Road to Thingvellir

[thewhaleshark]

In pursuit of this “just make a board” idea, I bashed up a quick-and-dirty prototype of how I kind of envision such a thing:

This vision condenses the game to 6 core actions:

Ride - move Thingmen around
Settle - acquire and develop land
Raid - get fat loots
Foster - get special characters to break the rules
Pledge - get bondi to make use of your land
Feast - give away stuff to get wordfame OR commit murder most foul

Instead of using a hand of cards to determine actions, I would use a rondel-esque track. Lawspeaker picks one of the laws at the bottom of one of the tracks, and everybody either votes to go with it (making it stronger) or mounts a lawsuit (use Thingmen at the Althing to pick a different action). Subsequent lawspeakers an either go up to the next law in the track, or down to the bottom of any other track.

I would still keep the cards, but they’d be used exclusively to generate resources. Still keeps that element of chance - when you Raid, Pledge, or Foster, you never know exactly what the outcome is going to be, but you can respond to it intelligently in subsequent turns. You can’t control fate, but you can control what you do about it.

Farms would work inherently differently. I think I’d likely have building tokens, probably color-coded? Settle lets you add buildings to farms on an increasing scale of cost by color - the first one costs 1 action, the next one costs 2, the next one costs 3, etc. Costs are separate by track - so 3 actions could either add your 3rd farm of a color, or your 1st farm of each of 3 colors. Should probably be some kind of limit to how many buildings can fit in one place.

When the Lawspeaker picks an action, your farms of matching color get to do stuff in the same track, OR your Bondi of matching color can do their thing on that farm instead. Probably? I’d have to fuck with it to figure out exactly how that should work, but the general idea is you build up farms by color, and they activate when a matching track is chosen.

Buildings would be physically limited - after all, the Norse deforested the entire island in pretty short order, so building material is in limited supply. I’d also make razing a farm a consequence of winning a feud, and the buildings you burn down leave the game forever. Can’t un-burn timber.

Obviously there’s a lot more, but the gist is that if I do this as a board game, I could completely ditch having actions dictated by cards (making the entire game subject to chance) and instead make the outcome of your planned endeavors uncertain.

[thewhaleshark]

A framework for how I would run the board version of this game (which is increasingly a thing I’m exploring because it seems to solve a number of problems I was having in the card-only version):

I. The Law Council

The Lawspeaker proposes an action. We take a vote. You support or sue. We resolve actions.

A. Lawspeaker can either pick a new action track and propose its lowest action, or the same action track that was most recently proposed and take the next one up. If you’re at the top, you have to switch tracks.

B. Players can either: support the proposed law (making it stronger) or proclaim a suit.
-to proclaim a suit, you send Thingmen who are at Thingvellir to the action track - you have to pick a different track than the Lawspeaker proposed, equal or lower to the law; the action gets a bonus equal to the number of Thingmen you send

C. Players resolve actions, starting with lawsuits clockwise from the Lawspeaker, then everyone else clockwise starting with the Lawspeaker

II. Hunting for Sheep

Your bondi may take actions in districts you control. Any leftover districts will make goods that get you points in Phase III

A. The color of the action the Lawspeaker chose - or the color of the action you picked if you sued - determines which of your bondi will get to act.

B. Starting by some metric other than Lawspeaker (most points? fewest points? most farms of the color?), each player may assign as many like-colored bondi to districts as they see fit. The district must have a farm of matching color. One bondi per district only.

C. Each bondi will take its action once at a strength equal to the total number of farms on the district (max 6). Resolve the actions in any order you wish.

D. Once one player has finished, the next player in metric order goes.

III. The Long Dark Winter

We generate points and clean up

A. Starting with an opposite metric from II (fewest points? most points? fewest farms?), each player tallies up their farms of each color. If they have more farms of a color than any of their neighbors (players with districts that border each other), they get 1 point (thus max of 4 points per round if you beat your neighbors on all 4 colors). Districts where bondi acted are not counted (so choose to act carefully).

B. Retrieve your Thingmen (if any) from the Law Rock, pass the Lawspeaker card, and start another round.

---

I also thought of a way to condense actions down to four by offloading actions to phases. So the law rock would be something like:

Ride/Settle/Raid/Foster

In phase I, the Lawspeaker could pick, and you would choose to: support, sue, or solicit oaths. Support and sue are as normal - strength is equal to number of votes (Lawspeaker counts as 1 vote) or number of suing Thingmen.

Instead of either, you can solicit oaths, which involves drawing some number of cards from the deck and adding 1 to your bondi. You will not take a Lawspeaker action or a lawsuit action, but might get more actions down the road.

Phase II would proceed as I have described above, but we would score immediately instead of in the next phase. So, bondi act first, we resolve all the actions, and then we count up farms and add points. Might need to tweak the whole “bondi or points” thing but that’s what playtesting is for.

Phase III would be a Feast or Murder phase. Every player in turn in some order decides to either give gifts to get points, or to discard bondi (and maybe wordfame) to commit murder. Then we proceed to cleanup and start again.

That would eliminate the need for separate Feast and Pledge actions, and make the whole action decision tree a bit smaller. Still complex, but spread out the complexity.

Will fuck around a bit and write up rules at some point.

