If you do end up wanting to try and get this published, tying actions to to icons would probably be better than tying them to colors because of colorblind players.
2 Likes
Honestly, they already are - I think the question is more one of whether I should even bother keeping the colors at all. I’m going to add icons to the action names to clearly tie them all together, but should I also keep the color association for quick reference?
It’ll ultimately be a matter of graphic design and what works for information flow.
1 Like
Road to Thingvellir, v.3, Playtest 2
So we completed our playtest under the newest ruleset (which I didn’t post here because I’m lazy - don’t worry, I’ll post the next one), and it went pretty well! Reykholt (purple) is going to win on the next round no matter what we do, and Isafjordur (yellow) is not poised to stop them, so it’s over.
Overall, the playtesters found it fun and very very very different than the Impulse revamp project of yore. It is fully its own game doing its own thing with almost nothing left of its genesis material, which is cool.
Notes:
-
Feuds are too effective at points generation and game control from the very beginning. You can easily form a powerful steamroller to stomp all over the other players and block their political access to Thingvellir (which I absolutely intend), but you can build that steamroller in the early to mid game and be absolutely unstoppable (which I do not intend). Basically, one player (playing Reykholt in the photo above - the “R” faction) was able to build what would be a late-game engine when we were just entering mid-game, and that absolutely wrecked us. Thoughts on how to stop this below.
-
Feast is as difficult to execute as I intend - if you have the correct combination of goods, you can turn them into points at the highest rate of any action, but doing requires either building up the infrastructure to take that action, or figuring out how to get other people on board with voting for it. Unfortunately, that difficulty against the simplicity of an engine of violence means that Feast is simply not the way to win in these rules - and I want it to be. This problem is evident in the photo - Svinafell (the blue-green faction) had a pile of Wealth for most of the game, but was unable to ever effectively leverage it. They should be able to use that money, but combat was just too damn effective.
-
Personae (the figures you can recruit) are powerful, useful, and desirable. People will change what they were going to do in order to recruit strong ones, which is exactly what I want. The pool of available Personae needs to change more often than it does - right now, it’s tied only to the recruiting action, so you can hit a stagnation point where nobody wants the people out there, and the people out there never change because nobody wants them. That’s easy to fix.
-
Raid continues to be my best-designed action. It might give too strong a return, though. Will need to analyze that more closely. I got a suggestion to rename it, because “Ride” and “Raid” sound awfully close (I’ll admit I picked them on purpose because they follow the Norse poetic convention of skothending - “near-hit rhyme”) and it got confusing. Easy enough to fix.
-
I tied the acquisition of Oaths to the Foster action and I think that worked alright. It doesn’t feel intuitive but it worked reasonably well.
-
Managing the balance of farms via Settle definitely makes a useful difference. Though, again, because combat was too strong, it became extremely advantageous to hyper-specialize in one type of farm in order to use it to power Ride actions.
The clear and consistent failure mode in the game was the absolute dominance of fighting as a strategy, and the ability to combo it into a steamrolling engine of destruction. Cool in principle, but not terribly fun to fight against. In theory more players could band together and stop that, but I think it’s better to fix the root cause.
I could boost everything else to be just as strong - but honestly, I don’t want a thing that was as powerful as what dropped here, because one player was more or less able to just dictate the game, and that’s not fun. You should have to struggle to secure and maintain a position like that, but here, it came easily.
So we came up with some fixes and solutions to the bumps we found:
Soft-Touch Changes
To fix combat:
-Points from a Feud are limited by the Defender’s draw
-Slow trickle of the dead back to Longhall (1 per Winter)
Right now, combat involves drawing cards from the deck for each Thingman on each side. Those cards dictate the Conflicts we fight using Goods, and you get 1 point for each Conflict you win.
As you might imagine, this gives a big advantage to whoever brings the most numbers. In addition, right now all the Thingmen who die in combat return to you at the end of the round, so if you bring big numbers and throw them into a meat grinder to get points, you can literally just do it all over again next turn. Repeat until you win.
Instead of getting points for each conflict, I’m going to change it so you only get points for contested conflicts - where both sides have Goods. This prevents someone from just bullying a weaker player and squeezing points out of them. Thingmen will still die in uncontested conflicts - but they’ll have died for nothing. Ah, the glories of warfare.
In addition, instead of getting all your slain Thingmen back every Winter, you get ONE. Maybe add a way to boost that, or maybe bump it up to “half rounded up,” but in any event slowing date the rate of retrieval will make someone think twice before just running an endless meat grinder.
To fix overpowered Lawsuit engines (related to a combat engine)
-Slow trickle of Thingmen from Lawsuit
-Always get a vote at Thingvellir, don’t start with Thingmen at Thingvellir
In order to Sue, you need Thingmen at Thingvellir. But if you build a strong combat engine, you will also have this power - a bunch of dudes out and about means you can just put dudes where you need them to go and sue the fuck out of everyone and then murder them in their homes.
I mean again, that’s what I want to happen, but not without a cost, not sustainably, and not easily.
