I took this version to my first Board Game Design Workshop in Wellington. I can't tell you how much help it was. Thick skin was required, but the feedback was extremely helpful. I made major changes after this play through.

MAIN BOARD

• The one large change, recommended to me by Shem* after our Thursday night session, was to use the Perks to determine play order. In reverse VP position, players would choose a perk, and that would govern the order of gaining resources (shown by the Build Order arrow), and who would go on the battlefield first (Engagement Order arrow). There was an advantage to fighting first as the player gets to cherry pick the revealed enemy and there's a good chance there'll get to fight twice which means more VPs for them.

• The Perks area of the board was expanded to add more detail.

• Also, the Sidekick damage now became a Sidekick die. A separate component that would be rolled along side the players own battle dice. After all, the game is all about rolling dice!

• To make way for the Perks, I moved the Threat Line over to the right of the board.

POWER/SPEED DIAL

• I 'funked' up the design as the amount of power that the players could obtain was reduced. (due to dropping the number of rounds being played)

• I placed a marker on the starting Power and Speed for ease of reference.

OTHER STUFF

• I removed the 'Rebound' defense ability on the die from the last game. It was overpowered and almost broke the game, especially having access to the recalibrate tokens to shift the dice faces.

• Every Enemy now had some kind of ability. Some synergised with other enemies that on the board.

VERSION 7: WHAT I LEARNED

• Richard Durham was one of the playtesters, and was awesomely brutal in his summation at the end. He pinpointed everything he liked about the game, i.e. the dice and mech building, and the dice rolling. And then he circled the rest, basically saying it was getting in the way on him enjoying the good bits.

• He highlighted - too many assets, too many things to manage and too many steps. For instance, I had 5 levels of resources that changed over the 3 waves. "Why?", he asked me. "Because the colors are cool", I said. NOT a good enough reason. I was making it more complicated than it needed to be.

• And everyone around the table agreed.

Get the rubbish stuff out of the way to get to the good bits.

*Special shout out to Shem Philips (Garphill Games), creator of the awesome 'Raiders of the North Sea'. He play-tested IMDL! twice in as many weeks at this point, and a number of time afterwards. He's always been a massive help during the design process. Check out his games! (http://garphill.com/)