Category: Villanostra

By the time I’d reached year 5 of my solo 3-councilor game, I’d managed to build every building in the build row, and the threats were having virtually no impact. I know I’m playing more cooperatively than three individual players probably would, but that’s far too easy. Time to reassess the cost to build a building.

I dealt random some sets of 6 villagers and 3 buildings. For each set I took the influence from 3 councilors and tried to see how much I could accomplish with perfect cooperation. In other words: the councilors place their influence to maximize the villagers’ effort, even if it doesn’t help their own score. Getting 6 effort on the first building was pretty hard, even at the expense of effort to the other two buildings.

Getting 5 effort was certainly achievable, even to two buildings, but probably not to all three. Three is the minimum number of councilors, so a higher-count game would have more influence and potentially make it easier, but I suspect cooperation is actually harder with more players.

So I increased all the build costs to 5. I also made the Liberty and Care threats affect two villagers each, to give them more teeth should they come into play.

I started playing a 3-councilor solo game this morning. It’s going far too smoothly. Every proposed building has been built. I wonder if people will find that the game is too easy if they play it in a fully cooperative manner.

For example, the Corruption threat. When it triggers, the councilor with the fewest buildings must give some influence to the councilor with the most. This is, of course, bad for the player who loses that influence. Unless the two players involved agree on what goals they want for the year, and work together to meet those goals: in that case, it doesn’t really matter who played the influence, it still helps both players. In that case, the deprived player has lost little or nothing, and the threat is toothless.

Mechanically, this seems like a problem. Thematically, this is exactly the sort of thing I want the game to do. I very much want to see how this plays out in player testing.

On Saturday I playtested Villanostra again, and it didn’t go as well. For whatever reason I did a very poor job of explaining the rules. I need to write and practice a script to do that better.

Most significantly, based on feedback from Protospiel Online, I put rules in place for players to vote by placing one token at a time. It destroyed the character of the game. There was no debate or discussion, only strategic choices for how to earn the most votes. The newly-added threat mechanisms were ignored. (I’m sure this was partly because I explained the game so poorly.) The collaboration that is supposed to be key to the play experience simply didn’t happen.

I also changed how the players increase their influence. At the end of the year, you could spend two unused influence to unlock one new influence. The analysis phase was dominated by discussing other ideas for how this should work. Only later did I remember that increasing your influence was supposed to be compensation for a turn in which your influence didn’t seem to matter. By abstaining from placing your influence, you acquired more influence that should make a future turn more effective. Instead I was now incentivizing players to not play so they could maximize future power.

What am I doing about this?

1. Go back to the previous rule of gaining influence only by abstaining from a vote. Mechanically it is similar to turning in unused influence at the end of the year, but psychologically it feels different.
2. Add a rotating chairman role that walks the other players through the steps, and explicitly starts each vote with discussion. I’m not sure it will work, but it’s something to try.
3. Write a script for introducing the rules.

We’ll see how it goes next Saturday with my local playtest group.

Continuing my solo playtest with threats. Their impact is rather subtle so far, but that’s kind of intentional. The first reason is that until buildings are completed, nothing can be done about the threats. The second reason is that in the real world, humans tend to ignore threats until they cost too much to ignore: I want the players to argue about who will pay the cost to deal with the threats, when all they really want to do is make their own buildings.

Still, the threats need to be credible if they’re going to impact the game. I’m not sure I can determine their credibility in a solo playtest. I told Karen this morning that this game is getting harder and harder to solo playtest, because the decisions are becoming increasingly complex, even though the mechanisms are more elegant than they have ever been. This pleases me.

Also: At Protospiel Online, Amelie Le-Roche suggested that I try putting newly selected buildings at the front of the build line instead of the back. I’ve been pondering this. It means that if your building isn’t completed the year it’s selected, it will be much harder to complete it before the game ends. That sounds interesting.

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.