Just rip my lungs out, Jim

Massive overhaul on Werewolves of London after the last playtest, and then got to test the new version yesterday.

• New map - focusing on Inner London only, with territories divided up a little more arbitrarily, rather than doing all of the boroughs like I had before.  Fewer territories than before as well.  This was moderately successful both at reducing information overload and at increasing frequency of players fighting over the same territory.
• New end condition - the game now goes for a set number of rounds rather than "until all territories are owned."  I still need to figure out what the right number is, but this is definitely an improvement in any case.
• Cleaner division of each round into "day" and "night" phases.  This made it easier to keep track of what was happening when, and succeeded at reinforcing the werewolf theme a little better.
  
• New income rules - get money for territory that you own and also have the option of pulling money out of one of your investments and multiplying it based on the value of the territory where you invested.  This was good for reinforcing the "business predators by day" side of my game pitch, but had the slight problem of being able to grow insanely wealthy in just a couple of turns with the right investments.  And since wealth translates to control over the map (and maybe also scoring at the end of the game; I'm still fiddling with that), this is pretty important.  Still weighing options for how to solve it.

 

And then there's combat.  I had put something like this into the previous iteration, following from the "not wolfy enough" comments in the first one or two test games, and then for this version I took it further.  When two or more players are trying to hunt in the same territory, they bid a secret amount of Meat, with the winner getting to hunt and the loser(s) licking their wounds and going home empty-handed (and also increasing the risk of tipping off Scotland Yard).  What we got in testing was that this was the core of a good idea, but the way I have it current set up, there's little incentive to bid less than all the Meat you have, unless you really care about the current state of the investigation.  So the challenge now is to find a way to keep the blind bidding system but 1) make you really care about how much you're bidding, 2) not be too punishing to a player who is already too far behind, and 3) not accidentally be too punishing to the player who wins the fight.  And maybe also other unwanted consequences that I haven't bumped into yet.  Hopefully I can get this figured out soon, because I've got less than two months to put together a hard copy for PAX Unplugged...