[thewhaleshark]

Board Version Rules V. 1

Objective:
first to 22 Wordfame or last one left with a farm in Iceland

Components
72 Stead tokens (12 for each faction: 8 1/2 tokens and 4 3/4 tokens)
30 Faction markers (5 for each faction)
72 Thingmen (12 for each faction)
108 orlog cards
6 Home Stead cards
4 Arson tokens
6 hof mats
1 lawspeaker token
1 lawspeaker card
1 outlaw card
game board

Setup
-give each player a hof, stead tokens, their Home Stead card (tucked under their hof) and 12 Thingmen
-shuffle orlog cards and place on board
-each player places one Thingmen on a side of Thingvellir
-place one Faction marker for each faction next to the Fame of Deeds track on the board; place the remaining 4 Faction markers for each faction near The Sheep Hunt track on the board
-advance each Faction once on The Sheep Hunt for each color represented on their Home Stead card
-players determine who is the wisest and most learned among them; give that player the Lawspeaker card and token
-put the farm tokens off to the side of the board, sorted by color

Overview

-Game is played in rounds, each round is 3 phases: The Law Council, Hunting for Sheep, The Long Dark Winter
-Law Council: Lawspeaker proposes a law, gothi Support or Sue, resolve actions
-Hunting for Sheep: Bondi take actions OR Districts produce goods
-Long Dark Winter: collect points for goods, retrieve slain Thingmen

The First Round

I. The Law Council

1. Lawpeaker proposes a Statute at the bottom of one of the four Laws
2. each player clockwise votes to Support or Sue
3. to Sue, place Thingmen of yours that are on Thingvellir on a different law, equal to or lower than the selected statute
4. once every player has declare support or suit, resolve actions clockwise from Lawspeaker, starting with Suits, then Support
5. the Supported action gets a bonus equal to the number of players who voted for it; a Lawsuit gets a bonus equal to the number of Thingmen from all players who selected it (multiple players can join the same suit); some actions have a built-in bonus
6. Thingmen who sued are not available to resolve the action from that lawsuit
7. Once all actions are complete, return Thingmen to their place around Thingvellir and proceed to the next phase

II. Hunting for Sheep

1. Starting with the Lawspeaker and going clockwise, each player may activate all Bondi in their Oaths whose color matches the color of the action they took in Phase I. Each player takes all of their actions, and then play moves to the next player.
2. A Bondi has a strength based on the number of farms of that color the player controls, indicated on The Sheep Hunt track; the number leftmost column indicates this strength (i.e. if you have 3 farms of a color, Bondi of that color are strength 2).
3. A Bondi may not act more than once in this phase.
4. Your Home Stead Bondi may act on any color of action, but their strength depends on your holdings of that color.
5. Once all players have taken any actions they wish, proceed to Phase III.

III. The Long Dark Winter

1. If you’re using the Advanced Outlawry rules, the Outlaw acts.
2. Starting with the Lawspeaker and proceeding clockwise, compare a player’s holdings on The Sheep Hunt to all of their neighbors (players with whom they share a border); if a player’s holdings of any color exceed those of each of their neighbors, that player gains 1 Wordfame (thus, a player could gain at most 4 Wordfame).
3. Return all slain Thingmen to each player’s Longhall
4. Pass the Lawspeaker card to the left, and begin a new round.

The Second Round and Beyond
Play proceeds as normal, except that action selection changes slightly. Subsequent Lawspeakers may choose the next statute up in the Law where the Lawspeaker token currently sits, or they may choose a new Law and activate the statute at the bottom.

Note that statutes at the top of a Law have inherent vote bonuses.

If the Lawspeaker token is already at the top of a Law, the Lawspeaker must choose a new Law.

Play continues until one player has reached 22 Wordfame or only one player has any holdings left.

Actions

Each action is resolved at some strength as indicated above. All actions include “up to” in their description; you may always do less than what you are entitled to do.

Settle

When you settle, you have two choices. You must pick one of the following:

A. Subsume a new District
B. Expand your holdings in a District

A. To subsume a new District, it must be adjacent to one you control, or you must have a Thingman on it. It cannot have another Faction’s Stead token on it. Place one of your 1/2 Stead tokens on it, with the 1 side facing up, and advance one holding of your choice by 1 on The Sheep Hunt track.

B. To expand Districts, you increase the value indicated on the Stead token on that District; you then advance a holding of your choice on The Sheep Hunt . The cost in strength to increase the value of a District by 1 is equal to its current value (i.e. it costs 1 to go from 1 to 2, it costs 2 to go from 2 to 3, etc); either flip the Stead token over to its next size, or replace a 1/2 with a 3/4 token. After you expand, advance one of your holdings on The Sheep Hunt by 1. The total cost of all of your expansions may not exceed the strength of the action. No District may have a value higher than 4.

Ride

When you Ride, you have two options. You may do either or both of the following in any combination:

A. Set forth from your hall
B. Roam with bands of Thingmen

A. For each point of strength, you may send 1 Thingmen from your Longhall to any edge of any district you control (the assumption being that you have halls in each district and your Thingmen can be anywhere). If you place a Thingman on an edge with an opposing gothi’s Thingmen, they will intiate a Feud; see the Feud section.

B. For each point of you strength, you may move 1 Band of Thingmen once. A Band is any number of Thingmen occupying the same edge of the same district; you decide how many comprise the band before they move, and they move together as a unit. You may not move through any edge occupied by opposing Thingmen, but you may ride to such a place, and then engage in Feud. See the Feud section for more details.

Riding through an opposing gothi’s District may initiate combat; see the Feud section.

Thingmen are considered to occupy both of the Districts that share the edge on which they are placed.

