After some additional solo-testing on the 3-on-3 basketball game, I’m finding myself growing a little unhappy with the speed of the game. After an hour, one test game was only at a score of 11-to-8 … and this is on the way to a 21-point game. I don’t really want the game to take 2 hours to play … so, I started looking for a way to make the thing move more quickly.
So far, I’ve been using a 1-card-per-turn method that gave a nice flow to the way the cards were used. But, only moving a single player in a turn would contribute to the game moving along slower than I had hoped. The adjustment I tried to make was to play multiple cards on a turn — all cards would have to be of the same suit, and could only have 1 card per position.
I was able to do a test-play using this new approach with my brother, Jerry today. He’s a high school basketball coach, and generally a “good sports mind” as they like to say on the local sports-talk radio. We also played a ton of APBA Baseball as kids … so I trust his take on how sports-sim board games should work.
Turns out the new card method didn’t really work very well. It made the card-flow seem out-of-sync and lead to some strange hands — such as me having *only* cards to move my Center and Jerry having *none* of those when his Center had grabbed a rebound right under the basket. So, he couldn’t even shoot … he had to pass it off to his Forward or Guard for a sub-optimal shot.
So, this has me thinking about splitting along 2 lines … (1) return to the 1-card-per-turn approach, which had a nice flow to it (although making for a long game), and (2) dropping the cards altogether and going with a more direct simulation, instead of aiming for a lighter boardgame. I’ll sleep on it a couple of days and see where it goes … probably need to spend a little time with “Show of Power” anyway. 😉
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