Restart Continues

Restart Changes and Fixes

March 4, 2025

Published by Teetotum on March 10, 2025

Restart Continues

New playtests in amazing places with amazing people. Lately, we have been visiting friends and board game enthusiasts all over Greece to playtest Restart and get their valuable feedback. The game has changed in many different and interesting ways. Once again, we feel that we are on the right track. Let's look at some of the major changes that have been made after taking the community's feedback and recommendations into account.

As designers, our goal is to create fun, simple, and joyful games. Somewhere along the way, we seem to have forgotten that. While this is not the time for self-criticism, we felt the need to share this with you and assure you that we will do our best not to make this mistake again. To get back on track, we have managed to refine Restart (Restart Restart as a fun guy would say) into a more fast-paced, straightforward tactical fun game. How did we do it, you may ask, and we will answer. Here we go.

We have broken down the long player turn into three simple and straightforward action fields. Instead of playing a bunch of random actions in a very long turn, which caused dead time and made the game very slow, you now have to decide on your turn to activate only one of the three action fields, which are associated with a different task.
1. Complete a mission objective.
2. Accept a new mission objective.
3. Acquire resources.
Each action field can be boosted with combos and extra actions if you can create a more powerful engine on your player board to maximize their benefits. Furthermore, the same action field cannot be activated twice in a row, making the game more strategic as you have to plan ahead to get what you want, and faster as you basically have to choose between two action fields each turn.
This change is probably one of the biggest and most successful and we are really proud of it. Downtime has been reduced to zero and now, even in a four-player game, players play their turns really fast and they don't believe it when it's their turn again before they realize it. All in all, the game has become really fast and straightforward while keeping the fun and interaction at a high level.

Another major change is the text action on Event cards. Many of you have expressed your concerns about the complexity of the cards and the combos because of the long text, not to mention asking for translations. Well, the new version of the cards contains only simple coded symbols for the text action, making Restart even easier to understand. To keep the combos interesting and useful, we have managed to add a few more actions. We think the combination of simplicity and variety of combos is really interesting and challenging without confusing the players and causing analysis paralysis in every turn. In addition, we have removed the Event card hand limit to give players more freedom to explore different tactics to play and win the game.

All three action fields of the game are now connected in a way that makes the game flow more naturally. There is the Perception action field, where you perform actions to complete your mission objectives by playing cards in the grid. There is the Intelligence section, where you try to gain new mission objectives and score points at the same time. And finally, there is the Memory field action, which provides you with useful resources to complete your objectives and gain new ones. This connection between the three action fields makes the game easy to understand and pretty straightforward to explain, reducing the learning curve and the time needed for explanations. Although, don't hurry to think that you will be able to easily find the more efficient way to play as the very same connection between these three action fields created more strategic depth for those who want to master the game and gain the best out of their every move.

We are currently continuing our playtesting and will soon be making some adjustments to the development. Tweaking the old components to make them more efficient, stable and ergonomic and perhaps adding some new ones. After these changes we will probably be ready to present the new version of Restart at a convention. Stay tuned to learn more as we get closer to the restart of Restart.

Embark on a thrilling journey through time with Restart, a tactical engine-building game that challenges you to alter the course of events to save the world.