Raid

When you Raid, you have two choices. Pick one of the following:

A. Journey out to sea
B. Return laden with riches

A. To journey out to sea, place 1 Thingman per point of strength from your Longhall onto the sea area on the board. These Thingmen are unvailable for any other purpose until they return.

B. To return laden with riches, return all of your Thingmen at sea to your Longhall. Draw 1 card from the Orlog for each Thingman so returned, plus 1 card per point of strength; keep half (rounded up) of these cards as Goods in your Wealth (tucked so that the Worth of each card is showing). You may never look at any other aspect of a Good in your Wealth.

Foster

When the Foster action is selected, all players who selected that iteration of the action (i.e. everyone who Supported a Lawspeaker who chose Foster, or everyone who Sued to Foster) will participate in a Fostering round. If a player is Fostering through Bondi, they will be the only one to participate in that round.

1. Starting with the player who initiated the action (i.e the Lawspeaker or the first person who Sued) and proceeding clockwise, each player chooses to either send off one of their existing personae, or fosters a persona from the pool into their family.
2. To send off a persona, move them from your Hird to your Wealth; this represents an exchange of goods for the addition to another’s family (a gfit, a dowry, etc).
3. To foster a persona from the pool, you must have sufficient Goods in your Wealth. A persona requires a number of Goods of matching color in your Wealth equal to its worth, counting itself; thus, a Worth 1 persona requires no additional, but a Worth 3 persona requires 2 Goods of its color in your Wealth. You keep the Goods when you Foster.
4. Once everyone has sent off or fostered, the player who initiated the action draws 1 card from the Orlog per strength of the action. If there are any personae which can fill empty spaces in the Foster pool, fill them; if there is already a persona in a space in the pool where a newly-drawn one would go, the drawing player may choose to replace the old one with the new one. Send all remaining cards to their Doom.

Pledge

To Pledge, follow these steps in order:

1. Draw 1 card from the Orlog for each point of strength
2. Add 1 of the drawn cards to your Oaths as a Bondi; you may not have more Bondi than Districts you control. Tuck the card into your Oaths so that only its action is visible; you may never look at any other aspect of the cards in your Oaths.
3. Swap any of your existing Bondi for any of the cards you drew.
4. Discard all cards from this action, drawn or swapped out, that are not in your Oaths.

Feast

When you feast, you have two choices. Pick one of the following:

A. Give generously to your friends
B. Viciously murder your rivals

A. You may give goods whose total worth does not exceed the strength of the action. You may give goods to any gothi who are your neighbors, or any gothi who has a Thingman on one of your Districts. To give a Good, remove it from your Wealth and hand it to the chosen gothi; at the end of the feast, they will tuck it into their Wealth. You gain 1 Wordfame for each Good given in this way.

Gift Sets

If you give a gift with a worth of 2, you may also give that same gothi a worth 1 gift of matching color without counting towards total worth. You gain 3 Wordfame for this gift.

If you give a gift of worth 3, you may also give a 2 and 1 of matching color to that same gothi; you gain 5 Wordfame for this gift.

B. You may commit murder using your Bondi. You may murder enemy Thingmen, or you may attempt to capture an opposing gothi’s District by murdering everyone in their hall (you brute). You may not use more Bondi than the strength of the action.

You may murder opposing Thingmen on your Districts by discarding Bondi from your Oaths; they commit a murder, and are then outlawed. A discarded Bondi slays a number of Thingmen equal to their Worth; you may continue discarding Bondi until you have murdered as many Thingmen as you like. Discarded Bondi are sent to their Doom, slain Thingmen are sent back to the opposing gothi’s mat (to be retrived at the end of the round).

You may attempt to capture an opposing District where you have a Thingman. In order to do so, discard one of your Bondi and note its worth. You may also discard one Weapon from your Goods and add its Worth to the Bondi. Compare this total to the number of Thingmen in the opposing gothi’s Longhall. If the total is equal to or greater than the number of Thingmen, you capture the District; if the total is less, you may lose Wordfame to make up the difference and capture the District, or you may declare your attempt a failure. To capture a District, remove the opposing gothi’s stead token and one farm of your choosing; return the stead token to the gothi, place your own stead on the District, and remove the farm from the game. Discarded cards are sent to their Doom.

Feud

A feud can be intiated in one of three ways:

1. A gothi sets out their Thingmen onto an edge with opposing Thingmen
2. A gothi rides a band of Thingmen into an opposing band of Thingmen
3. A gothi who controls a District decides to start a fight with an opposing Thingmen who rode through their District

In the first two cases, the Feud is automatic and mandatory. In the third case, the gothi who controls the District decides whether or not to initiate combat before the opposing Thingman leaves their district. If the District’s gothi chooses to initiate combat, they will do so without the aid of Thingmen.

