Werewolves of London: what's all this then?

In my last WoL-related post I mentioned changing how police work.  Today I finally got to test out the new system, and it was almost a hit.  It started off slow, but by the end of the game the police were blocking off a good portion of the board.  Test players said they liked how this forced us into more conflict, and how it helped with balance (Mayfair isn't nearly as valuable if you can't actually cash out your investments).  The remaining flaw was that the bribe rules were just a slight tweak off of what I had before, when the threat of mutual annihilation meant that everyone had a reason to contribute to paying off the police.  With that threat gone, today's players felt like there was no reason for them to spend their own hard-earned money for something that might only benefit their opponents.  So what I'll probably do instead is to have a flat rate that you can pay on your turn to clear the investigation off of a territory of your choice (but you still can't invest money into that territory on that same turn, since the police don't clear off until afterward).

Ooh, and maybe to keep some sense of the "prisoner's dilemma" tension, even if it isn't quite the same anymore, multiple players bribing the police in the same turn will still only clear one territory, chosen randomly between them (or determined by whoever is willing to throw in more money on top of the base price). 

Alright, I guess that's at least one more test I'll need to run before it's ready for pitching...

Scales: sound check

 First playtest for Scales today, just a bare bones setup to make sure the basic mechanics work.  And basically they did.  Players liked the overall system of improving their various musical stats, and the competing needs of solo practice to improve personal stats vs group practice to improve the band's stats.  And the final battle mechanic seemed to work well enough for now at least.  They felt like there wasn't enough information in the game to make meaningful decisions, which is what I expected for this 0.1 alpha test, and we had a good discussion afterward for different features that should help with that.  I especially liked a suggestion they had for adding information - put some of the stat icons on the backs of the opponent cards, indicating what each opponent's strongest and weakest stats are but without saying which is which.

So, next steps for this game:

• Make more opponent cards
• Decide between the suggestion above, or my original idea of letting players reveal the opponent any time they want but that incurs a penalty for the rest of the game (ultimately I should probably test both variants and see what goes better)
• Re-balance the stats for the different instruments
• Come up with characters that have unique abilities (and maybe secondary goals?) so each player can pick one of those to then combine with whichever instrument they choose

Probably going to be a bit before I put all of that together, but we'll see what happens...