Category: Villanostra

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.

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!

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.