Prototyping
“House of Asterius” is a cat and mouse style game where one player is the last Athenian sacrifice left in the labyrinth and the other is the violent and hungry Minotaur. As the sacrifice you must search the every-changing labyrinth for the exit before the Minotaur gets to you. Both players must navigate the labyrinth as walls and entire paths appear and disappear before their eyes. The board is made up of 24 individual map tiles with several surprise encounters. Actions were dictated by the suits on a deck of cards.
The two mechanics I focused on were action points and map deformation.
My final product has these components: 24 map tiles that are shuffled and randomly placed face down to create a map, a deck of playing cards, two player tokens and 13 walls.
First Session
In our brainstorming and first playtesting session, my partner and I tried to combine our preferred mechanics. They wanted to implement bluffing and I wanted to focus on map addition. After a quick brainstorming session we ended up with a game about escaping a labyrinth/maze. In the first version the goal was to find the exit before the other player.
After we parted ways I finetuned the theme by researching more on the mythologies surrounding the labyrinth and Daedalus, the inventor. At this point I changed the dynamic of the players from both trying to escape to one of them being the Minotaur.
Another major aspect I changed was the effects of the cards that were used to complete certain actions. Originally diamond cards allowed you to move, spade cards let you place down more walls, heart cards let you break walls down and clover cards meant you could either shuffle the map tiles or peek at a face down tile. I changed it around so that movement was not an action controlled by the cards. Instead diamond cards let you switch the placement of two map tiles on the board and clover cards let you peek at a face down tile. Spade and heart cards remained the same except you were also allowed to build and destroy map tiles.
The monster and treasure tiles originally caused the total amount of cards to decrease or increase but I felt like that was difficult to keep track of so instead those tiles decreased or increased the amount of moves you could make on your turn.
Second Session
In my second playtest I found a major flaw. If the exit tile was shuffled with the rest tiles and randomly placed on the board a player could accidentally find it on the first round if it ends up on the edge of the map formation. After two attempts where my opponent coincidentally began the game by immediately finding the exit I changed the setup rules so that the Minotaur player would secretly choose where the exit tile will be placed at the start of the game.
After successfully playing the game through that way I felt that each player should start with two moves/actions instead of only one to make each turn more interesting. My playtesting partner also suggested that face cards should have a better effect than number cards to make it more interesting. To prepare for the third session I also changed the wording of my rules to make them more readable.
Third Session
In the final playtest the changes that I made definitely improved the overall gameplay. Unfortunately I forgot two of the tiles at home so our starting set up was a 4 x 5 array instead of 4 x 6. My opponent felt that there was definitely a good amount of suspense as the sacrifice to motivate them to find the exit but the element of not knowing what the next tile could be encouraged them to explore as well. This was good to hear because aside from the action point mechanics I wanted the secondary mechanic to be map deformation.
After finishing the game I received some feedback on the monster and treasure encounter tiles. The effects of those encounters should be temporary or one-use instead of a permanent effect because it made the game too unbalanced.