To fight a feud:

1. Each gothi draws a number of cards from the Orlog equal to the number of Thingmen in the fight (remember that in case 3, one side will not have Thingmen)
2. Line up the drawn cards on opposite sides according to color; each color will represent a separate conflict in the longer Feud.
3. Starting with the attacker, each gothi may add one Good from their Wealth to an existing conflict, or start a new conflict of a type not already present. Instead of either, a gothi may also accept a conflict.
4. Continue adding wealth back-and-forth, one at a time, until one side accepts the results of a conflict; that conflict is considered settled. Once all conflicts are settled, the Feud is concluded.
5. Total the worth of each type of Good committed by each gothi; the one who committed the largest total worth of a given type of Good wins that conflict.
6. A gothi who wins a conflict gains 1 Wordfame and slays 1 opposing Thingman (thus a maximum of 4 deaths and 4 Wordfame from a Feud); if no Thingmen remain to slay, instead that gothi may choose to raze one farm owned by the opposing gothi on either of the Districts where the Feud took place. Razed farms are removed from the game, slain Thingmen are returned to their owner’s mat (to be recovered at the end of the round).
7. Any gothi whose Thingmen were slain are entitled to compensation. Each player may claim a total worth of Goods from the opposing players commitments equal to the number of Thingmen of theirs that were slain. So if a player loses 4 Thingmen in a Feud, they may claim up to 4 Worth of Goods from their opponent. Compensation is added to Wealth as in a Raid.

[thewhaleshark]

It’s more math than I strictly want, but my hope is that in playtesting I’ll figure out a way to collapse all the adding and so on. My other hope is that by separating actions by phases, the flow of action will be a bit more controlled.

I kinda want to figure out an intuitive way to turn Foster into a sort of technology track; I think I have a way to do that, but I don’t want to make it more complicated than is necessary right now, since this is already a lot.

The component count is also way higher than I want, so I’d like to find a way to represent both ownership and level of development of districts in fewer pieces. Not sure how yet. Dice seem a straightforward but boring solution. I am a fan of the “destroyed farms go away forever” thing because that’s literally what happened in Iceland and it was a major contributor to the collapse of the island, but it might be impractical to sustain so maybe just significantly limit the number of farms and toss 'em back into the pool when they’re blown up. We’ll see.

[thewhaleshark]

As I’ve been plugging this into both Tabletop Simulator and screentop.gg so I can properly playtest, I’ve done some controlled fucking around with specific scenarios, and I decided I really need to fix the component count thing sooner rather than later. At a certain point it was just too many things on the board and too much to try to count up and track.

So I borrowed a little inspiration from here and there and came up with a sorta functional solution, at least I think it’s a solution:

Off on the left is a tracker. The idea is that when you make a district stronger (1 - 4), you move up one of the trackers of your choice. The actual districts will have a generic total strength represented (using a token with a number of symbols on it, to denote both ownership and value), and the idea is that each of those districts is accounted for already so the actual composition doesn’t need to be represented all the time.

This made it a little awkward to use Bondi as I described above…so instead, I figured it was easier to just have them get stronger as you got more of their color; when you move up the track in a color, you can cross thresholds where your Bondi’s action has a greater worth (i.e. at 3 on a track, Bondi of that color are worth 2 when they act).

Instead of choosing between scoring points or taking an action (which is honestly a bullshit choice that doesn’t add anything interesting, on further reflection), you get both, but your Bondi power up a little more slowly. That’s probably fine.

The question then becomes what happens when you fight or murder. How do we know what’s in that district?

My current idea is that we define it when it matters. I’m not sure about the exact timing, but right now my model is “the victor decides what gets razed, and the loser decides what the winner gets when a district is captured.” Generally this means that every fight is probably going to be the attacker hitting where it hurts the defender worst, and every forcible transfer of property sees the smallest benefit to the attacker.

And that’s also probably fine? We’ll see how it plays out. I’m sure that will need tweaking, but I actually like the idea of making every fight convenient for both sides. It tracks with how the sagas were written - not literal factual accounts, but massaged truths written after the fact to make the stories compelling. So I’m kind of going for “of course every fight is important.”

This also has the convenient advantage of literally showing you how everyone measures up against everyone else at all times, so you can just sorta see the state of land ownership, and that will make your choices more readily apparent (I hope). It also makes it easier to represent permanent destruction - when you raze a farm from a track, you advance a “fire” cube from the top down, permanently lowering the capacity of that track in Iceland. With enough fighting, everything is ruined.

I think this will have the effect of making the Law Council choice highly consequential and important, and that’s my goal. We’ll see.

[Apreche]

Dang that board already looks almost good enough to actually print.

[thewhaleshark]

Thanks! Yeah, I think when I neaten up the hexes (they’re not all aligned right) and do some better blending and design for the tracker, it’d make a solid physical prototype for meatspace playtesting. I’m really liking the way it’s starting to look, particularly when I actually put out my initial setup:

It looks to me like a situation that’s ready to explode into a political knife-fight at any moment, at least that’s what I hope it evokes!

I also discovered a funny thing when I made this hex map. My intent was to put 39 controllable hexes on the map - because in the Commonwealth, the island was divided into 39 administrative districts, each headed by a single gothi - and when I do that, each hex represents roughly 20 - 30 miles of actual distance in actual Iceland, which also corresponds to the typical distance you cover riding overland on horseback in a single day.

So each hex represents one day’s ride by horseback, which is an extremely common measurement of time and distance in the sagas.

I dig that my attention to detail has yielded something with a tangible real-world metric that makes sense!

[thewhaleshark]

Fuckin around with Autodesk Sketchbook to try to make the board look more thematically complete, and I think this is the kind of general thing I’d go for. A real artist would make trivial work of this naturally, but I’m having some fun bumbling my way through a dead simple illustration program.

The fill image on the tracker is an excerpt of the first page (1v) of AM 334 fol, one of the two manuscripts that formed Grágás, also known as “The Grey Goose Laws,” the first compilation of the laws of the Icelandic Commonwealth. It slightly obscures readability from a distance, but close-up doesn’t really seem to do much obscuring - and the actual numbers on the colored parts of the tracker aren’t important, just the relative positions of the tokens to each other, so I’m not worried about that.

