Labarnas — A narrative board game in ancient times

void4 2021-10-06 22:48

Nice game! I don't have a printer so I played it by copy-pasting tokens around in Gimp, which worked pretty well. It seems pretty balanced in terms of there being no obvious best strategy and every option having both benefits and drawbacks, although quite hard (I played the game 3 times before I won). I definitely felt the 'crumbling empire' vibe trying to shift my people around in the hope of surviving, which is good.

I think some aspects of the rules could be explained a bit better. At first I couldn't understand what effect assigning cards in the 'Feast of the Gods' phase was supposed to have (I initially assumed that the events would have a special clause where assigned cards would reduce the strength of the Assyrian attack or something like that). Additionally, the notation `⌊x⌋` / `⌈x⌉` isn't recognised by a lot of people from what I've seen (and pretty impossible for them to Google if they don't know it) so it should probably be replaced by an explanation in words or at least have an entry in the glossary (and there will be a smaller number of people who won't understand `min(x, y)` / `max(x, y)` either so maybe the same applies). That said, it obviously makes sense in the context of a time-limited jam to use these abbreviations.

Finally, one tiny typo: the map says 'Kizz**a**watna' instead of 'Kizz**u**watna'.

simonl 2021-10-07 10:30

Thank you @void4 for the very insightful comment!

Your balance experience matches quite nicely with what I was going for. In the end, demise is what ultimately happened in reality, and I wanted to make survival an accomplishment. One that maybe invites the player to wander in alternative history thoughts, where the Hittites continued to shape the greater region for another thousand years.

On another not, I released yesterday evening a post-jam updated version. The map art got an update and is now hopefully a bit less cluttered and more visually appealing. Based on your comment, I also added an additional sentence to the Feast of the Gods explanation, replaced the formulas with prose and corrected the typo.

Thanks again. It feels great to know that someone played it multiple times and actually felt the crumbling empire feel I was heading for.

frozenfire92 2021-10-08 01:30

What a cool entry! I didn't have a good way of playing this without printing it, but after reading through the rules I could see this being an enjoyable board game. In a future jam it might be useful to do it from tabletop simulator or similar. Keep on making games :smile:

hiroboto 2021-10-08 02:32

pretty nice trial! like the design so much!

ninjacreeper47 2021-10-08 04:43

This is an interesting design! I quite like the feast of gods mechanic, and how you can dynamically distribute your workers based off what you know has passed and is likely to come. Also I'm personally a big fan of the historical theme, and a struggling empire definitely feels unstable.

I think I have found a strategy that successfully breaks the game. Firstly is the feast of gods distribution: The most important part is to allocate 0 onto sea people raid, as they are the most dangerous in the early game. Then 3-1,2-2 or 3-1 onto famine-assyrian aggression (not sure which is optimal because famines are eventually good in this strategy but there is an argument for wanting an early aggression, In the game where I tried this (2nd play of the game) strategy I went for 3 famine-1 aggression, but I probably got a bit lucky, and I think 2-2 might be better. For worker placement never place on Nuhasse, it is useless and redundant. This makes you less spread out, giving you more workers. The weakness of this strategy is the small chance of getting unlucky in the early game and rolling a sea people raid on this territory. This weakness will disappear as soon you draw your first Assyrian raid, which makes that territory no longer a vulnerability.

Then you have the workers to something along the lines of 3-4 Hapalla, 3-4 Kizzuwanta, 3-4 Hatti. This gives you a reasonable enough defense in the frontier territories that you actually care about, and hopefully a chance at getting a decent worker income.