So, after a Lawsuit with Thingmen, you have to send one home. This means you will gradually bleed them out and lose some position on the map, which may be enough to break the stranglehold of a bully.
Also, right now, you can only sue if you have Thingmen, but ehhhhhhh. You should be able to at least launch a Lawsuit even if no dudes are there, and then dudes can offer a bonus. I need to think about how this will shake out exactly, but it needs to happen. Commensurate with that, you will also now not start with dudes on the map, since you don’t need them to sue. I kinda like the “faceoff at Thingvellir” starting position, but it’s not necessary and maybe even detrimental.
To Make Feasting a Bit Stronger
-Self-Feast - each Persona can eat 1 Good for 1 Point if nobody shows up
So right now, very effective Feasts require other players to vote in favor. In general, they won’t, because that vote enables you to get more points, and it’ll be obvious when you’re poised for those points.
So, add a caveat that if you propose a Feast and literally nobody else shows up, you can just throw an epic rager for your own dudes and get some basic inefficient points generation out of your own Goods. It’s still better if other people show up to help make it an awesome party, but at least it’s something.
In the self-feast, you would discard the Goods instead of handing them to someone else. This may actually incentivize more Feasts, because why not show up and let them put those Goods to good use (i.e. giving them to you) instead of just letting them get thrown away, right?
A Big Idea
So while this has been going on, I’ve been chatting/co-designing/co-developing a couple of other games with this outrageously French dude in Lille, France. He’s incredibly French, it’s honestly delightful. Anyhow, he does both board games and RPG’s and he is firmly in the “build a narrative in your board game” camp, which is also the camp I’m in with this game, so we’re very much on the same wavelength.
He and I had a back-and-forth about victory points and how they’re boring. VP are easy and convenient, but in a game like mine, they’re really a proxy for what I want to see - interesting, memorable, or convoluted actions. Right now, I’m incentivizing those kinds of things by making them worth more points on a scale.
So like, why have that middleman at all? Why not just spell out the cool stuff I want to happen, set them as challenges, and make the game about doing those things instead of making some numbers go up?
And thus, we get
Deeds
Technically, the idea is kind of just VP with extra steps, but somewhat like Innovation, I would come up with a number of “achievement” cards that you can earn by fulfilling specific game state conditions. In order to win, you need to get a certain number of these achievement cards.
They’re public, so everyone will see and be able to compete for them.
The difference between this and VP is that you can only get an achievement once, so any particular thing you do is only good for that specific thing once. Some things will clearly lead to other things so as to not totally throw away all that effort, but in general, this should prevent someone from hammering on the same strategy constantly much to everyone’s chagrin. Force people to adapt and overcome, basically.
The real real advantage to this approach is that I can then make the game more directly about building a narrative of your people; each achievement will have some story text, and so you will extremely literally write your own story through the combination of your Deeds.
One of the playtesters suggested including a physical notebook so players can record the results of a session and give each other appropriate Norse bynames based on the Deeds they accomplished. I’m 100% here for that gimmicky bullshit, because I love creating table narratives and want players to walk away talking about the experience they just had. And it’s a little bit of Legacy game stuff without putting stickers on the board.
I would include a glossary of Norse bynames that were actually used, with both the Old Icelandic spelling and the modern English, because might as well go all the way with this nerd shit.
One fork of this idea is to have Deeds that you achieve by being the First, and then end-game Deeds to do a sort of final scoring round. Many of those will involve players keeping track of who did what during the game, and I will absolutely not provide any means to track that - so it will be up to players to recall what everyone did, and both claim achievements and refute those claims. That’ll be a tricky set of interactions to manage, but I really like the idea of recounting Deeds after the fact, to cement the theme of building a legacy out of your works.
So anyway…Stuff! And now the creative juices are flowing and I may have inadvertently recruited a developer or two to push this game fully in its newly emerged direction. Whoops.
4 Likes
Game Update: 7/15/21
First things first, I updated the text of my public-facing rules to its current version. You can read them (and even try playing the game, though I don’t think it’s ready for blind playtesting yet) right here:
Yes, I know I need pictures in the rules text, those are forthcoming. Anyway, keep this link because this is where I plan to update this for a good while - I’m keeping my own copy of the rules elsewhere, but this is where I want public-facing rules to go.
Playtest 3, Session 1
Current state of the game:
Previously, combat was far and away the best way to win, so I implemented the various soft-touch changes - and I think it worked? It will likely require more refinement, but combat was now not just automatically dominant, the current aggressor had to actually work for it, and is not yet winning. In this picture, Reykholt has spent the entire game building up their forces, and just now managed to secure 6 points in a single turn by extending themselves hard, and that will run out of steam eventually.
The game seems to favor specializing in one type of Farm, which is not exactly what I was going for. Flugumyri (the faction I’m playing) is trying to employ diversified Farming, and we’re in last place. Buuuut we’re also poised to get a lot of points through Feast if I pull it off, so maybe I’m being premature in that assessment. Seems like diversifying early on is playing the long game, specializing early on is playing the short game? We’ll see how it plays out.
