Making steps forward ("killing your darlings")

In a few of my games I have started with a specific mechanism or idea that, over the course of the game, has had to drop out, or change significantly. I'd venture a guess this happens in many, if not most, designer's games.

For example, in my first published title, Terra Prime, I began with a "great" idea for a supply/demand mechanism for the value of resources you deliver. Based on Power Grid's fuel market, you would get paid more for delivering Bluium if there hadn't been any delivered yet than you would if there were already some Bluium sitting there on the ships, ready to send back to Earth. Every once in a while, the ships would take off, and the resources on them would clear off, resetting the demand (and therefore the price). Each resource was supposed to have a different curve - maybe Yellium was worth 7 the first time it's delivered, then 4, then 1... so it's super valuable, but goes down fast. On the contrary, maybe Bluium would range from 5 down to 3, and be a lot more steady:

I forget the exact details, but the bottom line is that while I liked the idea, the mechanism just wasn't working in Terra Prime.

In the end I (thankfully) decided to replace the whole thing with a Demand Tile mechanism. Much more simply, each resource had a price, and tiles indicated how many were required. Once all the blue spaces were filled, the demand for Bluium dries up, no more can be delivered. As soon as one of the tiles fills up, it goes away and a new one comes up, which may bring back some demand for Bluium.

This worked a LOT better, and I'm happy that's how I ended up going in that game.

The point of that story is to show how a major mechanism that I really liked ended up changing because it wasn't right for the game. Recently, that dynamic has showed up again on one of my current active designs: Apotheosis.

One of the instigating ideas for Apotheosis was that your workers would level up when played, like the cards in Solforge. The crux of the game was intended to be whether you play out all of your workers before recalling, and leveling up your entire workforce evenly, versus playing just a couple of workers then recalling them and playing them again, and ending up with a few high level workers while the rest remain at low level. That idea being the whole point, survived the first several revisions, and many playtests. However, as of last week, I tried a new version -- instead of leveling up every worker you have played when you recall them, we said you could only level up one worker.

I was hesitant to try this, but I was hopeful it would fix certain issues I was having with the game. As we began the first game with that rule, I missed being able to play an extra worker before recalling in order to level them up, but pretty quickly I could see how certain aspects of the game seemed to be tighter and work better. All told, you're still choosing whether to recall early to level more often, or play more workers first for their effects.

One concern with only leveling one worker at a time was that it slowed things down, but that's just a matter of balancing costs, and could be easily fixed. However, in an effort to try something in between "level one worker" and "level all workers," we tried something that amounted to "level some workers." I had expected that to be better, with some of the benefits of the restricted leveling, and some of the benefits of the original idea. But in practice I found that it didn't really work as well, and it became clear that just leveling once per recall (and maybe a few special rewards for things could get you an extra level-up) is the way to go.

So there you go -- once again I've had to "kill a darling," so to speak, and remove or significantly change an instigating mechanism for a game.

As a side note on this topic, my friend Gil Hova (of Formal Ferret games) has a particularly aggressive auction mechanism from an old, unpublished game of his called Wag The Wolf (one which I thought was good!) that he keeps designing games around. He used it in Battle Merchants, but in the end cut the mechanism. He used it again in The Networks, and again cut the mechanism before the game was finished. And I believe he started his latest game, High Rise, with that mechanism, and eventually cut it from that game too!

The List - January 2020

Last month I reviewed The List, but I think I have enough of an update that it's worth taking another look. I'm adding a new section for games I've recruited (or am recruiting) co-designers for:

Published Games:
- Terra Prime (BGG)
- Eminent Domain (BGG)
- Eminent Domain: Escalation (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Exotica (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Oblivion (BGG) (expansion)
- Eminent Domain: Microcosm (BGG)
- Isle of Trains (BGG)
- Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG)
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
- Dungeon Roll: Winter Heroes (BGG)
- Gold West: Bandits promo (BGG)
- Gold West: Trading Post promo (BGG)
- Yokohama: Achievements & Free Agents promo (BGG)
- Brainfreeze

Finished But Unpublished Games:
- Eminent Domain Origins [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Olympus on the Serengeti  (FKA Deities and Demigods) [Art starting]
- Exhibit (BGG) [Unlikely to be published due to conflict]
- Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (dice game) [In line for art]
- Dice Works (BGG)
- Wizard's Tower (BGG)
- Isle of Trains: All Aboard (expansion)
- Suburban Sprawl
- Watch It Played [Abandoned]
- Now Boarding [Abandoned]