Next you wait while hoping you don't get really unlucky. Your goal is to have at least 13 workers (which should be pretty likely in a reasonable amount of time given the amount of prosperous years in the deck), at which point you can shift to the next phase which is the actual core of this strategy. In this phase you have enough workers to have 6 in each of the 2 frontier territories you actually care about, which is the maximum amount of defense you can get while still having the 1 worker to field hatti. It is now very unlikely for sea people raids to harm you at all, and the Assyrians have to get the lucky 6 to be able to make more progress. They key to this strategy is to now always leave only 1 farmer in hatti. Famines only make you lose farmers, so if you have only 1, each famine can only give you net -1 workers in your pool. You should still be able to have a semi net positive worker gain over the game because there are more prosperous years than famines (which will both now have a magnitude of 1 regardless of roll). Additionally you are immune to civil uprisings because half of 1 rounded down is 0. If at any point you have surplus workers dump them in Hapalla (so that they are not farmers which are too vulnerable and so they are not in the path of the Assyrians which has a low but non-zero risk of you losing the entire stock). Now the game is staple, anytime you lose your 1 worker in hatti you should have extra workers lying around in hapalla to fill their place on the allocation. I was able to reach the stable point after about 10 cards, and for the rest of the game I was bored, because I had already won (as long as I didn't get absurdly unlucky). The game no longer felt like managing an unstable empire after I hit the critical mass of workers.

The existence and possible effectiveness of this strategy shows some design problems in the game (like leaving only 1 farmer in hatti being optimal doesn't feel right, because the intent of the game is to make you balance farmers and soldiers but farmers are just too vulnerable.

Anyway, Great job! The first game I had the intended experience and watched in horror as everything went wrong and I didn't have enough workers anywhere and I enjoyed the time I spent thinking how to optimize this game during the 2nd play!

simonl 2021-10-08 07:54

@frozenfire92 The first commenter here played the game in Gimp (any image manipulation software should work) by copy-pasting tokens to the map. Pretty neat idea that might help if there is no printer nearby.

@ninjacreeper47, thank you very much for the detailed comment! I'm glad that the crumbling empire feel came across in your first game. Your strategy looks interesting. It is definitely not intended that one worker in Hatti is optimal. A nick pit though: In the civil uprising, it says "Lose half of your farmers rounded down, but at least one.", so you won't be invincible to them. With your event distribution (2 on famine and 2 on the Assyrians), you should have a 37.5% chance to gain a worker (12 prosperous year) and a 34.4% chance of losing one worker (6 famine, 3 civil uprising and 2 volcano). Together with the odd roll of a 6 from the Sea People or the Assyrians it should be in the range of 1:1 with the danger of losing also soldiers if you're unlucky. It all depends of course on which events are still to come.

Your thoughts on Nuhašše are interesting as well. My idea why players would want to defend this territory was to have a buffer zone to the Assyrians (what it kind of was for long periods historically, mainly to the Egyptians though). Giving the Assyrians Nuhašše for free makes them only two good roles away from occupying Hatti and ending the game. Very cool to see you going a different route. Also, not every real Labarna paid much attention to the southern territories.

I'm still not sure if the incentives for having more farmers are enough, you certainly gave me food for, though! :)

Thanks for playing!

mediflect 2021-10-09 01:19

Fun game! I played the 1.4 version, and I had a printer handy so I was able to print it out and do it all physical, with cards and dice and everything. I really appreciated not having to read all the rules to start - it made the game really approachable. I played three games in total - the first I lost after about 15 cards, the second I lost after only ~7 cards, and then the last one I won. The game definitely feels like a struggle for stability, and in that regard I think you nailed the theme. Well done!

As far as critique goes, there was only one interaction I wasn't really sure about how to resolve. In my first game, I had both Nuhasse and Kizzuwatna occupied by the Assyrians, and then a Sea People raid happened on Nuhasse. I wasn't sure if the "weakened" tile on Nuhasse was supposed to apply to the attack on Hatti, though ultimately it didn't matter because I rolled a six and lost anyway haha.

Overall it was a good time! I can tell a lot of thought into the mechanics and making sure they were well-balanced. My winning strategy was to put two cards on famine and sea raids each, and then do my best to survive at least one Asyrrian advance. Once I survived at least one, I knew I was safe from that loss condition (since there were only 3 cards that caused it in total), so I was able to focus on just defending Hapalla and Kizuwatna while keeping my farmers afloat. Great job!

forik 2021-10-09 20:20

Like for idea =D

simonl 2021-10-09 20:45

@mediflect, thank you for the insights!

