Bibliotheke

The Bibliotheke (libraries) game has developed into a full prototype over the summer for playtesting. 25 libraries were finally chosen, five from each of five regions, all historically accurate in different time periods set in the ancient world. The different roles of pawns were abandoned for two pawns per player (head and assistant librarians) that do multiple things. Each turn a player has four action points to spend on a variety of actions for his pawns. Each library has a stack of books that can be aquired, and placed in collections that are established at different libraries. Here's the mapboard:

A collection consists of five books that must match by either subject (literature/science/history, etc), by region (Aegean/Egypt/Mesopotamia, etc.) or by period of time. They must also be placed in a collection in "order" on the shelf, either chronologically or alphabetically. This provides endless combinations and ways to shift strategies if you cannot acquire the books you want. For playtesting I do not have finalized the 125 ancient books I need, so I made mock ones to just test the mechanics:

This book has the fake title of "Wade" written in 1740 BC. The subject is Government/Politics/Law, it comes from the Egypt/Levant region, was written in the Early-Middle period, and has a value of 2 (on a 1-5 scale) that pertains to end of game scoring.

Event cards can also be purchased with action points that bring into play such things as Thieves, Disasters, Research, Transportation, Forgeries, Guards and the Black Market. There is not as much interaction as I would like aside from the event cards and competing for the same books. Maybe have another pawn who does "bad" things to other players. There is also a tendency to "camp" at board locations in playtesting and not traveling to other libraries. How long can they "mine" a single library? Who of the two pawns carries what books of a player?There is also a question of correct point cost assignments to the actions, and the balance of the victory points.
It has been fun to play as strategies change, and there is the constant challenge of figuring out what collection will be made and how it will be ordered on the shelf. The fun and puzzle factor is there.

Evaluation Criteria

In order to evaluate developing games, we have adopted the Game Evaluatio Criteria (GEC) created by Mike Compton. It is a simple system of rating games from 1-7 in the following categories: Clarity, Flow, Balance, Length, Integration and Fun. He has provided a great chart with written examples to place the game experience along the 1-7 scale. You can find his charts in a pdf from this link:
 http://bgdg.awardspace.com/main/Game_Evaluation_Criteria.pdf

The individual feedback is the most valuable, but we will also add all  6 scores together and find the average for each evaluator and the total from all evaluators to give a final GEC score to rate and rank the prototypes we review and play.