Werewolves of London - it's New Scotland Yard now

 The last couple of weekends, I played Werewolves of London with different groups of people in real life (as opposed to my usual online playtests).  One of these games ended with a police-triggered game over, on the final turn of the game.  First time that has happened, and while it wasn't the worst thing in the world I didn't absolutely love that outcome either.  As luck would have it, the person I met with for the other game had some interesting ideas for potential revisions, one of which was a complete revamp of how the police investigation works.  So I took his general idea, and today I worked out the details for it, and here's what I have now:

Instead of the old "if you hit this Meat threshold then the police do stuff," the new system has police doing stuff every turn.  Bribe money prevents them from doing stuff this turn, instead of undoing stuff from previous turns, and there is no more "police catch you, everyone loses" like before.  And now there's variation to what they actually do.  Sometimes it will be locking down random territories like what I already have, and sometimes they will target specific territories based on a game condition like "where there was combat last turn" or "where there is currently the biggest single investment."  I don't know that I have all the details right just yet, but I think this new system has some potential and I'm looking forward to testing it out.

The other thing I learned from these recent games was that the I might need to have a 2-player mode with some rule tweaks.  I think the last time I had a game of Werewolves with only two players was many iterations ago, so the information I got from that is completely obsolete now.  And what I got from this one was that, with only two players, it was a lot harder to mitigate an early imbalance compared to a larger group where multiple players are all messing with each other.  I'm not sure yet what the solution to this could be, but I'm going to wait and see how things go with the new police rules before I work on this.  So in any case that's still a few more test games needed before I start hunting for publishers again.

Too many games, too little time

 Lots going on lately, across multiple games.  Here are the various updates for the last couple weeks:

• Werewolves of London got knocked out of the Cardboard Edison competition, which is not too surprising when they have ~350 games submitted and only take 21 finalists (which I think was still more than they usually do).  But my scores do keep moving up compared with games I've submitted in previous years.  Besides that, the judges who looked at Werewolves were almost unanimous in that they liked the theme, they liked the overall gameplay to the extent that they were able to assess it, but they wanted combat to work differently.  So that's something for me to polish up before I start submitting this one to publishers.
• Dolomball was back on the table today, in a very stripped down form so I can get a better sense of what actually needs to be in the game and what doesn't.  I got some good suggestions for that, and (with encouragement from today's playtesters) I got more comfortable with an idea that I had already been considering - dropping the link to the existing IP and no longer being constrained by trying to fit with how someone else defined their aliens in their game that, honestly, has nothing to do with my game except for my trying to shoehorn it into the same universe.  I definitely appreciate the support that I got from the folks at Galileo Games as I was getting this started, but trying to stick to the Dolomé has definitely let me to make some decisions that have detracted from gameplay, so it's time to let that go.  Which of course means I'm going to have to go through that title change thing again.  But in any case this one is probably going back to the back burner for a while because I also need to talk about...
• Scales - a new game, this time not based on a song title but on a little pun that- I actually don't even remember how it came up.  But someone said the word "scales," and I said "that should be a song about dragons learning to play musical instruments," and now I've got some rules sketched out and a 0.1 alpha prototype almost ready to go.  It's a cooperative game where all of the dragons are not only learning their own instruments but also they're in a band, and the goal is to get good enough to win the battle of the bands at the school talent show.  Once I have the basic materials together I need to get a test game to make sure the core gameplay works, and then I've got some bells and whistles to add, but I'll talk more about those once I know that the game is ready for me to add them (and that that's actually even the direction that it's going).