Neon Knights - approaches, again

Finally got to do that test battle I was hoping for a couple weeks ago.  I had three players, only one of whom had any prior experience with Fate.  From my side of things it went more or less how I expected - while we were using the current rules it felt like I was struggling to determine what approaches the players should roll (even if one was obvious, which second one to add was usually less clear), and when we switched to default FAE approaches it was much easier to decide.  From the players' side, however, that wasn't the consensus (and this is why testing with other people is important, of course).  They didn't feel a big mechanical difference when we switched, but they really preferred the flavorful stat names over the FAE defaults.  Similar to what I had pointed out in my previous post but more emphatically so.  Coming away from that, it felt like my idea of adding a "cardinal virtue" Aspect wouldn't suffice, they really wanted to be rolling against Prudence or Wisdom or whatever every time.  So it seems like the next thing to try will be to tighten up the definitions of the "knightly" approaches to be clearer about which would apply when, and to cover more of the gaps where I feel like none of the current approaches fit as well as I would want.  I will also drop the "combine two" idea, which has not been satisfactory, although this will have some significant ripples that I will need to address right away.  So that'll be the next game update.

Violet Moon - a small maybe-update

Most recent couple of tests have suggested that the gameplay overall is solid, but I'm still not sure about balance.  I already decided that a change I'm going to test out next time will be to drop the rule about yellow spaces being safe for villagers.  Hopefully that's enough to keep it even between the two sides, but if not, I thought of another change today that would be next in the queue to test - penalizing the Villager player for wrong guesses.  In the game narrative, this would be something like "everyone is suspicious of John and focuses on him, and the faeries take advantage of this confusion."  What it would look like in the mechanics, as I'm currently considering it, would be that if the Villager player tries to capture a piece that turns out to just be a villager and not a faerie, then the Faerie player gets to turn one of their basic move cards face up again.  So it's not a huge penalty for guessing wrong, but it is something.  I actually really like the idea, I feel like it puts more pressure on the Villager player in a way that fits with what I want the game to be, but there's also the risk of it pushing the balance too far in the Faerie player's favor and that's not what I want.  Oh well, more testing to do.