Where wolves?

Werewolves of London playtest today.  I did solve the specific problem of turtling being the optimal strategy, but now there are bigger issues I need to address.  Feedback from both players was that they loved the theme and premise of the game, but it didn't feel vicious enough - not enough meaningful interaction with each other, not enough tension around the police investigation, and, apart from me saying that Meat represents what you get from hunting for humans, nothing that actually felt like being a werewolf.  I have some ideas starting to come together for how to deal with this, but it's definitely going to take some work.  Let's see what happens over the next month or two...

In other news, PAX Unplugged ticket has been purchased.  I will be there that Saturday, in the Unpub room, hopefully with a much improved version of Werewolves of London for people to play.

Allegedly doing some kind of work

I was supposed to have a Neon Knights one-shot (and unofficial playtest) yesterday with a couple of people who had expressed interest in the game.  Spent the week prepping an adventure for them, since our plan was to skip session 0 and get straight into the action.  And then my internet crapped out and we had to cancel (trying to connect to Discord voice chat on my phone was iffy at best, definitely not something we could all tolerate for 2-4 hours).  In the meantime we talked a little about renaming some of the stats to sound more Metal.  I've thought of some terms I could maybe use, and now I'm on the fence between being more thematic vs being easier to understand right away.  I'll get that figured out eventually.

On the other hand, since I couldn't spend my evening running an RPG, I did spend it finally updating Werewolves of London.  In the original playtest only a few of the territories had special abilities, so yesterday I wrote up a bunch more.  And I made sure that some of them overlap or otherwise conflict with each other.  Next step is to redesign the cards so things are easier to see when they're all in your hand instead of neatly laid out on the table.  Hoping to have everything done to be able to run the game again next weekend.

Dolomball: hitting me with the curveball

Dolomball playtest today.  The new "speed" mechanic worked out well - that was the change I made after last time to replace the rock-paper-scissor system for resolving ties.  Cards are still played simultaneously, but now they resolve in speed order instead of simultaneously, so that takes care of figuring out who gets to the ball first, or who can block someone else's movement.  Besides that, the other players today liked the core of the game but felt like it was more complex than it should be for the kind of game that it is, and that scoring is too slow (I'll refrain from making any soccer jokes here).  Also, they both wanted to be able to plan further ahead and be able to make better predictions about opponents' actions.  Suggestions for me to play around with included making the board smaller and separating movement from action cards.  Need some time to decide what I'm actually going to do with that, but I think it is worth exploring.  Let's see what the next few weeks bring...

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In other news, this week I started doing layout work for Neon Knights.  It is simultaneously tedious and exciting.  But I think this is going to end with a book that makes me look only 50% amateur instead of 100%.  Maybe even only 25%, especially if I get in-document hyperlinks to work correctly.