I had a small playtest today for Under a Violet Moon, with another game designer. He played as the villagers, and gave me feedback specifically from that side. On one hand, my revised movement system was a success, so that's good. On the other hand, he felt that the villager side was too passive, especially in the first few turns before he had any useful information to try figuring out who the fairies were. So we talked about some ideas to address that, and what came out of that was
- Reveal one of the faeries right at the start, so the villager player has a target right away and the faerie player has incentive to be aggressive early on instead of moving too slowly
- Instead of the faerie player revealing when the villagers have captured someone, let the villager player decide when to take pieces off the board if they are in the right position, and don't reveal until the end of the game if these were good choices or false positives.
Based on one evening of pondering, I like both of these and want to test them out. The first idea I would probably keep as an optional rule (or, depending on how testing goes, make that the default and then make the other way optional). The second idea would require me to change the narrative description of what's special about those target spaces on the board where villagers are able to capture faeries, but that should be easy enough if I verify that I want to keep this rule change.
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