I want to do that “manuscript background” motif on cards as well, just to enhance the feel, but that’s a lower priority compared to like, testing various mechanics to see how they work.

I plan to internally playtest for a while, but at some point will need human brains to make decisions, because the game can only play itself so much.

[lukeburrage]

The grey text as titles is almost impossible to read. It needs way more contrast. It’s okay to have all the text black.

[Apreche]

Yeah, as nice as it looks, the background definitely has accessibility/contrast issues. Like an old Geocities or Myspace website with a busy background.

[thewhaleshark]

Fair enough, my default aesthetic is “excessively busy Geocities website” so that tracks.

The most important part to me was duplicating the border effects so I didn’t have some naked rectangle stuck on one side, so I can forego my design idea for readability I guess.

[lukeburrage]

To be honest, with that choice of typeface, I’m still unsure of what the words above the map say. Fame of Weeds? Tame of Deeds? Pame of Oeeds?

[thewhaleshark]

Good to note, it’s a placeholder typeface anyhow, I’ll fuck around with it at some point to make it fully readable. It’s tricky because it intersects with the border there, so I may play with placement.

“Fame of Deeds,” for reference.

[thewhaleshark]

The end state of a self-playthrough:

I think I’m on the right track. I generally like the way this looks because clearly Stuff Has Happened, and the board state reflects that. I’ll post a breakdown of play at some point.

There was less territorial expansion than I wanted, and as a result the Sheep track was kind weak. I think my mechanism for points from territory is good in principle, but when expansion is slow it gives a big advantage to people who can wall themselves off. Overall I was expecting like, Isafjordur (yellow) up in the upper left to have that whole block settled, and Flugumyri (purple) should’ve expanded east more. Really I expected the factions to control 6 - 9 districts apiece - at least 2/3 of the island to almost all of it. I think I can solve this by making “claim a new District” just an option that costs 1 point, so you can claim and develop in a turn. That’d certainly jazz up the Sheep track at least. Maybe limit it to 1 claim per turn? I dunno, we’ll see.

I think the dynamic of the back-and-forth on the track is solid and the information is available relatively readily.

I need reasons to put Thingmen out, or to make the existing reasons more apparent. Maybe I was tracking too much trying to play 4 factions - in principle, getting a pile of Thingmen to sue should be an attractive option, but I never really did that. I think maybe they need some kind of offensive option for districts where there are no Thingmen - so unprotected farms can just have dudes show up and start shit. Right now I have the District owner being able to start a fight if there’s no Thingmen there, but maybe it should be either side that can start shit.

I think the incrementing of District costs worked fine, but I kinda think a powered-up District should like do something. Dunno what yet.

[thewhaleshark]

Playing the Game

Setup and Round One

Round 1 Beginning (open for the full-size image):

The Svinfellings (of Svinafell), Oddaverjar (of Oddi), Asbirnings (of Flugumyri), and Vatnsfirðings (of Ísafjörður) are vying for dominance in Iceland. Each faction is dealt a hof (mat) and their Home Stead card (which is tucked into their Oaths). Each faction starts with a 1 District token on their home District, and they get two Holdings on the Sheep Hunt track, indicated on the Home Stead card. They also take the Thingmen and District tokens associated with their faction/color.

Note to self: make the “F” on Flugumyri’s tokens white, because that shit is invisible as black on purple. Also probably redo the Home Stead cards because the meaning of the colors is a bit confusing.

The Orlog cards are shuffled and placed on the Orlog pile. We draw 1 card per player from there and fill out the Foster track - the Foster track can hold up to 12 personae at once, one of each color and size combination.

The players determine that the Oddaverjar are the wisest and most learned among them, so they are the first Lawspeaker. They take the Lawspeaker card.

Round 1 End

The Law Council Phase

The Oddaverjar wisely choose Settle as the first action. This is uncontroversial because everyone needs more land, and everyone votes to Support it. This gives the Settle a Strength of 4. Starting with the Lawspeaker and proceeding in order, everyone claims and/or develops Districts as per the rules, and adjusts Holdings accordingly.

Note to self: This uses the faster expansion rules I came up with and I like them, so that’s probably what I’m sticking with. Also, so far in every self-playtest, Settle is the clearest best first action - this suggests that I should probably have a separate “Settling” phase as part of setup, where we accelerate this initial spread and then start the actual game. Settle will still be a very important and probably popular choice for a while, but might as well get that first one out of the way if that’s going to be the case almost every time.

Hunting for Sheep

Since the action from the first phase is blue and everyone voted for it, blue Bondi are active in this phase, at the strength indicated by each players blue holdings on the Sheep Hunt track.

Home Steads count as the color of the action you picked in the first phase, so that means everyone’s Home Stead action is blue for this round. We start with Oddi and proceed in the same order as we did in the previous phase.

Neither Ísafjörður nor Svinafell have blue Holdings at all, so they don’t get to do anything (specialization is for insects). Flugumyri could hold a Feast, but has no gifts to give and the only murder they could commit is extremely costly, so they opt to do nothing.

Only Oddi takes a bondi action - they Foster a Worth 1 persona from the track (the image doesn’t show you what it does because I had to be zoomed way out, but it’s “draw and keep 1 more when you Pledge”), and then draw 1 from the Orlog to replace it (because their Foster is a strength 1, they draw 1 card to fill the track after Fostering has happened). It’s a duplicate of an existing persona, so Oddi tosses it.

