After a few months of nursing a bruised ego and poking and prodding at various bits, I have come up with the new approach that I am going to be playtesting more fully. This is summed up here:
It sounds a lot different than what I’d been doing, but I think it’s not too far off. The changes:
-Deeds are added. There are still points - you use them to buy Name achievements. Game ends when someone has 3 names, winner has the longest roll of Deeds.
-Farms are no longer placed by the player at their choosing; instead, Farms are on the map, and you have to claim them. At the end of a round where someone has claimed a Deed, refresh all Farms not owned by players (return them to the bag, deal out new ones at random)
-Acquiring new Farms requires you to have an action of Weight equal to the number of that Farm you already have (i.e. to claim a 4th Farm of a type, you need a Weight 3 action)
-When you take actions (Honoring or Exploiting Oaths), you now have to commit Farms of matching type to the action in order get a boost - flip them over. That means you have to decide how to spend your Farms each round.
-Action selection is different. Instead of voting to give an action a boost, your vote lets you use that specific action as a wild (i.e. can commit any Farms to it), and the one that gets the most votes does not require you to discard Exploited Oaths of that type for the round (this all feels a little clunky to me so I’m hoping it either goes smoothly, or we find ways to refine it)
-Lawsuits are now a separate thing that give you a one-time bonus and then send your Thingmen home. They are competitive, so only one player will claim the benefit of a Lawsuit on any given round.
-Lawspeaker no longer changes hands every round. Instead, you have to sue to become the Lawspeaker.
Gonna self-playtest it just to get out the big kinks, and then once again seek out victims to try it out.