Zach Hoekstra

Got in a full 4 player playtest of GRIFT yesterday!

There were some major fiddly bits, but a lot of the message is getting through. We had two people who were not used to money games, and while they had a hard time grokking the money mechanisms, they were able to muddle through by just doing actions that made their Line Go Up. Which is all I can hope for.

Dec 17, 2022 at 5:10amWeb
Show threadZach HoekstraDec 17, 2022

One great suggestion that came out was to push the idea of "one winner, many losers". This technically happens, as one person can really run away with available cashflow, but at the end of the game each person ends up "making" money.

Ideally, I want most players to be cash-negative at the end of the game. There's a few mechanics I want to remove, so I think there's mental load available to do a mechanic around squeezing people with no actual fiat money.

Show threadJ C LawrenceDec 17, 2022
@zhoekstra Do you have any sort of asset progression, wherein early assets are small, then there are bigger ones, then yet bigger etc? Add a simple system where size 1 assets are removed from the game when size 3 assets are bought, size 2 are removed when size 4 are bought, size 3 when size 5 are bought, etc. Now there's a treadmill which is constantly eating its own food supply. Scores will then be much lower if the game ends before the final assets can be actually used.
Show threadZach HoekstraDec 17, 2022
@jcl The economy of this game can best be described as "really freaking weird, that's the whole point", but there is an asset progression of a sort. I'll see if I can work something like this into the game