Category: Game Design

First Villanostra solo playtest with the new threat mechanism. At the start of each year, randomly select morals equal to the number of players, and increase each corresponding threat. Any councilor can apply influence to a completed building to reduce the corresponding threats.

In the span of slightly more than one week, Villanostra has gone from this:

To this:

By focusing on the most important aspects of the game–voting on buildings and influencing workers to build them–I dramatically reduced the ruleset, play time, and component count. A three-player test session went from being unfinishable in two hours to completing in 45 minutes (including time for teaching rules and post-game analysis). Ideas from playtesters led to combining the voting and influence tokens, which led to each councilor having distinct moral-based abilities, which also resolved issues with ally selection. The whole game feels more smooth and elegant. Playtesters were enthusiastic.

Next step: Add mechanisms that threaten the village as a whole. I now have some confidence that I can do so without making the game too heavy for the players I want.

Thanks to all my Protospiel Online playtesters for your time, thoughts, and encouragement!

And thanks to The Pitch Project for putting me through the sell sheet process, which helped me clarify and focus upon the core of the game.

I just finished a three-year playtest of Villanostra, after hacking out lots of the mechanisms and adding in annual moral-based threats. The threats are simplistic: they all do the same thing, no matter what moral is drawn. But they can only be alleviated by spending effort from a building associated with the moral. That worked… okay. It still led to some interesting choices, even though the buildings were effectively all identical. I’m torn, because I want the threats and buildings to feel distinct, but the game already takes so long to play that I’m scared to add any more complexity.

I tried at first having each councilor care only about their primary moral, with no secondary / sympathy morals. That created a lot of situations where a councilor had no motivation to act at all, so I added the secondary morals back in.

I tried starting with random villagers. That created an ongoing situation where one councilor had no influence on any villager, which was intolerable. So I went back to having each councilor choose a starting villager. But I’d like to always start with 3 villagers, so that’s not a great solution. For the next playtest, I’m removing every villager that none of the players can influence, but that doesn’t guarantee that each councilor will always have a matching villager in play. Ugh.

I changed scoring to occur only at the end of the game (three years, for now). I’ve also added a rule that each player’s score is reduced by the number of villagers having more than 4 stress. The Judge scored 7 points, The Priest and the Doctor each scored 3. 10 points seems like a good target.

This morning I started a Villanostra sell sheet, as my submission for The Pitch Project. This is what I have so far. I was just getting ready to set up columns for the rest of the layout when my spouse (and graphic design mentor) looked at it.

She said “You should be using InDesign for this instead of Illustrator. Illustrator is for drawing, InDesign is for layout. If you try to use Illustrator for layout, you will hate your life.” And she’s right. So I know where I’ll be picking up tomorrow.

Saturday’s playtest confirmed that Villanostra has become far more complex than is practical. It took over an hour to play a single year. So this morning I stripped out all the components that didn’t seem essential. Here’s what the game looked like Saturday morning:

And here’s what it looks like now:

This will require substantial rules changes, of course. But it has already led to some interesting ideas. One of my biggest struggles with this design has been to represent the morals, so each of them feels important in a different way. I have been trying to demonstrate their value through the buildings, but I think instead I should be demonstrating their value through threats to the village. My next step is to make event cards that are drawn each year, each representing a threat that can be ameliorated by one of the morals. Then I can give each building an ability to deal with its matching threats.

New solo playtest. At the end of year 1, all players but Red have 1-2 points. Red has 16. Problem?

Uh, yeah. Here are some rules I used in this playtest that were contributing factors:

• First solo playtest of a four-councilor game. The (untested) rule for distribution of Sympathy cards was to deal them all out at random. If you get your own, deal with it.
  • Note that Red got two of their own, so any advantage they get in scoring is multiplied.
  • Also note that everyone has 3 Sympathy cards instead of just 2. So Red’s multiplier for their own moral is 4 rather than 3.
• Random selection of starting villagers. Kelly and Lee gave Red 4 pips right out of the gate. Green had 2, Blue and White had none.

There’s no point continuing this playtest. I still want to try random starting villagers, but I’ve changed the four-councilor Sympathy card rule to match what I’ve been using for three councilors: you get one of the unplayed councilors at random, plus the councilor to your left.

Other than that, lots of positive improvements! I like the new village grid. The community support and stress rule already looks good. And the new Building card visual design already looks a lot better.

Now that the village board is gone, the villagers are each represented by two cards:

1. A small Worker card, which is moved around the Building card lines to show where the villager is working.
2. A large Village card, arranged in a grid and used as a place to put the villager’s coins, stress, and support counters.

The arrangement of the Village cards also creates an opportunity to have villagers interact with adjacent Village cards as neighbors.

I wonder how much it will confuse the players to deal with abstract villagers that are represented by two components. It’s not like it’s a totally new mechanism: I’m basically using the micro cards where lots of other games (especially tactical games) would use figures. Something to watch for in playtesting.

I’ve pondered what to call the Village Life cards. Leaving them with that title is likely to cause people to confuse them with the Village deck. I don’t want to call them Event cards, because I haven’t ruled out the possibility of having village-wide Event cards affect the game. So now they are just Life cards.

I’ve added in the rules for community stress and support at the end of the year, and now I’m ready to solo playtest again. I wonder if I can get a full three years in before our playtest event on Saturday? If I cannot, that’s not a great sign for how long the game takes to play.

Up to this point, Villanostra has had a large white board for tracking each villager’s coins, stress, and support.

It takes up a ton of space and is not attractive. And it requires little name tokens to be added to the board for the villagers in play.

This morning I replaced the board with a set of poker-sized villager cards, similar to the micro cards used to show where the villagers are working.

They’re much more attractive, and they allow the players to find the villagers by name and by face. They show the villagers’ morals, which is important for some of the Village Life cards. The set of 30 cards will probably cost less to print than the tracking board would have cost.

And they were easy to design: I went into Component.Studio, duplicated the existing Villager micro deck, and changed the deck to poker size. At that point I was 80% done.

I also turned off the snap grid in TTS. It has advantages and disadvantages, but I think the new Building cards–with their illustrated job slots–should make the snap less necessary. And it’s not like the physical game could have a snap grid anyway.