Initial Sketch and Idea
My design remained mostly true to my initial sketch. There were a few scoring changes from the initial plan, but the biggest change was that when you got the ball into the middle cup, the one that the hidden ball in a cups and ball routine would be in, the player would get an extra ball. This small, on a whim change had big ramifications for how the bagatelle would be played.
Side-by-side comparison
Changes
One idea that I stuck with the entire time was that if got two balls in different card slots that matched suits, you would get 10 bonus points. But when I added the extra ball, I realized that not rewarding any points for landing in that slot would make the extra ball reward worthless. It may as well have not been there. So, I made the extra ball reward 15 points as well. This meant that the new meta was to try to get infinite extra balls for infinite extra points. Although there is no upper limit to Magitelle’s score, the highest score a player was able to achieve was around 80 (disappointingly low compared to infinity).
Another interesting thing about the meta is that because of the pin on the Jack of Diamonds on the very right, it is possible to shoot with such little power that the ball would stop at the Jack of Diamonds, but it was also possible to shoot with enough power to have the ball stay along the right wall, and then come down and bounce over the Jack of Diamonds into the Queen of Clubs. That meant if your first ball missed the extra ball and landed in the other Queen of Clubs or the King of Diamonds, a player could purposely try to match the suit for guaranteed bonus points instead of trying thier luck at getting the extra ball.
Scoring at the bottom, players can jump the Jack of Diamonds.
User Reactions
The feedback I got was mostly positive, although there were a few points of possible improvement mentioned. Firstly, a playtester wrote that it is hard to see the suit of a card when a ball lands in that slot. Someone else wrote that the rules don’t clarify if you should remove a ball when it lands on the board. Both of these would be simply fixed with clarification on the instructions that once a ball lands you add its score and remove it.
A bigger issue with my game that I discovered through feedback was that the ball got stuck on the launcher very often. For some reason with the way I assembled my pinbox, if the ball bounced onto the launcher it would stay there. I knew this would happen when I played it, but I was easily able to just relaunch the ball by pulling back on the plunger and releasing, but players didn’t know if that was a legal move they should do. While I could have explained that in the rules, I instead tried to mess with my launcher to stop the problem of it getting stuck, but I was unable to stop it. Another issue was that the pins used to stop the ball would sometimes dig too deep into the cardboard and lose effectiveness. This was really only an issue with the pin in the top right of the box that the ball would bounce off of off the launch. Although I could lift it back myself, after repeated hits from the ball, the pin would always sink down. In hindsight, I could have hot-glued the pin at the correct height, but that thought did not occur to me while making improvements between playtests.
Despite these small issues, I received a high rating for theme execution, info/clarity, and playability, which I would call a huge success!
That is the journey I took with my Magitelle Bagotelle!
