This morning I completed another three-year solo playtest of Villanostra. And it’s taking too long to play. The decisions are interesting and I’m engaged the whole time. But it’s taking about an hour per year to play, and that length of gameplay will exclude a lot of potential players.
I need to consider stripping out everything but the most vital mechanisms. Or maybe accept that its audience will be limited, except the point of designing this game was for it to be a game for change, so I really want to make it as appealing as possible. A dilemma.
Yep, the Village Life cards definitely add too much stress. At the current values, the “Bereavement” card will give a new villager enough stress and coins to retire after their first year in play!
Also, hard to read in TTS.
Something feels off about paying normal living costs of 1 coin per year from the Village Life card, and then paying 1 coin for tax. Maybe it’s just because it’s different from the process I’ve been using in the past. But having something good happen but the villager still losing 1 coin feels wrong. I really wanted to process each villager only once through multiple steps at the end of the year, to streamline the process. But I think conceptually it will make more sense to the players if there is one processing for Village Life, one for Expenses, one for Taxes, etc. I think I can’t have more than three times through, though. Maybe one for Stress (including Village Life and support) and one for Coins (including expenses and taxes and retirement)? And then one for Scoring.
Conversely, the rule I’ve been considering to add support and stress to each villager based on the end-of-year moral scoring feels really good. It creates a sense of community between the villagers, which I suspect will draw the players in as well.
Gah. The game feels far too long, and I keep adding things.
Started a new solo playtest, made it almost to the end of year 2. I suppose I should be concerned that even though I’m very familiar with the game, and only controlling 3 players by myself, it still took me over an hour to get to this point in play. Hrm. I wonder what else I can do to streamline?
Lots of the most recent changes seem to work well. Economy feels about right, but the buildings haven’t really kicked in yet. Village Life cards feel like a gut punch when a villager takes 4 stress, that seems like an awful lot. And over 1/3 of the cards produce that much. We’ll see how it plays out, but if nothing else it already feels inappropriate to place that many tokens in response to one random card. The results were interesting, though, because it forced the Judge to take over Sanitation to remove two stress from Belle so she could repair the School in time for scoring.
Now with pip-based values on the voting tokens instead of numerals. The pips are closer together than I’d like, but that’s to keep them inside the “safe zone” for cutting the chits when they are exported for printing. We’ll see if people have trouble counting them during play.
I also updated all the Loyalty symbols because people couldn’t figure out what the medal was supposed to be. And what says “Loyalty” more than a wolf? Especially when the associated color is yellow, so the circle looks like the moon!
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.
Lots of little card tweaks this morning. Added the term “aligned”, meaning “the quality of having one or more morals in common”. This let me simplify some wording on Village Life and Building cards to use the terms “most aligned” and “least aligned”. Changed the Projects deck to a Building deck, because that’s what people think the cards are, even if they still get added to the Projects row in the Project phase.
I also changed the Ally deck to a Sympathy deck. I had already tried using the word “allied” in place of the “aligned” term I now use, and so there was a potential for terminology overload. But also it seemed weird to say “You’re allied with the Sergeant, but they don’t know it.” It seems a little weird to talk to the players about how to deal out “sympathy cards”, since that implies something else, but other than that I think it’s better.
And given how much I like the flavor text on the Village Life cards, I changed the motivation and goal text on the Councilor cards to also use first-person statements of their motivations. And changed the text to italics, because that’s what we do with flavor text. I’m afraid that also means players have been trained to ignore text in italics, which will keep the cards from creating the experience I want. *sigh*
The analysis spreadsheet for the Village Life cards is trickier than expected. I wanted to show values like “-1” when a villager loses a coin and “+1” when they gain one. But the formulas for calculating averages don’t recognize “+1” as a number, so I had to remove all the plus symbols.
I have this strange setup now where there’s all the data that actually appears on the cards, and then there are columns for analysis that are mostly derived from that data, but with some manual adjustments based on other effects. And then there’s a separate export sheet composed entirely of formulas to extract the card data from the analysis sheet, without the analysis columns and rows.
Despite all that, I managed to generate a deck and set it up in TTS. I need to tweak some of the buildings and then run another solo playtest.
I’m starting to set up Village Life cards in Component.Studio.
As I expected, CS failed to import the Google Sheet I use to do math analysis on the village life cards. So I had to copy and paste the section of that sheet to another sheet that I could publish and import. Which means that when I make a change to the original analysis page, I have to go through all those steps again. But it’s better than trying to do that analysis in CS itself.
I don’t care how these cards look, I just want them for testing. So I’m using CS _.prevy to position the text from each column right below the previous text. Looks like there’s a thing where _.prevy causes a column to not render if the previous step was empty. (Hence the line “[test]” in the screenshot above.) Something to investigate tomorrow.
I’ve been struggling with creating a deck of Village Life cards to draw for each villager at the end of the year. I had lots of ideas for what to do, but I hadn’t yet committed to anything. This morning I remembered that anything testable, no matter how poorly implemented, is superior to lots of unexpressed ideas.
I knew that I needed the Village Life cards, on average, to cause 2 stress and cost 1 coin. That should allow them to replace the food cost and health rolls I used previously without changing the system economy very much. So in my spreadsheet of card ideas, I added columns for stress, coins, support, corruption, and inactivity. These aren’t the values that will actually appear on the cards, they’re estimated values based on the card effects, which I can use to balance the entire population of cards. For example, if a card causes 3 stress to villager and their neighbor, the value in the stress column is 6, because that’s the adjustment for the village as a whole.
The average at the bottom of the stress column is the Mean Stress change per card draw. But support and corruption also affect the stress in the village, so I also added a Net Stress equal to the Mean Stress, minus 3 times the average in the support column, plus 3 times the average in the corruption column. The current result is +3.05 net stress to the village per Village Life card draw. That’s higher than I thought I wanted, but I’d rather have too much stress in the system than not enough. More importantly, I can look at that net value when I modify the cards to get an idea of how it will affect the entire game.
Unfortunately, when I import the card sheet into Component.Studio, I think it will also try to import the rows for those mean and net values, which will screw up populating the card templates. Maybe there’s a solution for that.
This morning I removed food as a mechanism from Villanostra. It was just another way to add stress to the villagers (if they couldn’t afford it) that could be mitigated by some of the buildings. But as the buildings have been updated to experiment with new moral-related mechanisms, only the Granary remained as a building related to food. I’ll figure out something different to do with it.
This puts more pressure on a good design for the Village Life cards for each villager at the end of the year. Food mostly caused stress for poor villagers, so the Village Life cards need to do likewise. But the end-of-year processing for each villager was getting far too complex, and needed to be streamlined. Food was the least interesting mechanism in the list, so it needed to go.