While play testing myself, I didn't count a weak indicator on Nuhašše when the Assyrians attacked from Kizzuwatna. But that wasn't really a considered decision. I'll think about it and will make the rules on it a bit clearer. It's not well specified there. Glad that it didn't have an effect on you :D

playerdeer 2021-10-09 23:55

I had to get the printer out of my closet to actually test this, pretty neat idea tbh. I only saw the comments that people had the idea to play the game in Gimp and now I kinda wish I did that myself. Still fun nonetheless, gonna make my roommate try it too!

jaspior 2021-10-10 06:52

You can play on google docs too, neat game there!

yellowkamel 2021-10-10 09:01

Heya. I've created this game as a workshop download for Tabletop Simulator: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2624372080 For convenience reasons this might be easier for people to play. If you want me to take it down, I will do so. I originally created it for myself to test it, but thought it might be nice to upload it to workshop for other people to use my finished version.

simonl 2021-10-10 10:32

@yellowkamel Wow, I didn't even think about that. Many thanks for the effort! I added the workshop link to the description if you don't mind. I tried it out and it seems to work nicely.

@playerdeer Alternatively you can check out the Table Top Simulator link form @yellowkamel (I added it to the description as well).

Thanks for playing :)

alex-chertilin 2021-10-10 13:20

Thank you for the narrative board game. Rare jewelry.

guilloteam 2021-10-10 17:35

I always have a lot of respect and excitent for board / cards games entries in game jams! Good job on your game!

markveligod 2021-10-11 03:46

The narrative turned out to be very cool!

gno-evenimente 2021-10-12 06:04

This is awesome. I've never played a board game that involved a deck of cards before. Really enjoyed it.

2021-10-17 18:56

Very nice idea and concept.

very-dark-lord 2021-10-19 16:30

This was hard! I played it together with my girlfriend, and after two crushing defeats caused by both unlucky deck shuffling and very unlucky dice rolling, we decided to relax the rules a bit and change "less than" to "less than or equal" for some of the cases. Which helped. :D We were still close to extinction early on, but then managed to explode our population and become almost invincible.

I think it would be nice if there was a way to push the Assyrians back again after they take over your land. E.g. we had the case that the sea people attacked already weakened Assyrians once in our last game, and then just decided that this would push them back from Kissawatna to Nuhasse.

Also, while the current balancing really fits the "unstable" theme, from a pure game design standpoint I would personally prefer if it was somewhat easier to recover from weak states, and also easier to get weakened when the population is really strong. Currently, e.g. civil uprising is worse the fewer people you have. On the other hand my experience with game jams has been that there's just *never* enough time to get the balancing perfectly right anyway. :D

Really good job overall. First time I've seen a board game here, and I think it turned out really well. Very interesting concept and a great start for something that could become really engaging with a bit more fine-tuning.

simonl 2021-10-20 08:36

@very-dark-lord, thanks a lot for the thoughtful review!

That the design is prone to the extremes, early defeats and exploding population, was one of my main worries from early on. Luckily, most of the games during late play-testing turned out pretty balanced, as in, still losing but on the last third of the event deck without crazy worker amounts. But as you've experienced, it happens more often than I'd like.

The plan was that a competent player will roughly win every third or fourth game. The real Hittites ultimately crumbled as well and winning should be the accomplished exception.

I decided against being able to push back the Assyrians, mostly because I didn't want to add another mechanic and because it was so much out of the question in reality. But maybe that is an interesting idea for a "diplomacy" expansion… :grin:

But so much for excuses!

Giving the player more leverage to recover from weak states is definitely something to improve. Same with the swinginess of certain events. Thanks for the food for though :)

Somehow in game jams I always spent too less time actually playing the game :D (even though I did better this time than before)

btw: Did you play the jam version or the updated one?

sarah 2021-10-20 23:01

I wasn't able to play it because I can't print it, although I see that others used some programs to simulate playing it. It seems interesting overall, and I love that you did something non traditional!