Quantitive Analysis 

Qualitative Analysis

Achieving balance in this game was both an easy and difficult feat. Some of the biggest issues we faced included:

- How do we entice players to interact with one another more? This seems like an unnecessary question, but it is very important to ensuring everyone just isn't off doing their own thing. After all, in a game where the objective is simply "finish your list", how do you encourage others to interact? We initially had the idea of splitting Essential Items into quadrants, which helped, but we solidified the idea by introducing a level of randomness--see, how you get Essential Items is random, as every card that is on someone's list are all shuffled together into a deck. This deck is drawn from at random, meaning you don't have control over what you get. This, inherently, encourages interaction; if someone has something you want (or vice versa), chances are you'll have to interact with them to get what you want. This then helped introduce the concept of Trading, which whilst not used too much in the average session, would still occur, especially given whilst you could use items or events to forcefully steal what you want, that's not always available to you.

- Continuing from above, another choice we did, alongside making the event and catastrophe space random, was to add a Shop space where you can purchase items. Given 3 are drawn at the start of the game and always visible, this ensures that everyone knows what everyone has at all times, thus encouraging strategy and interaction; if you know you have something someone wants and you know they have an item that can take from you, it might be wise to negotiate before that happens. This adds depth, strategy, and ensures each player has routes to get what they want that aren't either at the whims of other players or randomness, at least not to the same extent. If you want something someone else has, you can simply just steal it with an item.

- How do we make the early-game feel better? One thing we noticed right away during our playtest was, simply, that it did not feel good to play in the early-game. Whilst the game picked up later on and absolutely became more chaotic (we experimented with an "everything is double in the last 5 turns" rule which did not help matters),  that initial hurdle up the hill was, simply put, daunting. We questioned whether we would even have enough money to spend in order to get our items, which was a brief debate before we decided to boost Reward Spaces' money gain from 5 -> 10, and also increased initial money to be "at least enough to buy 3 Essential Items." This gives the player plenty to work with, and opens more avenues earlier on, thus ensuring the game lets you strategize at every point rather than being cut off by simply lacking the money required. This also, in turn, balanced the Penny Pincher and Student characters, who are both related to money in some way. Previously, these two were severely overpowered due to gaining lots of money in a game that was scarce in the resource, making them overly desirable. Simply increasing the supply lowered the demand, and thus balanced them out.

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