All For One structural changes successful?

I am trying some structural changes to All For One, which I alluded to in my last post. I've played about 4 games with them so far, tweaking things here and there. All I can say at this point is "So far, so good." I'm heading off to West Coast Meeple Fest tomorrow, and I'm taking it with me... hopefully some people will be interested in trying it out.

The next thing that has to happen is some long overdue cosmetic changes. I've got the same board I printed out 3 years ago, with stuff written on it, whited out, etc. The cards are real old too, and need a graphic design overhaul and some corrections. Before I go about physically making an updated board though I want to make sure there aren't any changes necessary to the layout - and at present I think there are. It may be a while before I convince David of that, and I may want to experiment with different layouts before anything is set in stone. My two biggest concerns about the board are...

(a) Some of the Named Locations are right next to each other (well within one turns worth of movement), which means it can be really easy to chain missions together or do certain missions all in one turn right at the beginning of the game. I'm not happy about that because it means if you were dealt that mission, you effectively get a head start.

(b) I'm skeptical that it's too easy to chain duel missions one right after another, because characters tend to clump at Named locations. This might be a sort of good thing really, making those missions very doable, and allowing players to set them up by completing missions in certain locations when they have a duel for that character in that location. However I keep thinking it might be interesting to have duels occur at locations other than the Named locations... at particular lettered locations. This might also have the effect of getting the characters into the streets so they're in each other's way a little more, to help balance the clumping effect where by the end of the game all the characters are sitting in the same location demanding tokens from each other.

I'll continue to think about whether or not those two things are necessary, but I'm happy to say the game is shaping up even more than it already was. I hope to see this published in the not-too-distant future.