Werewolves of London: first playtest

Had my first test game today, me plus two other players.  It went... okay.  They liked the premise and the core loop, and quickly found some significant flaws in the current design (which is to be expected when it's the first draft, but still a bit disheartening).  Biggest things I need to work on are giving players who aren't currently in the lead a reason to care about the investigation, strengthening the feeling of engine-building as you acquire more territory, and anything else I can do to increase the gameplay value of spreading your territory as opposed to picking a few lucrative territories and turtling there.  The test players did like the "set collection" abilities that a few of the territories have (i.e. that they give you bonuses if you also have specific other territories), and we talked about having more of those and building in some overlap so it gives people a reason to go after each other's territory.

As far as the investigation, I have some ideas starting to come together about how to fix that problem, though I'm also noticing how they could lead to other potentially broken strategies, so I'll need to play around with that more.  Maybe I'll have it ready for another playtest next month, maybe I'll alternate with Dolomball, I don't know.  We'll find out in the next post, maybe?

Neon Knights update

 Just finished the latest round of revisions (I feel like it's not the first time I've said that).  Biggest thing was fleshing out the setting description.  I got some good advice about that from readers a couple months ago, with things to add to the setting chapter but also ideas about weaving in bits of implied setting into artifact and adversary descriptions, so I did that.  Seems pretty good right now, maybe actually ready to start moving into layout sometime.  Sure would be nice it the flyers I bring to PAX Unplugged this year can say "available on DriveThru" instead of "coming soon."

I saw Lon Chaney Jr in a game cafe with the Queen, they were playing...

 First draft prototype is done:

https://screentop.gg/@DrMindermast/werewolves

Carry on.

Werewolves of London: enjoying some beef chow mein

I've been pushing hard on a couple of games recently and feeling like I need a break from all of them.  And also it hit me that PAX Unplugged is less than 6 months away, and I specifically want Werewolves of London to be the game that I am demoing there (and hopefully shopping around, if it's in good enough shape by then).  So I pulled that one off the back burner today and spent way too much time tracing over the city map to get images that I can use on cards.  That doesn't sound like a ton of progress, but I can't start testing the game if I don't have cards to use, so this is a good step in that direction.

Other assets I still need to create before I can set up the prototype and start testing for real: separate card decks for bidding and for when you own a territory; money tokens, in different colors for each player; game board with investigation track along one side and score track going around the other three sides.

And I guess at some point I might as well turn my pile of random notes into an actual rulebook...

Dolomball: 20 yard line? Is that a thing that sounds exciting to sports people?

Got all excited with the new revisions, got everything together quickly, got a test with other players this afternoon (one of whom also played last time, so he was able to recognize the changes).  General agreement that it's better now than it was, still not totally solid but much closer.  Both of the other players liked all of the new actions I introduced, and the system of having two options on a card and needing to choose which one.  Need to streamline some of the rules or leave things for players to decide in the moment, rather than having lots of specific rules about uncommon situations.  Also need to streamline the simultaneous resolution - it's not entirely off the table, but in its current form it still leaves things kind of unclear and hard to keep track of at times.  But the testers did give me some good ideas for further refinements.  And it is at the point now where I can start shifting from messing with the core mechanic to refining what's there.  Although after the push the last couple of weeks I think I need to take a break from this one for a bit.  Maybe for the next couple weeks I can resume focusing on Neon Knights revisions...