The Long Dark Winter

We are not using the Outlaw rules (because they don’t exist yet), so there’s no Outlaw phase.

Starting with the Lawspeaker and going in order, we compare each other to our neighbors and count up points.

Oddi is neighbors with Svinafell and beats them on two Holdings - weapons and jewelry (red and blue).
Svinafell is neighbors with Oddi and beats them on two Holdings - food and cloth (green and yellow).
Similary, Isafjordur and Flugumyri are neighbors and beat each other on two different holdings.

This means everybody beats their neighbors on two tracks, so everybody gets 2 Wordfame.

You could, of course, maintain such a balance until the game just ends - but there can only be one winner, so someone is going to have to try to get a leg up on someone else if they’re going to actually win.

[thewhaleshark]

Round 2 End

The Law Council

A round with some controversy. As Lawspeaker, Svinafell chose Pledge on the green track. Flugumyri voted in support because more actions is more gooder, but both Oddi and Isafjordur sued instead - Oddi to Settle some more (to get a stronger land position) and Isafjordur to Raid (because farming volcanic rocks is stupid).

Lawsuits go first, resolved in order from the Lawspeaker (I went left to right, top to bottom because I did a square setup, but it’s normally clockwise).

Isafjordur gets to Raid at strength 1 (because there is 1 Thingman on that suit), and sends 1 of their Thingmen from their Longhall out to sea.

Oddi then gets to Settle at strength 1, which they use to bump one of their 1 Districts to a 2, and get another Holding. They use that to get on the board with cloth (yellow) Holdings, tying Svinafell and thus denying them a point come Winter.

The Law is then resolved, starting with the Lawspeaker and then whoever supported, clockwise. Two votes means a strength 2 Pledge, so each player draws 2 cards from the Orlog and keeps 1 of those in their Oaths - now they have that action available going forward! Svinafell tucks a yellow Raid, and Flugumyri tucks a green Raid.

Hunting for Sheep

Starting with the Lawspeaker, we resolve Bondi actions based on the color each faction picked in phase 1. That means that Svinafell and Flugumyri will use green Bondi, Oddi will use blue, and Isafjordur will use yellow.

Svinafell has 3 green Holdings, so their Ride action (which is green for this round) is at strength 2, so they can Set Out with 1 Thingman and then move that Thingman once (and I think I accidentally moved that one twice here, oops), so that’s what they do. The yellow Raid doesn’t activate because Svinafell picked a green action this turn.

Flugumyri uses its Raid Bondi (strength 2, because it’s green and they have 3 green holdings) to send 2 Thingmen out to sea, to be recalled later. They again opt not to Feast because they have no gifts to give and no useful murder to commit.

Isafjordur uses its Raid as yellow (because they sued for yellow in the previous phase), which is at strength 2 because of their yellow holdings. They recall the Thingmen they sent out in the previous phase, and draw 1 (for the Thingman) plus 2 (for the strength of the action) cards from the Orlog, and keep half (rounded up). They get 2 pieces of really sweet loot from this brief excursion - an excellent ROI.

Oddi uses their Foster as Blue, so they Foster a worth 1 yellow persona (that counts as a wild farm in the winter) and then draws 2 cards (because strength 2 action) to replenish the pool.

The Long Dark Winter

Oddi’s choice to bilk Svinafell out of a point has landed them in the lead! Oddi gets 3 points, Svinafell gets 1, and Flugumyri and Isafjordur each get 2.

Farming in the Commonwealth is little better than fighting over scraps. It’s going to take some ingenuity to truly make a legacy here.

[thewhaleshark]

Round 3 in Detail

The Law Council

Flugumyri is now Lawspeaker, and they have chosen to advance up the green track to Feast.

This is the least popular decision in Althing history, and everyone else sues for something else. Because Feast is the second-tier action, both Svinafell and Isafjordur sue for different second-tier actions (Ride+1 and Raid+1), while Oddi…continues to Settle. Guess someone’s gotta do the farming.

Isafjordur picked Raid +1, so they send out 2 Thingmen (1 for the Thingman and +1 because moar law) to sea.

Oddi (as you will see shortly) decides to expand north a bit by adding a new 1 District, and becomes neighbors with Flugumyri (because they see the coming Raid/Feast combination and want to stifle some points gain).

Svinafell’s Ride+1 lets them move a Thingman onto the spot around Thingvellir where their suing Thingman will return (important in a sec) and also send someone else out from their hall (who will later cause trouble, no doubt).

Finally, we’re at the Lawspeaker, who…does not throw a feast. What?

Hunting for Sheep

The Sheep Hunt opens with Flugumyri. Because they chose a green action, their green Bondi activate, meaning they will get to both Raid and Feast at strength 2. Ahhhhh, now their choice as Lawspeaker makes sense! Sorta, anyhow - we’ll see if it pays off.

They recall the 2 Thingmen set out to sea last round, and draw 4 cards from the Orlog (2 Thingmen + 2 strength); they will keep 2 of these (half rounded up). Setting up for the coming Feast, they choose the yellow 1 and 2.

During the Feast, Flugumyri can give a gift of up to 2 Worth, and if they give a matched set, they can get more bang for their buck. They give a Worth 2 cloth gift (a fine cloak of silk), and that allows them to also give a Worth 1 gift of matching type at no extra cost (18 ells of humspun wool); this nets them 3 Wordfame immediately!

