I’ve been trying to balance my hex strategy game and its turning out to be alot harder than I thought it would be. The two main problems I’ve come across so-far have been:

A) The game has no random elements what-so-ever, so if there exists a perfect strategy for a particular map, the player who gets the first go is more than likely to win, essentially reducing it to as much fun as tic-tac-toe. I’ve come up with a couple of strategies to help guard against this but I won’t find out how effective they are until I solve the next problem.

B) I don’t have anyone other than myself to playtest with at the moment. Everyone is busy with the christmas season. This means I can’t anticipate which strategies people are going to discover or are likely to use. I thought about quickly coding a multiplayer feature into my prototype so I could play it with friends over msn, but I decided that I really needed the face-to-face communication, to both explain the rules and to receive feedback. So I decided against that move. When christmas is over and university goes back I’ll be able to find a few volunteers, I’m sure.

What has come out this this small game experiment is that I’ve developed a much greater appreciation of people who develop board games and games that have fully revealed open-states to both players - it’s alot harder to do than you might think.