From June to September 2010, several Barbarian Prince game session will be played to test the rules and make sure the game is balanced, unlike Alien Salvation.

If you personally know the author, now is the time to e-mail him to reserve a seat on the next play test session, thereby giving you credits once the game is commercialized.

If you do not know the author, but you know a game shop in the Montréal (QC) area willing to host game sessions and possibly help with the release of the game,  stay tuned, as updates will be posted once the initial play test sessions will be completed.

On May 29th, a 2 hour playtest occured with 4 players. 

All of the players considered the first few rounds to be "fun to play, with a challenging and diverse mechanics".

One of the players mentioned that he liked how varied the abilities of the tiles were, while still being relatively uniform.

Sadly, the game dragged on. In the early 2 player game tests, one of the players rapidly gained the upper hand, but in a 4 player match, the equilibrium was maintained through the use of different strategies by the players.

One of the players decided to never bid on tiles, but rather to perform research on every turn. Thanks to the luck of the dices and the low cost of research compared to the cost of bidding, she was able to move forward faster than the other players.

At some point, one of the players managed to establish himself in a rather positive fashion, but a devastating barbarian attack knocked all his tiles except 4.

Over all, the comments were rather positive, but it was clear minor adjustments needed to be made.

Here are some of the comments:

• It is too hard to receive bonuses. It takes 3 turns for a new tiles to generate a bonus, and removing just one population markers for bidding makes you lose 2 turns until that tile can receive a bonus again
• It is too hard to upgrade tiles to the Cathedral, the Temple or the University. We never managed to successfully do it
• It is too hard to defend against the barbarians
• The barracks are not powerful enough: no one wanted them

Despite the negative score board, all of the players agreed they were minor tweaks which would bring a lot more enjoyment to the game.

To fix those issues, the following changes will be make to the rules :

• It will be possible to transform population markers on castles and barracks to sentries on the spot, increasing the desirability of the barracks and helping defend against barbarians
• It will be possible to use votes and money to hire sentries or to recruit barbarians
• Tiles will provide gifts every turn if they have at least one population marker instead of 3.
• The upgrades will no longer have a minimum number of votes to achieve. A single vote will be enough.
• Upgrades will double the number of votes received for its type. In other words, each church will produce two church votes in the city with the Cathedral
• Research will need to be more expensive and less individually rewarding but more collectively rewarding to more quickly cycle through the tiles
• Instead of using a full tile set, a fixed number of tiles per players will be used, for example, 12 per player, forcing a tug of war for the tiles and shortening the game