Note that I intended that gift to go to Isafjordur (because that is Flugumyri’s neighbor and also fuck the Oddaverjar), but accidentally gave it to Svinafell (because Svinafell’s mat was sitting in the same relative place compared to Flugumyri’s mat as Isafjordur is on the map). That’s a fuckup, it shoulda gone to Isafjordur, and that mistakes changes the outcome of this round.

Isafjordur finishes the Raid they started in the Law Council phase, brings their Thingmen home, and picks up some more serious loot. They’re quickly awash in Wealth.

Oddi, getting nervous about Svinafell’s nearby Thingmen, opt to use their Foster action to convert one of their personae into Wealth - they foster the Tradesman off to their new neighbors at Flugumyri, and receive a flock of wool-bearing sheep in exchange for his services.

Svinafell, now with a band of 2 Thingmen, uses their Ride action to swing through Thingvellir and start shit with Oddi, perhaps 10 miles outside of the actual site of the Althing. Each side draws 1 card per Thigmen from the Orlog, and we match up colors.

Looks like it’s a yellow and green fight; Svinafell pulls a yellow 1 and green 2, and Oddi pulls a green 1. Tha’s a lost cause, but they drop their newly-acquired yellow 1 to counter Svinafell. The aggressor weighs their options and decides to add another 1 yellow, clinching the victory.

Oddi cannot afford to fight, and so loses two conflicts. Svinafell gains 2 Wordfame, Oddi’s lone Thingman is slain, and because there is an excess kill, Svinafell also razes one of Oddi’s nearby Holdings; Svinafell chooses the cloth holding, to deny a point to Oddi. The loser is bumped down, and we put an Arson token on the green 12 - the wood from the farm that Svinafell burned isn’t coming back, and so the island’s resources are just a little bit more strained now.

Oddi takes 2 Worth of goods from Svinafell as compensation for the losses (1 farm and 1 dead Thingman), and adds them to Wealth; this is but a temporary setback, and this insult will be repaid in the future.

The Long Dark Winter

Flugumyri is now neighbors with both Oddi and Isafjordur, and has to beat both of them in a Holding in order to get its point. The island is stretched thin, after all. They only do so for green holdings, and get 1 more point to go with the 3 they got earlier - 4 points in one turn is pretty good!

Isafjordur continues to have one neighbor and continues to beat them in 2 Holdings. 2 points.

Oddi’s farming has served them well - 2 points for beating their neighbors in 2 Holdings (would’ve been 3 if not for the meddling Svinfellings).

Svinafell gained 2 points earlier for astounding violence, and gains 1 more for beating Oddi in green Holdings. 3 points means Svinafell ain’t out of the running yet.

The game is tight, but a new leader has emerged thanks to a combination of planning and luck.

---

Notes:

I like the faster expansion because after 1 full cycle of Lawspeaker action, the island is pretty significantly occupied, and that means further expansion will require more…drastic measures. My general pacing goal for the game is to have early farming get you up to about 8 - 11 points, and then have it become harder to get points purely through land ownership and thus drive conflicts and feasts and land-based engines and stuff.

Faster expansion means I probably need to come up with a slightly faster method of acquiring Bondi - because if I’m pushing to that engine-driven state faster, you need to actually have the components of that engine for it to run. Have to tinker with exactly how.

[thewhaleshark]

So some more fuckin around and, well…

At this stage in my life, I’ve done enough system design and things that are either directly game design in non-tabletop media, or tabletop-adjacent, that I can pretty reliably make a thing that works, in that it reliably reaches a stable predictable end state. Making it good though, and a good vehicle for the experience I want to create, that’s the hard shit.

I fucked around with Pledge giving you more cards, and it technically works fine with faster expansion, but to paraphrase @Apreche in the context of microtransaction-driven games: “if people pay you money to not play your game, your game sucks.”

I think the problem is that my solution to timing the game is getting the expansion and engine-building over faster, to the point that it’s maybe an afterthought instead of carefully planned growth - I’m basically saying “here’s this part of the game that we need to play but also let’s not spend a lot of time playing it.” And that’s not what I’m after. It’s not satisfying and makes me think “well what the heck is the point of growth if I just plow through it?” Not very Expansiony for an ostensibly 4X game.

In thinking about what I’m ultimately trying to do here, I’m thinking about an engine-builder in general (because that’s what I’m trying to accomplish), and whereas previously I had thought the political phase might be the meatiest part, really it’s the engine that’s the meatiest part (no duh Peter), and the political phase is determining the input for that engine. In principle, what I want is to create a politics phase where people will come to the table with a complex agenda, and make calculated political choices to make their engine run in just the right way. The engine sets the agenda, the political choice is how to accomplish that agenda.

Pursuant to that, I’ve been thinking of ways to strip back a little bit and really focus my efforts on the engine part, and I think I’ve got a way to do it that I’m going to spend some time testing.

Basically, I was making the engine-building part really slow and unfun by splitting it across two different actions: Settle gets you territory (which gets you the fuel to run your engine) and Pledge gets you Bondi (which are the parts of the engine). But like, why should those be separate? I can’t really think of a good reason to make that two steps, especially when making it two steps means that I need to speed up each step so you can actually have an engine that runs usefully.

So in this pass, I have removed Pledge as an action, and now it’s part of Settle. Claim a new hex, draw a Bondi from the deck, and you can put that sucker to use straight away (or maybe collect and tuck it at the end of the turn, guess we’ll see which timing feels better). Probably also add “redevelop” as some kind of option to Settle.

