We have been recently looking at the process of iterating a game. This means to tweak the original concept to improve the game in a number of ways. This could be to change the flow of the game, make it more or less challenging, to add the ability for more or less people to play the game or just to make it more fun.
The process of iteration is a simple one, first the designer picks one thing about the game to change, implements that change, tests it either themselves or with others and then evaluates what happened to determine if the change should be kept or dropped. Then they move on to any other iterations they wish to do. This process saves a lot of time and money and is a fast, effective way of prototyping a game because it prevents the designer from committing a lot of effort to one idea only to have it not be worth it in the end.
When looking at my board game concept I designed in the first week, the biggest problem was that there were too many spaces on my board in which there was no effect to the player, this reduced the game down to just the luck of a dice roll which was boring. Therefore the first iteration I made was to shorten the board so that more spaces were interactive, when this was tested it found it made a faster paced and more enjoyable game. The second iteration I made was that since I have shortened the board, that games finished very quickly, because of this I decided to make the players have to get from one end of the board to the other and then back again, effectively doubling the playing time. This seemed to work for the time sense but it also added an unexpected strategic element when players met one another going opposite directions due to my rules on players landing on the same space.
My final iteration was that it was possible to have more than one player finish the game in the winning condition (having the highest life points) so I decided to introduce the element of bonus points for players depending on the order they finished the game (10 for first, 5 for second, etc). This seemed to solve the problem of players finishing on the same points and added another element of trying to get finished first to get the biggest bonus.
Good work, i judge from the comments that you made above that you have found this method a successful one for the development of your game. As you point out, a single change - letting people go back and forth - can bring unexpected results, this is why it is important to iterate one change at a time so you can judge properly what is happening to your game.
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