Play Testing StarCluster 4 - In The Beginning

I have begun playtesting In The Beginning. We created a setting using The Great Game board game, and now have started to fill it out from those origins. Immediately I found that the notes each player took for each round (a decade per round) of their play A: do not have the same information in each, and B: supply the wrong information. I need to re-create the Player Sheets to give the GM the information needed. The headings should be Decade/Range (Supplied), Cards Played, Who Was Affected +/-, What Happened?, Consequences In Space, and Points Scored. The same with the Colony Tracker - the headings should be Colony (Supplied), Date Founded, Date Failed, Date Independent, Status, Owner, and Population Origin.

Then I began fleshing out the colonies. The first two were a tiny unstable colony on Mercury, and a failed colony on an orbital. The fleshing out process (Determine Exports, Infrastructure, and Movers & Shakers, went as expected, except we (Klaxon and I) determined non-independent colonies would have a governor appointed to rule over them in addition to the native movers and shakers. No problem! Then we hit Venus! Venus is a world with perhaps hundreds of highly mobile floating cities, so the single list of cultural infrastructure generated by the tool I had made would not work well. So we had to divide the colonies into ones we could do with a simple setup and ones which needed a more flexible arrangement. That took some time! Then we made up a method that used the same infrastructure components in a different way, giving some things EVERYBODY had, some things shared across the world (Broadcast media, banking system, etc...) and a list of PROBABLE items. That worked much better! We finished Venus and ran out of time, so we will continue fleshing things out tomorrow, but the hard work is done and the modifications needed are in place!