Current Active Designs:
- Alter Ego (BGG)
- Apotheosis (Co-Design with Rick Holzgrafe)
- All For One (BGG) (Co-Design with David Brain)
- Riders of the Pony Express (BGG)
- Isle Of Trains: The Board Game (Co-Design with Dan Keltner)

Designs I'm Recruiting A Co-Designer For:
Well established designs that I could use help finishing:
- Automatown [a designer has showed interest]
- Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG) [a designer has showed interest]

Established designs that still need work:
- Reading Railroad
- Moctezuma's Revenge

Early stage designs that still need a lot of work:
- Rondel Role Selection
- Kilauea [a designer has showed interest]
- Joan of Arc [a designer has showed interest]

Idea stage designs that sound promising:
- Dynasty
-Scourge of the High Seas

Old Standbys - games which have been around, 1/2 done and untouched, for years:
- 8/7 Central
- Hot & Fresh

Old Ideas that Haven't Gone Anywhere (Yet) - some of these have been getting stale as well:
- Investigative/Tabloid Journalism
- Red Colony
- Clash of the Kingpins
- Time = Money
- Dating Game
- Ticket Please
- Cruise line game
- The Untouchables
- Day labor game based on craps

Misc and Really Old Stuff:
- 9-Ball
- Blockade Runner
- Roman Emperors (my version of someone else's game)
- Admirals of the Spanish Main (my version of someone else's game)

Let's take a closer look at some of the updates:

Crusaders expansions:
- Crusaders: Divine Influence (BGG) (expansion) [In manufacturing]
- Crusaders: Crimson Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
- Crusaders: Amber Knight (expansion) [Ready to print]
The first expansion to Crusaders: Thy Will Be Done (BGG) has been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer. The 2nd/3rd expansions are almost identical to each other, they each add one additional player: a red player, and a yellow player. The retail version art is done for both of them, and they're expected to release in October, 2020. I'm not sure exactly how we will support those who got the Deluxified base game, we will either make Deluxified versions of these expansions, or we'll offer some kind of upgrade pack.

Isle of Trains: the Board Game:
The publisher of Isle of Trains told Dan and I that instead of (or possibly in addition to?) an expansion to the card game, they would like to do a bigger box board game that's like Isle of Trains. So Dan and I have been working on a re-design of the game given the new constraints. We've made a little progress so far, and Dan has a prototype under construction, it'll probably see play soon.

Odysseus: Winds of Fate (BGG):
A designer friend of mine in Seattle has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. After so many years and iterations, I'm excited to see if he can help get this one across the finish line. He tells me he's got a prototype built and plans to give it a try soon!

Automatown:
A designer in Utah who had printed and played an earlier prototype of Automatown has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. I'm excited to see this one move forward, because I'm sure it would have taken me a long time to get back to it. I got word that he'd played the latest version already, and has some specific changes he's going to try next!

Kilauea:
Based on my blog post, a designer I'm not too familiar with has expressed interest in coming on board as a co-designer. I've sent him my descriptions of the game and the rules I had written... we'll see if he can do anything with that.

Joan of Arc [a designer has showed interest]
Another designer I'm not familiar with expressed interest in Joan of Arc. I need to revisit that one and see what info I can send him on it.

2018-2019: a playtesting retrospective

Back in late 2017 I started formally tracking my weekly playtest sessions in a google doc. One up-side of this is that I can go back now and review what was played each week, by whom, and what aspect I was looking to test that day. It's also interesting to see how much time we dedicated to each game, or how much time passed in between playtests of a game.

I'd like to use this post as a sort of retrospective on the last two years (or 28 months) of playtesting. Let's take a little trip down memory lane...

2017

Late August 2017 was the first session I'd logged, and that day we were evaluating 3 games I'd brought home from GenCon for TMG: Margrave, by Stan Kordonskiy, which turned into Old West Empresario, Rolled West, by Daniel Newman, and Embark, by Philip duBarry. Not only did we end up signing each of these, but all three are on store shelves now!

