of favor and whatnot, but I think I’m at a good testing place now! One other problem is the beads roll around a lot. I looked for square ones, but couldn’t find some that worked.
Also, for those wondering, this is the metal to color chart:
Purple - Combine Strontium and Copper
Orange- Combine Sodium and Strontium
Gold - Iron, but very unstable (add extra stabilizer)
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to share them with us!
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