Decisions seem appropriately weighty and meaningful and speak to strategic depth. The changes to combat have also made it so that someone who is being assailed has to respond, but doesn’t necessarily need to change direction. I think I like that balance - in a lot of games with combat, say Eclipse, you’re sorta fucked if someone builds up units and you didn’t, and your only choice is to drop what you’re doing and play that same game. Here, Svinafell has had to flex and respond to Reykholt’s aggression, but instead of Svinafell needing to change their game direction, they’re instead inspired to burn harder and faster while trying to hold off the encroaching forces. It’s creating a feel I really like.
I incorporated Murder as a way to get rid of Personae, and it’s happened once so far. It is appropriately costly to the Murdering player, and it definitely made a difference in the game.
The Outlaw is paired with Murder, and so far we’ve used an Outlaw once. It seems fine? We’ll see how it plays out in a more-players game at some point. It’s a thing I want to happen, so I’m going to make sure it feels good.
The “always get a vote at Thingvellir” idea has worked out decently so far, but I’d like to see more people bringing Thingmen to bear to make Lawsuits. Maybe this is a 3-player dynamic? We’ll see.
I mentioned wanting to incorporate Achievements to push this more in a narrative game direction, and while it’s going to be a little while before I play with those, I figured I’d share what I’m thinking initially.
I envision 3 types of achievements, representing temporally different types of Wordfame: Names, Songs, and Records.
Names are types of Norse bynames, which were generally used to refer to people in day-to-day dealings in various capacities. The ones here are taken directly from Landnamabok - the Icelandic Book of the Settling. Most were not flattering (I mean, Harm-Fart?), but they were usually used to identify people in conversation. I’m planning to have 3 types of Name - Prefix, Suffix, and Epithet - and you can only get one of each. Getting them will be tied to getting some kind of points as a currency (there will be both positive and negative points, and names associated with each), and I’m thinking that I will tie game end to someone completing their name - get all 3 Names, game ends, most Achievements wins.
Songs represent how skalds would remember and praise your Deeds throughout your life and in the cultural storytelling space afterwards. They’re all represented by kennings - literary circumlocutions that are used to elevate the subject to a more grand plane of existence. The tale grows taller in the telling, and kennings reflect that elevation. I added little story blurbs to each one, so as you acquire them, you build an actual narrative. You acquire these by being the first player to do the thing listed on the kenning.
Records represent the texts that are written hundreds of years later, the longest-lasting and most memorable parts of your legacy. These will be decided after the game ends, and could potentially swing victory to someone else.
I’m not a huge fan of post-game accounting, but here, I want to play with an idea that would have players recount the action that just happened as a sort of narrative remembrance and reinforcement. I have no idea if any of these will really be achievable, but I’m tossing ideas out there to see what happens. I think these will be the most flexible and also the weirdest.
1 Like
Having a pretty good idea of what the game loop is going to be (in rough chunks anyway - fine-tuning through playtesting will be a lengthy process), I turned my attention this past week towards upping the design aspect of the game a bit, based on playtest feedback. While it might sound less important than mechanics, the game heavily relies on you parsing what you and other players are capable of doing (i.e. assessing the game state before a decision), so design as it pertains to information flow is really important.
But I took the moment to add a little more art anyhow, just to deepen the feel, and put down some ideas for final design so that they can be examined and refined.
Before:
After:
And I updated the board to tie the action icons together (and color updates, darkened lines, etc):
An example of the cards tesselated as intended (with an older color scheme and a stupid upside-down icon thing I tried out and abandoned because I hate it):
2 Likes
Last night, I had a playtest session with 4 other people who I don’t know personally, who have not followed the development of this game at all, and none of whom have played anything by Carl Chudyk ever.
They had a really good time and want to keep playing!
Lots of notes that I’ll post at some point, but the fact that total strangers played it, were into it, and got it is extremely promising.
4 Likes
Finally got around to scheduling another session with that playtest group. Still not done but it should finish up in one more session. Current board state:
The board really looks the way I was hoping it would in a 5-player game at this state of maturity - everyone has a tableau full of stuff, and they’re burning it to try to pull ahead. Thingmen everywhere, border disputes, lawsuits flying, selective politics with a bit of roleplaying - I’m getting the table experience I was hoping for, and with relative strangers.
I have a number of mechanical improvements that’ve come up already, mostly in line with what I had been thinking but now confirmed by playing it out more thoroughly.
The actual core of the game seems to be holding up well, so everything that I’m finding is really a tweak to get it to behave in a way that’s more engaging and that further enhances the experience.
I’m trying to figure out the right end condition. I’m not sure if the game proceeds too quickly or not - at the rate we’re going, there will be maybe 15 rounds, meaning every player is Lawspeaker 3 times. Is that too few? It doesn’t seem like a lot of chances at the helm, but the game is also very live the entire time - everybody acts every round, so it’s not like you only get 3 turns, you get the same number of turns as everyone else because it’s always everyone’s turn.
But I think that does feel a little odd in 5 players. We’ll see. I think that’s mostly a problem of framing expectations going into the game.
