Updates to A Taste for the King – Autumn 2023

It’s been a while since I blogged about the developments to A Taste for the King despite putting it through regular iterations.

A Brief History

The game no longer has a voting mechanism as it felt a little stale and didn’t speed the game up like I had hoped. I instead focused on trying to lean into the bluffing nature through dialogue, trying to balance positive (true) feedback against negative (bluffing) feedback. I did this with the addition of a giving mechanism. Instead of discarding up to two cards, the player may give a card to another player and then may discard the second. This worked well to give the player an incentive to listen to others and gave the other players incentive to sometimes tell the truth so they, themselves, wouldn’t get poisoned.

This also leant itself nicely to the player making deals between themselves and their opponents.

The Current Rules

One issue the game still had is that with more players the game would ramp up in play time quite a lot. A second issue was that deals became somewhat first-come-first-serve and a final issue was that sometimes the game ended up tending towards what I call “auto-play” where players would ally themselves in such a way that they’d tell each other how to perform the best with the current hand. This was both unintentional and undesired.

A simple fix to all of these problems seems to have come in the form of limiting each player to saying just ONE thing about the hand and leaning into the concept of truthiness.

Suggested Feedback

"Oof, bad platter"
"Very tasty platter"
"That card is poisoned"
"Ah look at the delicious [course][/dish name]"
"I’d love that [course][/dish] on/in the [position]"
"You’ve got [x] food (items)"
"Give me that card on/in the [position]"
Dish names are reserved only for advanced play and only if all players agree to it at the start of the game.

This seems to have been met with a mostly positive response, as it limits but doesn’t eliminate deal-making and makes the game feel faster. It also seems to breed more creativity in the feedback given. I still need to perform a few more tests, though, to make sure it wasn’t the social dynamic of the group and that it is actually a good solution for the rule set.

Interesting Feedback Given by Players

“You don’t have 2 desserts”
“these two would make me really sick”
“You only need one card”
“Jake does not need/want either of those drinks”
“The drink has green on it”
“If you want to stop a menace, give me the middle card”

Future Changes

  1. Make discards and gives face down, resolving given cards at the end of the turn.
  2. Limit the number of players who can give feedback each turn.
  3. Allow the player to give OR discard for both potential discards.

Face Down Given Cards and Discards

By making the discards/given cards face down it would allow a little table-talk between the opponents, laughing and/or jeering about certain outcomes, without giving additional information to the current player. It would also simplify the deck cleanup at the end of the turn, as all dishes would be scored and returned to the deck at the same time. At the moment given cards are scored immediately and then added to the discard pile which can get a little confusing.

Limited Player Feedback

I’m hoping that by reducing the number of players who can give feedback in games with larger player counts (5+) to 2-3 players per HAND that the game will run faster. My concern for this, however, is that there may be too much downtime for some players. To fix this I am considering having the people who can give feedback move around the table with each hand. This means that each turn only one player would be left out from feedback and each player would get n-2 goes at giving feedback each round! Below is a video explaining one possible implementation for this mechanism.

https://youtube.com/shorts/FhPsfsJtN88

Optional Given Cards

One piece of feedback I’ve received is that it’s not a good feeling as the current player to give a card you KNOW is poisoned unless you really want or intend to do so and that forcing the first discard to be given to another player can make this happen. While some people feel it’s quite fun and/or funny for this to happen I’d like to try and address this. As such I am considering making it so a player can discard OR give either of the two discarded cards. I need to be careful though, as I feel, currently, that given cards are a deterrent to players who would always lie and try to only benefit themselves in a direct manner and I’m not sure if optional giving would be enough of a disincentive.

Overall I’m excited by where the game is going and I feel it’s nearly ready for me to release the Screentop.gg implementation into the wild for public play-testing! You can check out the private page with a summary of the rules right now!

The digital implementation of A Taste for the King on Screentop.gg for playtesting.

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