Month: August 2020

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.

Back to thinking about annual life events for villagers. The d10 – stress die roll I used previously did a good job of cycling the villagers through injury and death, but it was abstract and slow. In my last playtest, however, I forgot to include anything like it, and the villagers were too prosperous and effective for the game to be interesting. So, I think a set of cards is the way to go. They should almost always increase the villager’s stress–“stress” was originally “age”, until I realized I could combine the two–but they’re also an opportunity for more interesting and engaging things to happen. It’s a little tricky coming up with ideas that don’t overlap too much with stuff that’s already modeled by other game mechanisms, especially related to work.

My epiphany this morning was to design each life event card so that it includes a first-person quote from the villager. Instead of the Robbery card just saying “This villager gains stress and loses coins”, now it starts with “They took so much stuff. I don’t feel safe in my own home anymore.” Designing the effects of the card from there already seems to be inspiring me to come up with more creative ways to model the event. And I think the players will find it more engaging.

This morning I picked up a Villanostra playtest that I started yesterday. Things are going too smoothly for the village. I accidentally removed the end-of-year mechanism that causes the villagers stress (and previously, injury as well) at the same time that I unthinkingly added the new support mechanism to counteract stress. They are far too happy. I was trying to simplify the game so I could move on to testing the new buildings, but by changing the testing context I rendered the test invalid. Oops.

This morning I started a new solo playtest, using feedback from the last multiplayer playtest. First year went very smoothly, all three projects were completed. Second year looks to be well-funded already, will probably complete all three buildings again. Probably too easy! But the main thing I want to test in this solo is the effects of the buildings, so getting them into play earlier is probably a good thing. At least, for now.