CKIXD

In considering life events for villagers, I’m already modeling their career, health, economics, and education. What’s really important in real life that I’m not currently modeling is relationships. I considered using a relationship map like some RPGs use, but it think that’s pretty unwieldy for the concept’s relative importance in this game.

I already have a chart for each villager, showing their coins and their stress. I could add another column for their relationships: spouses, dependents, other family, friends? I’ve even considered that if villagers marry that I move both of them to the same line on the chart and pool their values. Having more dependents means they’d have to pay for more food. Relationships also tie closely to the moral value of Loyalty, and could be at odds with Liberty, so that could introduce some new mechanisms.

I’ve also considered that the game should have an objective measure of the village’s well-being at the end of the game, regardless of the councilors’ moral value scores. Relationships could be an important part of that.

Definitely something to think upon more, and experiment with.

I changed the word “facility” to “building” throughout the game this morning, since it’s a more familiar word, even if it isn’t as technically accurate.

I asked Karen to help me come up with a list of life events for the villagers. I think a large part of the success of this game will come from how players feel about these villagers. I’m wondering, for these life events, if they should be very detailed (“_____ was foraging in the woods when they stumbled across an old cave, and found a stash of jewels inside!”) or if they should be general (“Treasure”) with the players requested to tell a little story about each event. The rest of the game doesn’t really have a storytelling feel to it, so I probably shouldn’t put that burden on the players.

Saturday’s playtest of Villanostra went pretty well. We didn’t get as far as testing any of the new facility abilities, but the playtesters were engaged and gave me interesting ideas.

• Score all undamaged facilities each year, whether they employ a villager or not. Bonus points for matching values on employed villagers.
• Players called them “buildings” instead of “facilities”. While they are not all technically “buildings”, it’s a more familiar term and I should use it instead.
• Dot voting for project selection worked great. Only downside is that councilors couldn’t earn a coin by not proposing a project, so the economy is tighter. I’ll leave it as-is for a few more playtests to see if it’s too tight.
• Councilors who aren’t in play are still thematically present: they could add their influence by some easily-processed rules to help get stuff built.

Considering my own situation, it also seemed to me that unemployed villagers should gain stress. 🙁

Stress and corruption mechanisms already seem to work pretty well. End of year villager processing is a little confusing and slow, so I think streamlining that should be my focus to prep for next playtest.

I now have an updated list of village facilities for Villanostra, ready to make a new batch of cards. Undoubtedly, some of them are awful. But testing something awful is how you figure out how to make something better. And I need something ready for our playtest meetup this Saturday: deadlines are great for creating pressure to make progress. Hopefully I’ll have time for at least a brief solo playtest before then, to make them a little less awful before subjecting others to them.

Continuing to work out what Villanostra‘s facilities should do. Still struggling to understand how corruption should work mechanically. Trying to figure out facilities that cost coins to operate. Hope I can get a playtest in before our Indy Tabletop Game Creators meetup on Saturday.