In September of that year we continued evaluating games: Pixel Factory was a neat one, but ultimately TMG did not sign it. Back to Earth was also neat, and we did sign it, but due to unrelated circumstances we ended up releasing it later. Railways is a game by some British designer friends of mine, and I liked it, but it needed some work. We did suggest the new title: Railblazers. My understanding is that at this point it has improved greatly, but the main mechanism which I was interested in (like the Mancala-rondel in Crusaders) has changed completely.

October saw us switch gears a bit. We spent a lot of time playing my games: Eminent Domain Origins (a Terra Prime reboot) and Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (a dice game version of EmDo -- I should add those to the BGG database). This went on into November as well.

December was spent almost entirely on a dozen games of Embark, which had been signed by that point. I also see a lone play of Eminent Domain Origins at about Christmas time.

2018

We started off the new year with 2 more games of EDO, but then spent the rest of January, February, March, and half of April playing about 3 dozen (!) games of Old West Empresario, working on game balance and player powers. The only other playtests in those months were a few games of Harvest to test some potential expansion characters (unfortunately, we never did do an expansion to Harvest).

Late April through mid-May we tested the Crusaders: Divine Influence expansion, which was in pretty good shape to begin with, but we hammered out a few details. That one has now been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer in China and should be out later this year.

My son was born at the end of May, and my playtest sessions went on  hiatus. The only other testing that happened in 2018 was at Rincon -- Michael was in town and we played a game of Deities & Demigods (now Olympus on the Serengeti), and several games of Imminent Domain (now Sails & Sorcery, but that title might not be final either), which is the game Michael designed based on the deck learning of Eminent Domain and the area control of El Grande.

2019

After an extended hiatus, I finally got back to regular playtest sessions in February of 2019, and we spent that first month back playing Eminent Domain Origins some more, fine tuning some last details.

March was spent on Emperor's Choice. TMG is doing a Deluxified version of that game, and we developed a 2 player variant which went over well with Richard Ham of Rahdo Runs Through, who famously only plays games with his wife.

April and May were dedicated almost entirely to developing Sails & Sorcery, changing up the format so it would play better, but keeping the core ideas of the game.

June was spent working on a new design of mine, Apotheosis. We iterated through several big changes as we quickly honed in on what worked and what didn't.

We started out July with a quick couple tests of a 5/6 player expansion to Crusaders. This worked out well, and we've got art done, but this won't come out until October. Then it was back to Sails & Sorcery through August. Most of the game was pretty solid by that point, but we were trying to fix this one niggling dynamic that just didn't work right.

We switched gears again and spent September and half of October playing Alter Ego, my co-operative deck learning game. We played quite a few games considering that one of my main testers doesn't like co-op games!

We ended October and spent most of November working on expansion content for Pioneer Days that we got from the designers.

We revisited Alter Ego once in November and once in December, and spent the rest of December testing Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory, and another one of my games: Riders of the Pony Express. Riders was in pretty good shape, but was a bit fiddly. We fixed a couple of small issues, and brainstormed how to remove some of the process a little bit.

In addition, we played a few non-playtest games including Tapestry (which did not go over well), In the Year of the Dragon (my favorite Feld game), and we tested a game for one of my playtesters (we actually did this a couple of other times, but I hadn't recorded those). Also, I took my players out for an annual Playtester Appreciation Day to see the new Star Wars movie (we saw Solo last year, and Episode VIII the year before that) -- only one of them could make it though.

Finally, we capped off the year reviving my oldest game design that was any good: All For One! I initially got involved in that co-design 17 years ago, and it had been so long since the last playtest (2012?) that I didn't try any changes, we played straight from the rulebook. It was great to revive this old classic, and we started off 2020 with some significant changes to All For One, which worked well and felt great!

Recruiting Co-designers / Assembling a Design Team

Ever since I recruited my friend Rick to work on Apotheosis (FKA Worker Learning), that game has made a lot of progress where it would certainly still be sitting in my notebook otherwise. That arrangement is working so well that I would really like to recruit other designers to help me progress my other stalled or (or un-started but promising) designs.

Here are a few of the designs I could imagine handing off to another designer at this point and letting them run with for a while, or working together with another designer on...