They all seem to be into the heavy historical theme, and they all like the cultural and historical elements the most out of everything. They’re making challenging decisions, though at this point in the game state (about halfway) everyone kind of seems to think their path is set and clear, and now it’s a matter of playing it out.
Which…I think is what I want? You spend the early game building and looking for a path forward, and then at the midpoint it breaks into a gallop? That’s probably good? Far too early to tell, but I’m not worried.
Work continues!
5 Likes
So that playtest group is really fond of TTS, and while I think Screentop is a better interface for the kind of game I’m designing, it does lack some ability I would like to have (like, say, updating components in the middle of play). I’ve decided to acquiesce to popular demand and also build the game in TTS - and, as long as I’m doing so, I’m taking the opportunity to play with height and dimensionality, to create additional visual interest.
I think of the tree in Everdell - it doesn’t explicitly add anything mechanically essential to the game, but it adds a whole lot of feel and visual interest that helps create the table experience.
I’m thinking about using standing models to do visual storytelling, like so:
The models leave something to be desired, but the idea is there. The Lawspeaker has selected their action, and placed the Law Rock on it. Those who Support the Law place tokens on top of the rock, and people who Sue place tokens on the ground at the base of the rock. My goal is to visually reinforce the political state of the game - a group on top of a rock looking down at those who defy them.
Similarly, I’m trying out just a couple of 3D objects sitting on the map, to visually anchor the action.
We’ll see how it all plays out. I suspect it won’t have quite the same impact in TTS as it would in person, but this is an easy way for me to try it out and see what I like.
I’ve also got a decent rules text written up, finally. Haven’t added images yet, but in theory the game is playable by this text alone.
1 Like
Finished a 3-player playtest and it’s a stark contrast against the 5-player game, in a way that is vexing and frustrating.
Ultimately, the lower player count doesn’t work correctly. The game devolves very quickly into a bunch of expansion and single-resource domination, and it’s just not interesting enough.
We tossed around a bunch of ideas, and they all involve having less stuff available. The 5-player version was interesting because the decision space is more constrained and you have more things pushing on you; in 3 players, you have so much room to breathe that nothing else matters.
I think a sharp restriction in the amount of available stuff is in order, for sure. There are many ways to do this - a cost for continued expansion, give you fewer things, create upkeep costs, and more.
I thiiiiiink the right answer is to make Farms harder to get at and not something you can choose directly. The other option is fewer Loyalty tokens so you can’t take as much territory, but I really like the idea of someone being able to take over a lot of the island because that’s a cool narrative. So, make it not straightforward to build a network of resources. A suggestion was to randomly seed the board with Farms at the outset - because, after all, I’m playing after Iceland was settled and populated. That would mean that instead of you just putting a farm down, you would seek out specific places based on what you needed, and would have to try to coax them to join you.
There was a desire to have the Lawspeaker be more powerful and affect victory conditions, as well as be something for which you would compete instead of something you would be handed. This matches up with my desire to shift from points-based victory to achievement-based victory - instead of pushing numbers up a slider, do stuff you have to invest in and try to outstrip everyone else. The Lawspeaker could choose an achievement for the round to be the hot-ticket item.
There was also a desire to make non-Feast points generation matter more, and I agree. There should be some big moves from doing other things - and really, this is again where achievements come into play.
I had previously cooked up a hybrid system, where you get some points that you can turn into “Name” achievements, and also special achievements for pulling off specific mechanical things. Game ends when someone has 3 Names, and most achievements wins. Something like that.
This one definitely stung a bit because my 5-player session went well and I was riding on that high. This version felt like an enormous step down, and it’s been that way for every 3-player game. So, beyond all shadow of a doubt, something pretty fundamental needs to shift.
I’m a little bruised, but still going at it!
1 Like
Gonna jot this down while it’s in my head. This will probably not make sense to anyone here except maybe @Apreche and @Alex . Maaajor structural changes, probably too much complexity, though also it seems not that dramatic to me?
Victory
In order to win, you need to collect 3 Bynames. There are 3 ways to collect a Byname:
-scoring 22 Wordfame and taking the Commission a Manuscript action in Phase I
-completing a Tale chosen by the Lawspeaker
-completing a Saga
Tales are action-based objectives, like “give a Gift of each type at a Feast” or something. There will be a pool of them, and the Lawspeaker must pick one at the start of each round to be the thing.
Sagas will be like Tales, but substantially more difficult, limited (1 per player), and always available.
When you collect a Byname, the other players decide which one you get, with the Lawspeaker getting the final say. This has no effect other than giving everyone the opportunity to name you Harm-Fart because you’re a jerk.
Lawspeaker
The Lawspeaker, in addition to setting the Tale, gets an extra vote in Phase I.
You can compete for the Lawspeaker in Phase I. Otherwise, it doesn’t move.
Terminology
Settle becomes Pledge (the island is already settled, you’re just trying to curry favor)
Wealth now holds Stores (cards), and Stores hold Goods (formerly Farm tokens, now distributed on the map to be Harvested)
Setup
Mostly as is now, except that Farms go in a bag, are randomized, and placed on all Districts on the map.
