TESTING AT SCALE

I didn't know anything about balancing games and didn't want to play-test a broken/unproven game mechanic with friends, so I figured out another way to progress. I wrote some macros in Excel and had it play games repeatedly for me. I could quickly alter things like the card characteristics (how much drink tolerance a character had, how strong mead or food was), and that let me very quickly get a baseline balance to work from - at that point, the drinking/food mechanic was as you'd expect, those with more drinking tolerance lasted longer given all the card draw probabilities were essentially the same for all characters.

Now, I could add uniqueness to the character abilities that could affect the outcomes for other players or themselves. I started to tweak those characteristics - the Cook could gain extra benefit from food cards when played, the Missionary would never drink Ale, the Musician could always give away a drink, the Shipwright (later changed to Raider) had more cards in their hand. With that work, I got to a much better place on how the abilities balanced out the drink tolerance of each character. It was now consistent that people had an equal opportunity to win in a game with just Ale/Mead/Food cards, with their unique drink tolerances and using their special abilities. How the program chose to play was still pretty stupid, but I knew that in a four-player game, each character won approximately 25% of the time in thousands of games. Testing to this level with people would have taken much longer to accomplish. For the last part of the "Excel simulation tool," I added the unique cards (Odin's Wisdom, Loki's Mischief, ...) for a bit of variety and challenge in gameplay. Still, since any player would have an equal chance to get those cards, it didn't alter the balance, but it did alter the game's duration (it generally sped it up), so games finished in less than 15 rounds of play on average.