Last time, I talked about my plans/adjustments for fixing the slow start - the addition of the pantry and giving each player 4 starting ingredients. Today I want to talk about how I plan to address the next big issue (in my mind) from the playtest, kitchen upgrades. My note from the playtest was:
Kitchen upgrades felt hard to obtain. The benefits offered by the kitchen upgrades felt good, it was just hard to pay for one.
Having had some time to think about this, I think there’s more to this than just that things were too expensive (which I still think is a big part of the issue). I think upgrade availability is also making it hard for players to pick one up. In the playtest, there were 5 upgrades available, when one was purchased, it was replaced with a new one from the deck. Only having 5 to choose from can be problematic in a number of ways - maybe a player doesn’t have a lot of coins and most of the upgrades are level 3, maybe the player has coins but the available upgrades don’t seem like they will help towards an objective. I have a new approach that I hope will make this easier!
In an attempt to solve this I'm first going to lower the cost of kitchen upgrades. Everything will come down by two coins across the board - from (8, 14, 20) to 6, 12, 18). I think I could take these discounts even farther, but I don’t want to overswing considering the other changes made to accelerate the game. Below is a peek at a few new kitchen upgrades with the updated costs.
Next, I’m going to change the way that cards are purchased in general. Instead of a faceup pool of cards to choose from (like the market), I’m going to seperate upgrades by level which players will purchase from a deck. When purchasing, players will draw 3 upgrades from the deck and select 1 to keep, returning the others to the bottom of the deck.
It feels like there should be less friction in this approach, and I’m hopeful this will encourage players to spend coins on upgrades earleir, and more often. Choosing from a shared pool of upgrades makes the choice feel like it has greater consequences - “Should I buy this one? Will something better come along?”, “Do I save my coins to try and get the level 3 upgrade or go for this level 1 card that I don’t really like?” To me, “Oh, I have enough coins for an upgrade - let’s see what I get!” is a much easier choice to make.