You will take competitive Ride actions to go collect Goods from those Farms, in an effort to power your engine. You can also try to gain Loyalty from a District by Pledging (formerly Settle) to it, which makes it a permanent Good that you own.
-Revamp phases:
Phase I is politics via worker placement in which players compete for bonuses and board manipulation that will be relevant in the next two phases; we take no main actions in this phase.
(I normally hate worker placement games, but mostly because they’re extremely parallel - so I’m hoping that lots of political interactivity makes it more interesting to me).
Phase II is taking main actions via Oaths, powered by Goods collected from Farms and enhanced by choices made in Phase I
Phase III is cleanup, harvest, and scoring: retrieve the slain, collect Goods, and score points for winning at competitive Rides
Phase I
There are 10 action spaces: 5 corresponding to each type of Farm/Good/Action (i.e. Axes/red, Fences/brown, etc), and 5 corresponding to each named Action. The Lawspeaker and Outlaw cards are also action spaces. There is also a Commission a Manuscript space.
The Type action spaces represent you betting on being the player to win a Ride of that Type this round. If you win that space and also win the Ride of its type, you gain 3 additional Wordfame.
The Action Name spaces give a +1 bonus to all actions of that name that you take this round. If you don’t have an Oath of that action, it also counts as an Oath of any one color for the round, for you only.
If you win the Lawspeaker space, you become the Lawspeaker next round.
If you win the Outlaw space, you may declare any one Persona owned by any one player to be the Outlaw (remove them from that player’s Hird and place them on the Outlaw card).
Starting with the Lawspeaker and proceeding clockwise, each player claims one action space by placing some number of their Thingmen at Thingvellir on the space. You always have one special permanent Thingman at Thingvellir, so you always have at least one vote.
Other players may announce a Lawsuit in response to any player claiming a space. To Sue, place more of your Thingmen on the space than the other player. That player may countersue by adding more of their Thingmen (tie always going to whoever was on the space first), and you go back and forth until someone gives up. The loser retrieves all of their Thingmen and places them on something else.
You may not sue for the action that the Lawspeaker selected with their additional voting token (it will be marked to indicate that it’s special).
Continue doing this until everyone has assigned all of their Thingmen to actions, or until nobody can or wants to assign. Thingmen assigned to actions are committed for the entire round and cannot be used for any other purpose. Then, move to Phase II.
Phase II
Starting with the Lawspeaker and going clockwise, each player Honors or Exploits one Oath.
To power Oaths, spend Goods from your Stores matching its Type - 1 Good is 1 Weight. Send those Goods back to the sack (there’s a sack of Goods now).
Honored Oaths stick around. Exploited Oaths gain bonus Weight equal to the Worth of the Persona doing the Exploiting if the types match (i.e. yellow Persona Exploits yellow Oath, get bonus equal to Persona’s Worth) and then discard that Oath. Each Persona can only Exploit one Oath per round.
The Farms on Districts that are Loyal to you count as Goods in your Store for this purpose. Flip them over instead of spending them to indicate that you’ve used them for this round; they come back at the end.
Keep going in this fashion, one at a time, until players have taken all the actions they can afford or want to. You can Honor multiple Oaths, but no Oath can be Honored more than once per round. You can Honor and Exploit the same Oath.
If there is an Outlaw, it counts as an Oath available to everyone. You may spend Wordfame instead of or in addition to Goods to power it, 1 Wordfame = 1 Weight.
Phase III
Take During the Winter actions
Resolve the Rides for Goods - whoever wins a Ride of a Type takes Farms of that type from anywhere in Iceland and places them in their Stores, up to the total Worth of that Store (i.e. if I have 4 Worth of Axe Stores, I may take 4 Axes from Iceland). They also gain 2 Wordfame for winning the Ride (+3 if they won its type in Phase I).
Do this for each type of Ride. If nobody went for a particular Ride, nobody wins it.
Then, starting with the Lawspeaker and going clockwise, each player adds 1 Good of the appropriate type to each of their Stores (if they have the space for it). If a Good runs out before you get to take it, tough shit, try harder next time.
Then, replenish Iceland from the bag. If Goods run out and there are empty spaces, tough shit, it sucks to farm a volcanic hellscape.
Actions
Pledge -
-
place a new Loyalty token adjacent to one you already have: doing so requires Weight equal to the number of Farms of its type that are already Loyal to you (i.e. if you have 3 Axe Farms that are Loyal to you, you need 3 Weight to take a 4th.)
-
Swap any of your Farms that are Loyal to you with random pulls from the bag
Ride
Ride gets a big ol’ revamp and a bunch of complexity. Probably too much but whatever, I can pare down. You can make Rides up to the Weight of the action. There are 4 different types of Ride. For each Ride, take any number of your Thingmen from your Longhall and place them at the appropriate destination; you may instead recall Thingmen from a location and place them in your Longhall. Thingmen stay where they are until they are killed or recalled. You may Ride:
-
To Thing: place Thingmen at your Booth at Thingvellir; they will be available in susbsequent turns for political shenanigans.
