I have just made a few minor changes to the Description section of Taipan in the Store to help point players to the two different versions of Taipan on the Game Crafter.
Taipan: Merchants of the Far East
This is the full version that has higher quality parts, a 10'x10' box and divider to help keep the parts organized. There are also high quality Micro Cards to represent money and Cubes to represent Cargo.
This is the less expensive Play Test Version. There is no box or divider. Coins are represented by Paper Money and Cargo is represented by Plastic Poker Chips.
I have also added an Image of Taipan in the upper right of my Blogg. You can direct link to Taipan in the Game Crafter store by clicking the image. Please share the links with your friends and help support the Play Test of Taipan.
I have opened the store on the Game Crafter site. If you have $50 extra bucks and want to help test Taipan, go and pick it up at:
Look for this image in the list of games.
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/taipan
You might have to do a search for Taipan, it seems like the link only takes you to the list of games, not the actual Taipan page.
It takes about 10 days for them to print and ship it out to you. I need a lot of feed back on the Rules. No one but me has read them so I am sure there is a lot that doesn't make any sense. I need your help smoothing out the bumps, so please send notes and feedback.
Tuesday night I went to my friends house to play Taipan. I brought over the newly printed Game Crafter version of Taipan and set it up. We BSed and ate dinner for about an hour and go started around 8PM.
I blame the bad picture on the 21 year old Scotch. Mmmmm...Glenfiddich!
I had two new people who had never played (TJ and Sean), so it was good to get some fresh eyes on the game. Right out the gate I got very lucky where I fought off 3 pirates and got two gold cargo. This would have resulted in me earning 22 coin on the second turn of the game. In my continued attempt to minimize the huge random swings of the game I adjusted the rules only allowing players to choose 1 cargo from any Pirate victory.
The Start of the game using the new Game Crafter set.
Over the course of the game we found several other issues that need to be addressed. TJ got himself into a bad position where he had no money and lost most of his cargo when he got into a fight with Pirates. We came up with a new rule that allows a player to stay in port on his turn to earn 2 coins. I might change this to if he takes no Port Actions, he gains two coin. This will prevent players from loosing a turn and falling behind the other players who are earning much larger amount of money.
In addition, TJ also took Rasheed which did not help his situation any. After talking about it we have determined that his ability (Repair any two damage for free) is purely a defensive ability and playser can rarely win a game by playing all defensive. I will be revisiting that character to change his ability in some way.
Clearly Sean and Bryan have had way too much to drink.
I had a good lead for a long while, but in the end, it was Bryan who won. While I spent the game slowly paying off my debt, he built up his ship so that he had Max Sails and Hull. In combination with Markus Seawell (Move into and out of Port once per turn for free), this allowed his to make big buys and massive sells and pay off his debt in the last four turns of the game. This is a good strategy and the one I think all expert players will take, but it makes it very binary and appears to be the only correct choice. We talked about reducing the number of Ship Upgrades from 3 to 2, but my fear with this is that it will slow the game down. The game took 2 hours, and that is the perfect amount of time in my mind.
I think I am going to change Marcus Seawell so that he will be able to take advantage of specially marked short cuts on the Sea Map and Rasheed will become the Harbor Master allowing him to move out of Port for free, but not into port. There where a few other issues, but nothing to major. Some art issues on the cards, and some missing details and typos in the rules.
Cant wait to have time to make the changes and do it all again. Maybe this weekend I will get to dive back in. Until next time, happy gaming.
It doesn't happen often so don't get use to it, but sometimes I do like to learn something new. This time around it's making, editing, and uploading videos to YouTube. Thats right, my first video and I am such a big nerd that it is the Open Box reveal of Taipan! Sorry for the inconsistent video quality and random flares of over-saturated light.....did I mention this was my first go?
In about 4 hours I filmed it, learned how to use iMovie to edit it, did said editing and then added the fades (the parts where it fades to black). After that I learned how to upload to YouTube, and finished it off by posting it here. All in all, not a bad nights work.
My only complaint with opening the box and seeing the parts was the Micro Cards. The Micro Cards turned out to be much smaller than I was expecting. This doesn't really affect the Coin Cards, but the Cargo Cards are near impossible to shuffle, so I will have to order a set of the regular Poker Card sized deck of the Cargo Cards. Also, the Coin Cards I left the Coin to small on the card, so its hard to tell the difference between the gold and brass coins.
The only other issue I have found is that everything printed a little bit darker than I was anticipating. That doesn't affect the game any, so it's more of an observation than a problem.
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