Accessible Games

Monster Kart Monday #20: the Home Stretch

By: Jacob Wood, April 7, 2014 News

The Monster Kart Mayhem Kickstarter has entered its final week. With less than 7 days to go as of this writing, we’re in good shape and making slow but steady progress.

If you haven’t seen it yet, head on over and read Update #10, in which I recap my experience running MKM during International Tabletop Day on April 5th. I had a great time and gained some useful insights into the game.

Though the Monstrous Edition stretch goal appears to be out of reach, we may still wind up with Mermaid Adventures and/or Camp Myth adventure packs. That’s really exciting, and I can’t wait to see what happens.

Further Development

I have been making minor tweaks to the game based on the continued playtesting we’ve been doing. Here are a couple of the changes:

El Chupacabra was always a nice guy, but he appeared to be too nice. He wasn’t very good at Hurting or causing Complications, which meant the strategy for playing El Chup was to just grab Power-ups every round. That’s not a very interesting way to play, so I altered his Quirk to make him take a penalty to Maneuvering at certain times, rather than to have  lower-Difficulty Complications.

Big Foot was so bad at Maneuvering it was painful, and his Quirk made him even worse in many circumstances. His Superb Acceleration was supposed to be enough to make up for that, but in play that wasn’t always the case. I improved his Maneuvering from Mediocre to Fair.

Also, I altered Furball Frenzy; previously it was “take a -1 penalty to Speed for 2 rounds to improve Hurting by +2 for 1 round.” That proved to be too much of a penalty, since reducing Speed by 1 level for 2 rounds means you’re essentially giving up 2 Spaces of movement and you may not even penalize your target that much. Now, Furball Frenzy is a 1-for-1 trade-off; “when making a Hurt Someone action, you may choose to add +1 to your Hurting Trait this round, but take a -1 penalty to Speed next round.”

Finally, I’m hard at work on improving the functionality of the character sheet and other player aids. I learned during Tabletop Day that having tokens to represent your Power-Ups can be quite useful, so I’m looking at replacing the current write-in method of tracking Power-Ups with a space on the sheet to lay your Power-Up Tokens.

Also, I’ve heard time and again that it would be useful to have a place on your sheet to track your current Speed, since it limits your maximum Pace. I’ve added a Speed column to the Trait Ladder. Now you can place a bead or other token on both your Speed and your Pace, and if your Pace token is ever higher than  your Speed token then it will serve as a reminder to decrease your Pace.

I’ll upload the most recent Beta document for review after the Kickstarter ends. For the moment, I don’t want to confuse things by uploading half-implemented changes.

Next Week

Monster Kart Monday #21 will be the first post-Kickstarter installment of this series. I’ll talk about the KS, the results, and what’s in store for MKM’s future.

Until then, please remember to keep sharing with your friends and family, and thanks so much for all of your support!

Series Navigation

<< Monster Kart Monday #19: Busy Week!Monster Kart Monday #21: Success! >>