shinjuku

Playtest #20

Wed 3 Oct 2018

Participants: self, JeffB

Overview

• Testing Kaiju expansion
  • Play matching card to move Kaiju into a neighboring ward and destroy something.
  • Kaiju starts in water. Need wildcard to move it out.
  • Kaiju action: Play a card matching Kaiju action to (optionally) move Kaiju into neighboring ward and (optionally) destroy something in that ward.
    • Destroyed customers are removed from game
    • Destroyed stores and track are returned to player

Components

• 18”x20” board with Map of Tokyo
• 72 Ward cards
• 8/7/6 stores per player for 2/3/4-player
• 16/13/10 track per player for 2/3/4-player
• 3/2/2 dept stores per player for 2/3/4-player
• 60 Customer tokens:
  • 19 ◯, 16 ⤫, 14 △, 11 ⭒

Rules

Setup

• Deal 5 cards to each player

Turns

Place a random customer at start of turn

Each turn take 2 different actions:

• Build: Pay a card, build a store in that ward
• Upgrade: Pay a matching card and a matching customer, upgrade a store to a dept store
• Lure: Pay a card, lure customers from that ward.
• Expand: Pay any 1 card to build 1 track; pay 3 cards to build 2 connected track
• Income: draw up to 5 cards, or draw 1 card if you already have 5 cards. Taking this action ends your turn.

Expansion action:

• Kaiju: Pay a card that matches Kaiju’s location to move Kaiju into neighboring space, destroy one item.

Department Stores

When a department store is built, it triggers a burst of new customers: 4/4/3 customers for 2/3/4-player game.

Final turn

When last customer is placed, that player finishes their turn and then everyone (incl the person who drew the last customer) takes one additional turn.

Comments

Kaiju is an action and can only be taken once/turn.

• Jeff: ◯◯◯◯◯◯ ⤫⤫⤫⤫ △△△△△△△ ⭒⭒⭒⭒ = 14
• Gary: ◯◯◯◯◯◯ ⤫⤫⤫⤫⤫⤫⤫ △△△△△ ⭒⭒⭒⭒ = 15

Adam: It’s odd to allow Lure actions to pass through the location where the Kaiju is located.

Adam: Instead of destroying, have the Kaiju scare customers away.

• Into a neighboring ward. Player chooses. All customers must go to the same ward.
• No infrastructure desctruction

Additional thoughts

Kaiju: Game goes on longer than expected because we build fewer dept stores and thus have fewer bursts of customers arriving. We only built 3 dept stores instead of the expected 4-5, so we had 4-8 fewer customers arrive and 2-4 extra turns/player.

Any variant/expansion that allows destruction needs to account for the fact that fewer dept stores will be built, so there will be fewer bursts from that. Otherwise the game will last a bit too long.

Suggestions/Actions

For next playtest:

• Kaiju:
  • Scares customers instead of destroying things
  • Lure actions cannot pass through Kaiju location
• What about 3 cards = wildcard?
  • PRO: Makes 5 non-wildcards (e.g., your first turn) not so bad
  • CON: Removes some incentive for building stores
  • Does it make it too easy to perform any action you want? Would that be bad?