Just like the bikes go round and round, so does the game!

Changing the main goals in Pizza-go-round brought several issues to light, so additional tweaks were required. I was fortunate to get really good feedback and design suggestions from Vital Lacerda and now the game’s working well, so here are the changes:

First up, I replaced the standing order lineup for small piles of orders on the buildings themselves.  Instead of picking up orders to fulfill on your own, you prepare the ingredients and go to the building in order to deliver the pizza.

This increases player interaction and competition. When you see other players chop ingredients you can guess what orders they’ll be going for, and the race is on! When that order is delivered, that player keeps the order card for the final scoring and a new one is revealed. The game is over when four of the piles are empty.

That means the “Out of gas” card is out too. How could it stay, since the single pile of orders isn’t there anymore? The players weren’t big fans of the semi-random end of the game anyway, especially because they were penalized for any leftover ingredients they had. There was absolutely no downside to removing this from the game.

As you can see in the picture, the buildings have abilities now! Each one has a unique ability which is activated by the action cards. Using them is simple: play the “building” action to activate the building where you are. This creates a lot of possibilities both for the players and for the game, as building cards can have two different sides.

There’s also a “deliver” action you can use when you’ve prepared the right ingredients for the order, and a brand new one I’m experimenting with: “recycle”. Recycle allows the player to discard any number of cards from their hand in order to draw more from the deck. This allows the players to throw away cards that aren’t useful at the moment and to press their luck, while keeping the deck flowing.

Lastly, the direction of the bike doesn’t matter anymore. I thought the players would be confused now that the ramifications of their actions change, but actually it was the other way around. It flows better because it avoids the situation where a player wants to move but suddenly can’t because everything is pointing to the wrong direction, and removes the “fiddlyness” of having to turn the cards in a specific way – particularly noticeable when the bike cards are stacked in a single building.

How about a slice?