This is a massive update.

The game is solid and consistently achieves its set goals; consequently, its core structure has been unchanged for several versions. However, testing and feedback keep highlighting elements that need more polish, especially in the material design of the prototype, thus driving the continued release of new versions. After publishing v017 I was already working on v018... but in developing that version I got to a point where enough rough edges were smoothed over a few core truths started to emerge. These are the reason for the change-log you see here and the weird jump from v017 straight to v019.

Summary

• included iconography in the rules text
• refined Arena iconography
• shortened Drag track from 5 to 4 steps
• overhauled Rally mechanic
• removed Mend action
• rebalanced Role effects
• removed Evade action
• new Tide mechanic
• Hype reworked and streamlined
• updated Scatter behaviour

Iconography

Text is cumbersome and fits poorly on play materials. And it doesn't look like a cool "toy". Icons and symbols are eye-catching and evocative, and can be much more compact and info-dense. But text is clearer, more informative and immediate, but icons allow for at-a-glance connection to meaning. Result: I'm experimenting with using more iconography in the game materials and even text. I hope this actually improves readability and usability. It's a difficult work in progress for someone with little to no training in graphic design 😅

Drag, Rally & Mend

The Drag mechanic of pushing your seekers at the cost of their performance has always been effective, but test after test it became clear that it needed to be more incisive. So, one small adjustment at a time, the original Drag track has been shortened substantially. Now seekers can perform one action free of Drag before starting to quickly tire.

Part of this was about making the Mend action more relevant. Mend had always been seldomly used because it felt too much like "losing a turn" in order to refresh a single seeker. The accelerated Drag escalation made it more important, but still it often felt more like a punishment than a boon, a bitter but needed medicine. Most players seemed to prefer only using it late in the game, when no other choice was left, while trying to achieve an early  victory. As Drag became more unforgiving, people again avoided Mend in favor of Rally... but there was a problem there.

The Rally mechanic, like Drag and Mend too, was itself functional but needed more impact. Tweaking Drag led to the desired effect of pushing players towards more team-oriented tactics... but then it often felt too small a reward. Initial tweaking improved it from "it feels neutral" to a more positive "it feels like a small advantage" but to achieve this Drag had become more punishing and so the overall result was often described as akin to "one step forward, two steps back". The problem was, I could not push Rally too much, otherwise what would be the point of using Mend?

Right... so I finally tightened up Drag, cut off Mend, and gave Rally the bombastic upgrade it needed.

Rebalancing & Evading

Removing one whole action (Mend) meant that now the roles were off balance. After a bunch of tinkering and some more testing I landed on having each role have one core action, leaving the others to only be affected by situational modifiers. The only exception is the Slinger, which is good at both Throwing and Seizing the torque, but in turn is the only role with a negative modifier (to Pushing).

This led to the Evade action not being a specialty of the Shifter, the role that is supposedly good at being agile and moving around. Which felt wrong. Which led me to notice how Evade, in the end, was just a more limited form of reactive movement. And so, fresh from cutting off Mend, Evade went away too, reworked to function as a reactive part of the Rush action.

As a result now the game does everything it did before, but a bit better, and with just four actions. This allowed further streamlining in the Test structure itself, as now "any" action can be used to react to any opposed test. Each action is only possible in determined circumstances – for example you can only Push a rival, and that rival has to be near you – but within that limit you are free to react however you see fit. Simpler, cleaner, more flexible.

Hype & Tide

As it was before, Hype was often ignored. A cool idea, but presented as a dense list of keywords, leading to somehow sub-optimal interactions. Why would new players ever spend brain cycles on it? They did not. So I slightly simplified it, and then reworked it into the game rules themselves. While overall the Hype text has basically disappeared from obvious sight, its rework has made it more accessible to players: they glance at the normal game actions and use them over and over during a bout,  eventually stumbling on the very visible Hype icons and getting rewarded in Edge for them.

But all these changes are akin to "refactoring code", an optimization of something that is already there as a result of ongoing usage and testing. Tide is instead a new element, and therefore it still needs further testing to be proven effective. At its core it is a "catch up" mechanic meant to rebalance the effect of other system changes: players enjoy the sense of explosive advantage they get from doing extra after a Rush (as expected) or after a successful pass manoeuvre (a risky but rewarding action) or after buying  precious Momentum. Such action-chains have very real costs and drawbacks, but they look and feel like winning. By the same token, being on the receiving end is not really an irreparable negative, but it can look and feel like losing...

Similarly, the Edge economy needed a small boost. Some players experience Edge as a welcome but unreliable extra on top of the normal one-action gameplay. But many others, especially the casual crowd that is the main audience of this game, felt it in reverse: the "real" and engaging game is the one fuelled by Edge, and without it you are at a crippling disadvantage. Some enjoyed its presence, others suffered its absence.

The Tide mechanic is supposed to address both issues, granting an incrementally solid promise of a comeback exactly when the opponent is advancing on you. The more they do extra, the closer you get to a free Edge point. We'll see how testing goes.

Scatter

Finally, the Scatter mechanic got some extra care. Turns out that everyone loves how the torque moves on its own, and how chaotic its influence is when it violently collides with unprepared seekers.

But the simple mechanic has a side effect: sometimes the torque gets kinds stuck pinballing in some arena corner. It's not a real problem, since resolving this takes just a few and very obvious single-die rolls, and many solutions ended up complicating the procedure beyond what I felt is worth. So why not lean on it? 😈

Now you can simply count how many times the torque fails to end its scatter movement (up to 6 times) and use that increasing number as the Force with which it will hit the poor sod unlucky enough to get on its trajectory. It probably needs a wee bit of balancing, but players already seem to like it, looking forward to the torque getting stuck in a pinballing frenzy.

- - -

And that's it for now. The work continues.

One Tribe!