[Grim Tuesday]

Not only is this game difficult to design for, it's difficult to analyze. Every time I look at the score distribution I think one of two thoughts:

"Wow the pyramid is really overpowered"

and

"Wow the pyramid is really underpowered"

I think this arises from an extreme difficulty of estimating how other teams will be able to play this game. Disc shooters we've seen on CD are all pretty good, reasonably accurate. I haven't seen any good way of getting the discs into the shooters prototyped nor have I seen any climbers beyond level one. But if the shooters are as good as is to be believed from what we've seen so far, the effort spent to climb seems like a big waste: If your climber takes 30 seconds and you can score one trip of white discs and climb for 10 in that time, then you've just scored 22 points making that very complex and fancy climber worth 8 points.

But on the other hand, I wonder if it will turn out like Rebound Rumble where some factors arise (ball squishiness for instance) -- maybe this year it will be getting the disc into your shooter, or your drive train not getting caught on them as you drive around the field -- that will cause the average disc score to go down precipitously. Maybe it will be the rampant defense that is conceivable. In this case, climbing is worth it no doubt.

But that's the whole issue: I don't know which will end up happening. We chose one of these and moved on. I think this game is an excellently designed one, at least for the difficulty of analyzing it. Every time you start thinking one way is definitively better than another, something (cough cough colored discs) comes out and proves you wrong and brings both ideas back to balance.