I decided this morning to update the voting tokens. Here are the old ones:
And here are the new ones:
Why the changes?
With the big red / green planning tokens, I wanted them to be more versatile. The thumb up and the open hand still can be used for “yes” or “no”. But they can also be used for “ready” and “wait”, which is more important for this game. In my experience game-mastering roleplaying games, I often ask all the players to plan their next action simultaneously, then put their thumb up on the table when they are ready. Villanostra includes some periods of simultaneous decision making, and I wanted the players to be able to use the “wait” and “ready” sides of this token to show “I’m still planning” and “ready to proceed”.
For the small numbered tokens, the players use those to mark building cards to show which ones they want to work on in the upcoming year. But does the 3 mean “This is my third-ranked choice” or “I put three votes on this choice”? The first is more intuitive when voting, but makes it harder for players to evaluate their combined choices: the most desired option has the lowest-numbered tokens. By changing the tokens to mean “This is how many votes I put on this option”, the players can simply add the number of votes. And by putting a variable vote weight on one side of the tokens and having the players place them face-down, the other players have a harder time gaming their votes based on other player votes instead of just voting on what they want. Ideally the faces of these tokens would show dots instead of numerals, to make it even more clear that these are to be summed up instead of ranked from 1 to 3, but I ran out of time to make that change this morning.