-
To Gather (support): place Thingmen on one of the competitive Rides (there are 5, one of each type); if left unchallenged, you will win that Ride, gain Wordfame, and claim Goods.
-
To Survey: place Thingmen on any hex edge in Thingvellir; so long as they are there, they count as Loyalty tokens for the purposes of Pledge 1, and give bonus Weight equal to their number for a Pledge action taken to claim one of the Districts they touch
-
To Feud: you may send Thingmen to challenge existing bands of Thingmen who are Gathering, Surveying, or those remaining in an opponent’s Longhall. If you do so, you fight the enemy band. See fighting when I write it up.
Sail
Unchanged except for one addition: you may use your Sail action to send your Thingmen at Sea to Feud with another band of Thingmen at Sea (basically Ride for Feud, but only among those at sea)
Foster
Unchanged
Feast
Mostly unchanged. You give Goods equal to Weight, 1 point per Good given. Worthy and Legendary gifts involve giving away entire Stores, plus the Goods on them - you get 3 points for Worthy and 6 for Legendary, plus 1 for every Good on the stores. Big points move.
This is very Thingmen-intensive, and I like that because consistently, having to carefully choose where to allocate your Thingmen has been the most interesting set of choices. Soooo I’m trying out a bunch of ways to make that more prominent. Will likely need way more Thingmen.
That’s very significantly different. I can’t tell if it’s going to work or not without a lot of playtesting.
What I can say is that my brain is telling me you are getting even closer to “King of Dragon Pass” without realizing it. To win that game you have to complete X hero quests. IIRC X is 3 for the short game and 8 for the long game? And yes, it’s in the world of Glorantha, so they do mean Hero Quest™, although it is not turn-based tactical dungeon combat in any way, shape, or form.
I’m going to do some solo playtesting for a bit to iron out large kinks and cut away at chunks of this, so I imagine whatever I trot out for others to see will be less. It’s very different but still hits on what I want to hit on. I think, anyway.
Probably the first thing to cut will be the dual layer of worker placement that I cooked up with Ride. The pull between Thingvellir and the Sea is probably enough to make domestic commitment sufficiently complicated.
I should actually play that one day.
I’ve tried and failed several times already. But even in failing I learned a lot. There isn’t anything else like it except for the one or two other games that are in the same family.
EDIT: I wonder if we can play it together… It’s an entirely solo game, but unlike Pandemic it might benefit from having another person to ease the cognitive load.
1 Like
How about you make it a five player game only?
Or maybe make a “fork”, and keep the five player game much as it is now, leaving you able to develop the three player version more freely without worrying how it will effect the five player version.
1 Like
Five player only is untenable, IMO. I’m not a fan of games with extremely fixed player counts. That works for weird indie RPG’s but I think makes a tabletop game a non-starter.
It’s definitely going to be a fork for sure. The 5-player version was actually fun, so there has to be something there, and an easier way to make it work at lower player counts than the revamp above.
And while I am saying the 5-player version worked, it also had a specific problem in common with the 3-player version, and that same thing has come up consistently (it’s better to specialize than diversify, which is the opposite of what I want) in all playtests, so it tells me that there is something fundamental to the design that I don’t quite grasp that is getting in my way.
But I’m definitely not tossing out the previous version. I am primarily interested in trying a different approach here, and seeing if it helps me figure out what the fundamental difference might be and how I might play at addressing it.
2 Likes
Messing around a bit with self-playtesting, I thiiiiiink the smallest change I can make that might fix a good bit of it is reversing the way Settle currently works.
-Place a new Loyalty token and a Farm. The Weight of the action must at least equal the number of Farms of that type you will control after placement. (i.e. if you have 3 Axe Farms, you need a Weight 4 action to place a 4th Axe Farm)
-Exchange one Farm you control for any type
In principle, this means that you can’t just keep expanding with Weight 0 Settle actions. You need at least a Weight 1 to add a new Farm, and Settle Oaths will not allow infinite recursion.
This might also make the non-Weight-dependent option more attractive - because the action will allow you to ratchet itself up if you pick and choose Farms.
This might make the game too slow, that’s my only fear, but I’ll play with it and see what happens.
EDIT: Also realized I can probably just straight up add the Tales and Sagas, suing for Lawspeaker and Outlaw, and modify Phase I without actually substantially changing the underlying structure of the game. Instead of taking an action in Phase I, your selection gives you a wild Oath that you can use in Phase II. That would put all the main action in one Phase, and leave Phase I as purely choosing, instead of this weird choice plus action thing.
Other thoughts to possibly try:
-in order to limit the snowball effect, using Farms to power Oaths “taps” them for the round. Flip uspide-down, can’t use that Farm to power other Oaths.
-instead of fighting to claim a District from someone, you use Settle as normal, but must also discard Wealth whose worth exceeds the number of Farms of that type the owner controls
-if you eliminate all enemy Thingmen in a Feud, you can raze a Farm as well, and remove it from the game
-Raid: Thingmen can Raid undefended enemy Farms (i.e. no enemy Thingmen on the hex) to try to take Goods from that player
A thought came to me today and I’m gonna frame it out here:
Right now, I have The Grey Goose Laws: a political action selection track. Decide if you throw in with the Lawspeaker, or Sue to get your own way.