Paring down to 5 actions was a little weird across 4 color, so I added a 5th color, and that allowed me to collapse the Law Rock down to 5 choices - a color tied to a single action. I thought the added complexity of three actions per color would be cool, but in practice in my self-playtests it was hard to get there. So fuck it, let’s try making it simpler and more focused.

With one fewer action, I have no reason to have a deck that’s so big, so I think I can drop to maybe 70 cards - 14 of each color - and see how that works out. The fewer cards I have, the closer I can get to having each recruitable character be individually-named, and I think that’s way more interesting and thematic than some of the generic ones I have now.

Going to 5 colors and a simpler action selection also got me thinking about how else I could represent tile ownership and stuff, and I think I can do something like give each player 15 ownership tiles - 3 of each color - and then it becomes a lot easier to represent things on the map (instead of this abstracted slider). Each hex gets one tile, your actions during the Sheep phase are governed by the number of tiles of that color you have out right now. I kinda like that 1:1 correlation more than the sliding scale I have right now. Each piece means something concrete that way.

For now I’m going to ignore points for territory and just focus on how the engine-building works and what it leads to. I’m keeping the previous iteration kicking around, of course, but as I’ve pared down I’ve felt better about what’s left, so I’m inclined to pursue this line of thinking a bit.

[thewhaleshark]

Had a good test with @Apreche just now!

@thewhaleshark

So in this pass, I have removed Pledge as an action, and now it’s part of Settle. Claim a new hex, draw a Bondi from the deck, and you can put that sucker to use straight away (or maybe collect and tuck it at the end of the turn, guess we’ll see which timing feels better). Probably also add “redevelop” as some kind of option to Settle.

This is too powerful. Settle gives you both dudes that do things on a turn AND makes the things they do more powerful. My internal playtesting told me this was wonky and Scott confirmed it - this is just a very good action, too good as is.

Oaths in general are very strong, in large part because they’re not really limited. I definitely need to limit how many can have, or at least how many you can use in some fashion.

@thewhaleshark

Paring down to 5 actions was a little weird across 4 color, so I added a 5th color, and that allowed me to collapse the Law Rock down to 5 choices - a color tied to a single action.

This was a good change EXCEPT that right now, I have a color of a Law tied to an action that is also most represented in that color of card. So you can, for example, choose Settle as the Law, and if you also have a Settle Oath of matching color (very likely), you get to do it again. This was far too powerful.

Scott suggested changing that - make the action associated with a Law one that is not represented in its color by cards. So the Law will always do something different than the engine created by the cards of its color.

I really like that idea. And that will also mean that between the Law and the cards, each color will have 4/5 possible actions. Each color is defined by what one thing is absent, and I dunno I kinda like that.

Anyway, edits incoming! Feels good to actually put another brain on this, tell you what.

EDIT: I also thought of one more solution to an annoying problem - how to get Oaths. Right now, it’s coupled with Settle, but I can decouple those things and also fix an issue I was having with Foster where it didn’t have a good second option.

So I’m going to do this:

Settle: Add 1 Hex with a Farm of your choice OR Replace [strength] Farms you control with other Farms
Foster: Add 1 Persona to your Hird OR Draw [strength] from the Orlog and add 1 to your Oaths
Feast: Give up to [strength] Worth of Goods as Gfits OR move 1 Persona to your Wealth

Ride and Raid are unchanged.

That will separate getting land and farms from getting Oaths. I’ll want to add alternate utility for land (go back to getting 1 point for having the most of a type?), and I’m thinking of limiting Oaths to using 1 of yours per turn that matches the action from the Law Council phase - but also letting your Personae use your Oaths as a one-shot.

[thewhaleshark]

I have a playtest in progress with some dedicated Chudyk fans, and while I’ll have full feedback when it’s done, I’ve got some observations now.

1. Splitting off the acquisition of Oaths and putting that in Foster seems to work well - or at least, Settle is no longer powerful as hell, and other options seem desirable.

2. Having Personae be able to use Oaths is pretty strong and makes Personae major game-changers. This is a thing I want (since the sagas were about these people anyway, so why shouldn’t they change the game a lot), but I don’t know if they’re too good. Might also need a sort of default way to move the Persona pool along, because I think those will be major factors in anyone’s decisions.

3. #2 makes me think that I want a mechanic to let players get rid of other players’ Personae at some kind of steep cost, and this might be how I get Murder into the game. Maybe Personae can murder other Personae, but get outlawed (i.e. discarded) in the process. We’ll see.

4. Raid is my still my best-designed action I think, but it might be too strong. Need to tone it down a tad to make Wealth a bit leaner.

5. I modified combat a bit and I think I like how it works. It’s hard and costly to just bully someone around, but you can do it.

6. Other players actually have to think about the actions they take, so yay things aren’t blatantly obvious. We had one discussion about the right move to make on a turn, and the decision involved a political odds calculation (i.e. “if I do this, who is likely to support me”) and then an assessment of who is the biggest threat they can manage. It felt like the kind of decision I want in the game.

7. The action chain connection was a little cumbersome to explain but I thiiiiink my players have a grasp of it. Might need a way to make it clearer.

8. Each action is tied to a color, but also to an icon, and increasingly I’m thinking that the color is superfluous? Maybe I can just use the icons? But color is a quick reference so I dunno, I’ll have to fuck with it.