10/20 battle battle

This week in class, we as a class paired up and practiced playing Battle Battle on Tuesday. How the game works is that each player gets a paper card of a certain character. That character has certain amounts of hit points, tokens they can use, etc. They have also a section on their card telling them what certain dice roles mean for their character. The card I played with was called the robot. The robot's dice rolls all equaled 3, but I had 4 tokens which gave my dice rolls 2 extra numbers in the case I lost a roll. The robot also had  6 hit points which helped me win a lot. On Thursday, we messed with our cards by tweaking them to make them more balanced.  I made by 1 or two number dice roll equal 1, and I made my 5 and 6 number dice roll to equal 6's. To counter having two numbers that equal 6, I only gave myself 1 token instead of 4. On Thursday when playing with tweaked cards, I went 7 and 4, which was slightly better then on Tuesday. I think some games the robot was very balanced, but on other games I blew my opponents out of the water. One way Jess Schell talks about balancing games is by making them symmetrical. Battle Battle isn't quite symmetrical because some players have better abilities or more hit points than others. On the other hand, everyone did have tokens, or hit points, or certain numbers that their roles equaled to, etc. Another point Schell makes is to give the losers a break. After every 5 games we played, we switched partners so that a new opponent came along to keep the game from getting boring and see just how balanced we made our cards. Another balancing type Schell makes is to have meaningful choices in a game. Choices around strategy, timing of decisions, etc. I definitely utilized this as I only had one token on my freshly balanced robot card instead of 4. I made careful decisions that ultimately led to my overall victories on Thursday.