Month: September 2020

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.