But here’s the thing: that’s not really how it worked. Generally, The Law Council met separately to discuss and amend laws, and then lawsuits were heard at the various Quarter Courts or the Fifth Court at Thingvellir. Gothi made up the law council and appointed judges to the courts, so the two operated separately.
So why have I lumped the two together at all? Hmmmm.
What if you do action selection as one thing, and lawsuits as another thing?
A quick rough-out of the idea. Gothi pick an action in the Law Council to support. The more who support it, the more that actions of that name get boosted in Phase II.
If there are Thingmen at Thingvellir, they may bring lawsuits before the Courts. Suits are competitive - if someone throws more people at a suit than you did, you get kicked off and have to move again. The resource spaces all do something related to that resource (you get a bunch of it bonus? more points?), and the Lawspeaker and Outlaw let you sue for those.
It needs to be refined but that’s the basic idea.
Alright, here’s what I’m going to fuck around with for a bit. I’ve been prodding and trying things out here and there, and so far this is the idea that speaks most to me:
The Logretta is where you vote on actions - you get the action you pick as a wild Oath that turn (explained below), and the most popular one (i.e. most votes) gets +1 to all Oaths of that name. Lawspeaker breaks ties.
After voting, anyone with Thingmen can launch a suit in the Quarter Courts. You can only launch one, and they’re competitive. You can kick someone off of one by putting down more Thingmen then they did - they can move to another one or give up. 5 of the suits give you a special power that you affect your opponents or the game state, and you can also bid to become Lawspeaker or the Outlaw.
Once all that business is done, we move to Phase II.
In Phase II, you use Oaths. All Oaths are powered by your Farms. You can Follow the Law (use the Oath you picked in Phase I) once, Exploit one per Persona (they add their Worth to the Oath if the type matches), and Honor any number of Oaths.
Each player does one Oath at a time, starting with the Lawspeaker and proceeding clockwise, until everyone has taken all the actions they want to. In ord
To power an Oath, you need to commit a Farm of matching type by flipping it over. If you Follow the Law, you can use any of your Farms to power it.
And then I’ll use the change to Settle (now Pledge) above, to make it really costly to add new territory.
Gonna see how that goes, tweak it, then maybe find some victims to try it out and see how it flows.
Reconsidering points gain and math.
I want to move the victory condition to “most achievements,” and the game end condition to “when someone has 3 Name achievements.” There are two kinds of special achievements that you get by doing specific things, and a pool of Names that you can get by Commissioning a Manuscript when you have X Wordfame (currently 22, will change numbers as relevant).
That means right now it takes 66 points to end the game, which is already taking goddamn forever. So, fucking with math and following some feedback from last time (every action should have some way to get you points), here’s what I’m going to try out.
-
Feast: a Gift gives its Worth in Wordfame. A Worthy Gift is now 5, and a Legendary Gift is now 9 points.
-
Pledge: You get points for having the most of a type of Farm at the end of a turn. We count points for all types every turn, instead of whatever was “in demand.” Each type is worth 1 Wordfame, +1 for each Persona of its type available in the pool (i.e. a max of 4 points for a Farm type if all 3 Personae of that type are in the pool). Also contemplating doing this by only counting the Farms that didn’t get used to power an Oath in Phase II. This might be too many points but whatever, we’ll see.
-
Ride: You get points for Feuds. 1 Wordfame for each Conflict you win, and 1 Wordfame for each Good your opponent takes from you in Compensation.
-
Foster: It doesn’t generate points directly, but the action gets you Goods (to turn into future points), Personae (some of which make points), and now it directly manipulates the value of Farms (by changing the composition of the pool).
-
Sail: I’m thinking about you drawing a pile of Loot, and then either claiming Goods or claiming Wordfame by discarding them before looking at them (you come back with riches and tales of your exploits, basically). So if I draw 6 cards, I can choose to, say, reveal 3 as Goods and discard the other 3 to get 3 Wordfame. Might have to play with that a bit if it winds up being way unbalanced, but I thiiiiink this is the most inefficient way to turn cards into points (that’s the goal, anyway - the most direct, so the least efficient).
That should make for way more points flying around (and of course, I should revisit the Personae that generate Wordfame on their own).
I’m also contemplating letting you use the Ride action to attack someone else’s Thingmen who are At Sea, with one of your bands that is also At Sea. This would make sending dudes to the drink a bit riskier, and let you directly fuck with someone who is just turtling and sending dudes out to make Wealth.
Getting some momentum back now!
EDIT:
So, Achievements.
Upthread I showed the Names and the Songs, and I’m sticking with those.
In the version I’m working on, you get Names with Wordfame and Commissioning. There are two types: Praise and Scorn, and you take one depending on how you got most of your points that time (Gifts and Farms give Praise, Feuds and Sailing give Scorn). It’s up to the table to remember, but it’s also in no way important.
