Festival Design Entry 3

Met with the Wastrel last night to get the whole team up to speed on the design. He noticed a couple of holes to patch and I think we have a good plan for filling there. It is a true statement to say that neither of us are particularly mathy and so we will often estimate a game's economy and then try to refine that economy in the testing phase. As a result, many of our "decisions" last night we to look at a potential issue in testing and finalize a concept.

Central to this was the mechanic for the Festival Phase. The Festival Phase use the Performer and Act type cards reflected below. In the center of the board there are four stages, one for each of the Pygmy Clans. Each stage has a path on which the players will place Performer/Act combos as they recruit them. There is also an Audience Preference Track that is shared by all of the players and represents what the Audience wants to see. On that track, the primary position is worth +3 Dice. The next position is +1 followed by +0 and the last position is -1. Each of these spaces is occupied by a token representing one of the four Act Types. To determine victory in the Festival Phase, a player takes the number of dice equal to the Performer card, modifies it by the Preference Track and then lastly adds the bonuses from the Act Type card (which is hidden information from the others)

The issue that we faced was in multiplying bonuses. On its face, it seems easy to multiply a bonus by the number of particular Act Type cards in the round, however, that builds an economic problem in that if three players select the Act Type on the Preference Track (+3) and one player plays a card at the end of the Track (-1) but includes a high hidden bonus against the Current Act Type, that player would likely win the round (with a bucket of bonus dice) while performing an act that the audience is least interested in. This is a thematic issue as well as a gameplay issue for me in that it favors playing against planning and disadvantages strategy for tactics. So I think the answer is a simple one with bonuses registering if the Act Type is in the Festival but not per Act Type in the round. We think that is the solution but have decided to look at it in testing to see how it works.