Recently I oversaw a playtest of Dungeon Rancher in which rounds took 20 minutes (the target is 6). This was an increase of 4 minutes per round from the previous week, so I focused on determining why it was taking so long. It turned out the main culprits were the new dice-selling mechanic (which has since been removed) and the Mining Phase.
The Mining Phase was the mechanic I was most excited about going into the project initially. In games like Dungeon Keeper 2, there is a mechanic in which digging into a gold vein is likely to reveal further gold veins because they tend to be grouped. I wanted to replicate this feeling without any spatial elements by having decks of cards where certain cards allowed players to change the deck from which they drew.
We removed the mechanic of needing specific cards to switch decks after a previous playtest but left the four decks with different resources, each coded to one of the four needs of the game. The red deck had the least challenging monsters, allowing players to save minions for use generating red dice. The green and yellow decks provided green and yellow dice directly. And the blue deck provided tunnels and blueprints for building the rooms that passively generate magic each round.
Unfortunately, the mining phase takes too long. Players have also said that it feels very swingy; this is probably due to the threat system where resource cards have threat symbols that increase the strength of the next monster encountered if its color matches. Running into a lot of monsters means you won’t have time to gather resources, and finding many resources means the first monster you encounter will probably wipe you out.
The other cost of the mining phase is in explanation time. Between the threat system, the differences between the different decks, and capturing monsters, it adds a lot to the explanation time and some aspects are difficult for players to remember, such as the nuances of each mining deck.
As much as I wanted the mining mechanics to work, playtesting indicates that the cost is too high for what they add to the game. Therefore we are removing mining from the game. The core fantasy of the game is raising monsters, which does not require the mining minigame. To replace it, we are adding a Drafting phase in which players draft monsters, resources, and rooms into their dungeon. Drafting solves the problems that led to the removal of Mining because it takes very little time to explain and can be done quickly and simultaneously.
Drafting will hopefully also address feedback that the game lacks player interaction. The difficulty with player interaction is that it can lead to longer playtimes and is often not compatible with simultaneous gameplay. Drafting interactions are one of those rare exceptions.