Songs are a stack of tiles, and at the beginning of a round, the Lawspeaker picks one (or more?) to be available to claim that round. Some are easier than others, which means there will be some fierce competition, and also this should create incentive for people to vie for Lawspeaker - to change what’s available and put victory out of someone else’s reach and into yours.
But I never really liked Records because it involved post-game accounting, and I just now had inspiration for a different way: Sagas. There will be one per player, drawn randomly from a pool of 12, and they will be public and open for competition the entire game; the first player to fulfill all of the requirements on it claims it. They’re intended to be difficult and require substantial investment to achieve, and some require extremely specific deeds (which harken back to the actions from those various sources). Anyway, here’s what I came up with:
An interesting consequence of doing all this design in a spreadsheet is that the various types of Achievements are all different lengths from each other: Names are 1, Songs are 2, and Sagas are 4. This is actually completely coincidental, but now I think I want to play with the victory metric being the total length of your story.
Put all of your collected elements together in a line, and the longest one wins.
With Songs and Sagas, I’ve also realized that Names stick out as sort of boring and rote, because they hinge on points. I feel like there’s gotta be a way to claim a Name that turns on basic functionality but that doesn’t rely on tracking points, and I super want to see if I can do the entire victory metric without ever once talking about points. I have no idea how that would work out and I might just be making my life difficult for no reason, but it’s so close.
1 Like
OK, last braindump for a bit (I hope).
After I said “hmmm I wonder if I could track this without points,” I came up with an Idea. It might suck and be weird for the sake of being weird, but we’ll see how it shakes out. I can always fall back to saying “certain actions make points, exchange points for stuff.”
That’s a rough prototype tracker for the 3 types of Achievements I described above: Names, Songs, and Sagas.
Instead of tracking points, claiming a Name requires you to perform a number of different Deeds - each Deed corresponds directly to one of the methods I established for gaining Wordfame, so it’s basically making you do the same things you’d be doing anyway.
The main thing here is that performing any given Deed only counts once for claiming that Name - so for example, you need to perform 3 Deeds to claim your first Name (an “-inn” name), and doing the same thing twice won’t cut it.
The Roll of Deeds lists out all the different Deeds that can be done: you can give Gifts (each type is its own Deed); you can win at Farms in two ways (either have more of most Farms than anyone else, or have the most of a Rich Farm - one that has all 3 Personae associated with it); you can win at Feuds in two ways; or you can have the most Boasts of any player in a round (the thing where you discard cards you get from Sail); and 15 different Personae all have special actions that count as a Deed (each Persona’s Deed is considered different from the other).
The tracker above each name is a way to track how many Deeds a given player has performed - perform a Deed, move to the right till you’re at the end of the track - and sorta like Everdell, you advance to the next “block” when you claim a Name, and then start again.
I contemplated doing away with a numerical tracker altogether and saying something like “you have to keep track of your own Deeds, and if other players think you’re full of shit, they can lobby to say you’re officially full of shit and stop you from Commissioning.” Or maybe that’s a good candidate for Lawsuits, I dunno. There are ways to mess with that and I’ll figure out what feels right. I like the idea of forcing everyone to remember what’s happening in the game - very thematic - but that might just be adding mental load for no real gain, so a simple tracker seems fine.
So an example of how this works:
Thorstein Thorsteinsson manages to give a gift of each category: a singleton (called a Good gift), a Worthy gift, and a Legendary gift. That’s 3 Deeds, so after completing the third Deed, Thorstein can choose the Commission action instead of voting for a Law (or maybe I’ll make it a Lawsuit so someone can stop you?), and when he does, he can claim one of the “-inn” names (it means “the [something],” like “the Old” or “the White” or whatever).
Then, Thorstein places his tracker token in the next “block” corresponding to a Name. Now he needs to perform 5 Deeds. He could give Gifts again, but at most he can only get 3 Deeds from that - so now Throstein needs to think about how else he’s going to perform Deeds. Will he fight? Go Sailing for Boasts instead of Goods? Enter the Farm game? He’s gotta make choices.
While everyone is out there trying to perform Deeds to make a Name for themselves, they’re also competing over Songs and Sagas - so in theory, you should be trying to build a machine that lets you make progress on a Name while also competing for Songs and Sagas, getting the most bang for your action buck.
The idea is that this approach rewards diversification more than specialization. Specialization can help you power through the mid-game, but in theory you need to leave enough room to adapt yourself to other things. The hope is that this prevents the problem where someone just pigeonholes themselves into one thing.
The downside is that, if specialization doesn’t matter enough, and everyone is essentially the same, the game will come down to cards drawn with very little apparent reward for your input. I mean it’s a card-driven game so that’s a reality no matter what, but I want to avoid making everything excessively samey in the process. The challenge will be seeing what paths emerge and can be manipulated, and whether or not those paths allow you to run a machine of some kind for a while.
Maybe you run a machine for a bit and then re-tool it. I think that’s fine and cool. You had a run of some kind but now the world is different and you have to adapt. Sounds more like the story of a people to me, which is what I’m going for, but who knows how it’ll shake out.