Well established designs that I could use help finishing:
* Automatown - worker placement/resource management game about building an army of robots (which are your workers)
* Odysseus: Winds of Fate - Adventure game about Odysseus on his way from Troy to Ithaca. Play as the Fates, who don't care what happens to Odysseus, but pass the time by betting on his progress (and then influencing it)

Established designs that still need work:
* Reading Railroad - Build words (a la Scrabble) to earn coins, spend coins to build track. Connect cities to earn pieces of set collection scoring

* Moctezuma's Revenge - push your luck / deduction game about looting temples, but some are cursed

Early stage designs that still need a lot of work:
* Rondel Role Selection - Shared rondel / resource management / Role Selection game about splicing DNA to make hybrid creatures such as Hippogriffs
* Kilauea - Mancala game about spreading your people across an island, and sacrificing them to the volcano gods to control the lava flow

* Joan of Arc - Bag building game with shared piece movement. Play as a voice in Joan of Arc's head, vying to get her to accomplish your goals.

Idea stage designs that sound promising:

* Dynasty - Spread your villages across China, upgrade them to Cities, and fill your player board with Culture. You'll assimilate other players' culture, and they yours. When someone becomes Emperor, the winner is the player who's culture is best represented.

* Scourge of the High Seas - Deckbuilder along the lines of Ascension, with 2 buy rows (Tortuga, where you buy crew, equipment and ship upgrades, and the High Seas, where you spend crew and equipment to plunder ships)

Any takers?

R.I.P. Matthew Frederick, one of the great unpublished game designers

Some time ago -- almost 2 decades now -- I stumbled across a website called the Board Game Designers Forum. At the time I had recently graduated college and gotten a job, many of my friends had moved away, and I was looking for something to fill my time. It was a perfect storm that led to my eventual career in game design, development, and publishing, and it all started on that fateful forum.

In the early days of BGDF, I read a lot of posts, I wrote a lot of posts, and I spent a lot of time in the IRC chat room with some of the forum regulars. Several of those regulars have gone on to see great success in the game industry as designers, artists, or publishers (or all three)!

One of those regulars, an admin in fact, went by the handle FastLearner. His name was Matthew Frederick. Matthew was ever-present, always insightful, and always made sure the forums were going strong. He's the one that created this BGDF logo:

A logo I placed on the back of the box for both Terra Prime and Eminent Domain, as a nod to the role the forums played in the design of those games.

One of my favorite aspects of the site was something called the Game Design Showdown, which turned into a monthly design challenge where, given a week and a theme, component restriction, or other guidelines, you could submit an entry. Entries were posted anonymously, and then voted on. There was no prize, and the submissions were not intended to be finished, tested games anyway, but the challenge was a good way to exercise the design muscles, and I know of several ideas from the GDS that went on to become fully fleshed out (and in some cases published) games. I say that's what the GDS turned into, but it started as a sort of real time challenge in the chat room, run by FastLearner, where instead of a week to come up with a game idea, you had just minutes! We only did that a couple of times, but it was great fun, and it opened the door to the larger Game Design Showdown, which still runs today if I'm not mistaken.

As it happens, Matthew lived in Phoenix, AZ -- just up the street from my hometown of Tucson. A couple of times I drove up and got together with Matthew... we talked about our game designs, even played each other's games. Matthew was one of the players who I wrangled into may first two playtests of UK designer David Brain's prototype: All For One, and we did a prototype swap (I left 8/7 Central with him, and brought home his mountain climbing themed game: Everest). I recall several of Matthew's games that I played, and they were all very good:

Everest was a middle-weight euro-style game about drafting a team of climbers (with sponsorship from various countries), and climbing Mount Everest. There were different terrain types to navigate, and your climbers were better at some than others. You could set up camps along the way where you could rest your team. There were rewards for reaching certain elevations first, including a large reward for reaching the top of the mountain. It was a real, honest to goodness game, on par with a lot of the stuff I've played off store shelves.

Velociracers was a card driven game where you, a Velociraptor, raced around an island grabbing up eggs and trying to keep ahead of the T-rex that was hot on your heels. Each turn you would play one of your cards, and you wouldn't get them back until you did a special "rest" action. There were mechanisms in place to keep the dinos bunched in a pack -- a headwind to keep the front runners from getting too far ahead, and cards that let you advance more the farther back in the pack you were. Fall too far behind and the T-rex will hurt you, much like taking damage in Snow Tails. Like all of Matthew's games, this felt fully fleshed out, even if he wasn't happy with it.

Elvencraft was another excellent design, where you would move around an Elven village in the trees, connected by bridges (which I think you would build, if I remember correctly), collecting items and crafting them into better items. I don't remember all the details of this one, but I do recall it feeling like a real game as well.

Cow Tipping was a small, Rummy-style card game that a nascent TMG considered publishing. It had adorable art and a cute theme of gangs of cows taking revenge on people by tipping over vehicles stopped in traffic. Motorcycles required a smaller gang (set or run) of cows to tip, but are worth fewer points. Buses were the most valuable, but of course required the largest gangs to tip. I recently re-read my email threads with Matthew about this game.

As a neophyte developer, I was perhaps overzealous about wanting to change Cow Tipping a lot. In the end, TMG did not publish that game, but Matthew gave me some important feedback that I still need to take to heart at times- he said something to the effect of "with all those changes, what exactly are you licencing from me?" That is a significant question for a few reasons. Not only was it a wake up call to me as I stepped into the game industry as a professional developer, but it also stands in stark contrast to some of the sentiments I've seen in modern designers who might submit an unfinished game with the expectation that the publisher will finish it for them. In contrast, all of Matthew's games were fully fleshed out, thoroughly tested, and more complete than many submissions I've received over the years.

About a decade ago, I lost touch with Matthew. I wasn't hanging out in the BGDF forums anymore, and I didn't travel to Phoenix very often. I didn't have much occasion to reach out to him, and from what I could gather, he had a very busy life, sometimes plagued with additional hardships outside his own control. I did follow Matthew on Twitter, and occasionally saw some snippet of his life scroll through my timeline, and every time it made me wonder "what ever happened to that guy?"

Back in October, just a few months ago, Matthew sent me a Twitter DM, seemingly out of the blue. It was a very complimentary message, just saying that he was pleased and impressed to hear how well I'm respected in the industry. Apparently Matthew had followed my career, or was at least aware of it. He followed that with another message:

Perhaps one day we’ll get together again and reminisce about the old days and talk about what’s happened in the intervening years.

Two months later, I was sad to hear that Matthew was gone. I had gathered from tweets I'd seen that Matthew was sick -- fighting some kind of cancer. I know now that his message to me was something of a "goodbye," and I'm sorry I didn't drop everything right then and there and drive up to Phoenix to see him one last time, maybe play a game, or do that reminiscing he mentioned.

Matthew, I'd like to thank you for being the man that you were. The pillar of the game design community which brought me from a casual Magic player to a professional game designer. You are far and away the best designer I know, and the gaming world is poorer now that you're gone.

You will be missed.

All For One revisited -- again

It's now been about 17 years since David Brain first sent me a prototype copy of All For One, can you believe it?

The last time I had played the game was maybe back in 2012 at a protospiel event. I might have played it one more time since then, but to be honest, I don't remember if I did.

Well, I decided to bring it back to life at my last weekly playtesting session of 2019, and since I didn't remember what changes I was considering, we played it as-written (circa 2012). Then we discussed the game, and I brought it back out today, and played 2 more games, with some significant changes. Good news: I think the changes were for the better!

Since it's been so long, I'll run down the basic rules as I'd write them as of right now:

Setup:

As before, place the plot tokens and character figures in their home spaces on the board. 

Shuffle mission cards and deal 4 to each player. 

Give each player a reference mat and 1 One For All card. 

Deal each player a secret goal card (using only the ones for the appropriate player count).

Set a pile of VP tokens in a supply

NO GUARDS AT ALL

Game play:

On your turn, you have an Action phase and a Draw phase. 

Action phase:

During the Action phase you can do any number of actions from the following list, in any order (most are limited to 1x/turn):

a1) Move (1x/turn): Choose any 1 character and move them up to 3 steps. You may double back, but you must stop the move action upon encountering another character. If carrying a Horse, may choose to have the character ride instead, moving exactly 4 steps, jumping over tokens and figures.

a2) Pick up tokens: While moving, you may have the moving character pick up any number of tokens in the spaces you visit by discarding 1 card for each. Note that when riding, you may not pick up the tokens you jump over. Characters have no capacity limit. (you may pick up the a token in the location of another character you encountered - wording above might make it sound like you can't since I said the move action ends)

ONCE PICKED UP, TOKENS ARE NEVER DROPPED. In order to move them to another character, a Demand action is required (see below)

b) Demand a plot token (1x/turn): If 2 characters are in the same location, you may have one of them demand a plot token held by the other. In this case, a duel ensues to determine the outcome. Note: You do not have to use the same character that you moved - more than 1 character can act on your turn.

c) Complete a mission (1x/turn): Choose a character. If the conditions of a mission card in your hand are met, you may complete the mission with that character (some missions require a specific character to do them). Receive points based on the type of mission and the tokens you deliver (see below), and then bump 1 of that character's favored story tracks per token delivered (max 1 bump per track per mission). ONCE A TRACK HAS MAXED OUT, IT'S COMPLEMENT TRACK IS ALSO LOCKED IN AND NO LONGER MOVES.

c1) Duel missions: 3vp (and draw 1 card)

c2) Character delivery (either/or): 4vp for 1 token, 6vp for both

c3) Any Character mission (2 req'd): 5vp

c4) Standard delivery (req'd/bonus/bonus): 4/6/8vp for 1/2/3 tokens

d. Play One For All card for some effect:

d1) Play when completing a mission to gain an additional 2 VP

d2) Play when picking up tokens to cover the discard cost of all pickups this turn (so max 3 tokens, since you can move up to 3 steps)

d3) Play during a duel for 3 offensive moves (or during another player's turn for 0 offensive moves, but you get it back immediately)

d4) Play during the draw phase of the turn to draw 2 additional cards

d5) Play to immediately end your turn (skipping the draw phase) and start another. This allows for a 2nd move action, a 2nd demand action, or a 2nd mission.

Draw phase:

Draw 2 mission cards from the deck.

You may play One For All to draw 2 additional cards.

Then reclaim your One For All card.

Max hand size = 8 cards (including One For All). If you have more than 8 cards, discard mission cards until you have only 8

Game ends when all 3 story tracks are maxed out

Duels:

Duels between characters are triggered by Demand actions and by Duel missions. In any case, when you trigger a duel on your turn with a character (the one making the demand, or one of the two in the duel mission), you choose one of that character's story tracks to fight for. Announce the chosen character, the nominated track, and if applicable the token being demanded (and maybe from whom, to help other players out).

All players must play 1 card simultaneously, then reveal. Blue cards are worth 1 offense (2 if it's that character's signature move), red cards are worth 1 defense, white cards (riposte) are worth 2 defense. Add up all offense and all defense. If there is more offense than defense, the the duel has been WON. If there is more defense than offense, the duel is LOST. If there is the same amount of offense and defense, then the duel is TIED.

If WON: NOMINATED track is bumped. Token IS moved in the case of a demand.

If LOST:  OPPOSITE track is bumped. Token IS NOT moved in the case of a demand.

If TIED: NO track is bumped. Token IS moved in the case of a demand.

One For All card played by active player is worth 3 offense.

One For All card played by any other player is worth 0 offense, and they get it back immediately.

Abilities and Signature Moves: as before. Aramis' ability to avoid guards must change (since there are no guards now): You may discard a card to move beyond another character. If that proves too useless, maybe it doesn't need to cost a card.

--- End Rules ---

So the big differences from before are:

1. No guards at all

2. 8 card hand

3. Draw 2 cards per turn instead of 1

4. Pay cards to pick up tokens (making that more intentional)

5. No such thing as dropping tokens or hand-offs, it's all just demand actions

6. No "active character" for the turn - you can act with different characters in a turn (move Aramis, demand with Athos, complete a mission with MiLady)

And to clean up some exceptions:
7. Make all Meeting missions into Duels (so they're all the same)

8. Allow riding a horse over dashed lines (ferry crossing and catacombs)

Both 4p games we played today took about 60 minutes, and this mix of rules seemed to work really well.

I added a few connections on the map, and I think a few more might be in order. Might want to sort of revisit the whole map and also the mission cards to make sure that (a) named locations are sort of evenly spaced out (ideally not less than 4 steps between any 2 named locations), and (b) based on token starting locations, no missions are doable on the first turn (at least not without using the One For All card for extra actions)

Due to the higher hand size and extra card draws, the deck almost ran out in our 4p games, and I suspect for 5 players it would definitely run out, so more missions are needed. I'd begin by making more missions with Horses as required or bonus tokens.

I think this is a big improvement over the previous version with respect to fiddliness and rules overhead. It feels good to see some progress on this game -- the biggest disappointment of my game design career is that nothing has ever come of this game.