❖ Version History ❖

November – December, 2024
After our Halloween party in October, things are really picking up over here for Royal Threadcount. The fire has finally been lit for moving forward with this prototype, and it’s all due to a slew of new mechanics that have come to life now that we are play testing the game more.

In the last… maybe two weeks? We have sat down to at least six game nights among the inner circuits of the Librarium Family. One of the great things about being a board game developer is when you get the opportunity to call in all the closest friends and family that you have for a round of the new prototype. For us, there are about 16-20 people who rely on for this task regularly! (for today’s post alone, shout outs to: Nicole, Suraj, Jess, Aya, Ben, Aimee, Tom, Ellen, Katie, Kristin, Sara, Walter, Heidi, Rory, Misty, Adam, Abby, etc. etc. etc!)

This is one of the most important tasks of development for us while we are in the cocoon phase of bringing the prototype to life. Getting these relentless play tests in lets us iterate subtle changes into the rules in between rounds and see how they affect people differently (luckily our closest peeps are okay with the science being done on them). As a result of this, I get the most interesting chair in the room, because I am the one responsible for making the changes to the rules make sense without revealing that the rules have changed for the people at the table (i.e. we do blind tests with people to see how they react to different mechanics being in play). This provides incredible feedback, and here are just a few of the images I snapped at the end of each round to keep track of the data from the end of the games:

(These aren’t my greatest photos, but they weren’t really meant for sharing either!)

So, before we went on this spree of playing the game, we did officially begin to implement the new scoring mechanics discussed in Chapter #10 :: Scoring This Game Sucks!. It doesn’t look like it from the pictures, because I have begun an arduous process of redeveloping the digital designs of the game & have not made enough progress on that agenda by now to update the printed version of our prototype… but worry not, I have been keeping track of the scoring & the costs for our players to make sure that things are still working okay on this front during these tests.

In our adventures of playing the game a whole bunch more, we have uncovered all sorts of interesting ideas along the way for making the game better & more interesting to play. Here are some of the topics that came up in the discussions that we have been having:

1. The Color Cards should have an interesting feature on the back of the design… even though it is an area that is literally never looked at in the game play, it would be a nice touch.

2. There should be a “game clock” to keep better track of what turn it is… as of right now, the only way to do such a thing is identify how many color cubes you have earned & used so far, and this is not a very good metric, especially for younger players.

3. To help reduce the content needed to play, a player card would help tremendously for organization & component reduction.

4. Not all of the patterns in the game should always be available to the players during their turn, there should be some scarcity introduced to make things more interesting.

5. Something needs to be done about the fact that some players start their turn with no chance to earn silk (starting the turn with an empty silk tray is very unsatisfying).

6. There should be more risk/reward implemented in the use of the currency…. perhaps a way to interact with the silk tray before your turn begins?

7. There should be a limitation on how much currency a player can have… no necessarily how much they can earn in a turn, but how much they can hoard into future turns?

As you can see… there are a vast pile of options to consider for how the game can be manipulated to play a bit better. I personally love just about every single one of these options. But some of these ideas are cosmetic changes to the card designs, and some of these are manipulations of the rules. So, to make things a bit more organized here, for today we will discuss the ideas that came to mind as a result of the cosmetic changes, and for our next adventure in the Design Journal, we will go over the mechanical changes.

So, if we look through the list up above again, we have about three critical card design changes that have been requested by our player base:

•Personal Player Cards to Organize Components
•Game Clock (which is great because we also need a card design for the ‘Tic-Tac-Toe’ board)
•Full Art Card Backs for Color Cards

While it will definitely take me a long time to translate these concepts to digital, it is only a couple days worth of doodling in-between all of these play tests. Luckily, I am forced to be at work for some days of the week, and I can get all sorts of doodling done when I am there. here are some of my initial ideas for how to capture these requests:

Now, clearly, none of these are going to be the ‘final’ look to the designs… but you have to start somewhere!

On the left side of the images above we have my attempt to build a ‘back of the card’ design, which will feature very specifically the Bombxy Mori, or rather, the silk moth that is used to make the fabrics we are simulating in this game.

In the middle image, we have a “jumbo” card that can be used by the players to: keep track of the game clock, use as a storage space for excess ‘silk’ tokens & ‘dye’ tokens, and the collaborative Tic-Tac-Toe space.

And on the right side we have a few options that I am considering for the ‘player mat’. This space sets an imposed limitation of how much ‘silk’ & ‘dye’ a player can hold at any given time (limit x7 silk held by the end of turn & limit x3 dye of any particular color by end of turn as well). I really love the mechanical-artistic relationship that this imposes on players… it sets a very easy to understand visual ruling that also dramatically helps with the incentives of ‘shopping’ rather than ‘hoarding’ the resources you collect in the game.

Now of course, all I have to do is actually design these in a professional digital way (this is gonna take a while, and has definitely not been completed by this point in the storytelling of the Design Journal). So, for the time being we will have to put a ‘pause’ on this topic until we get our new prototype in the mail!

In the mean time, we will come back very soon for our next iteration of the Royal Threadcount Design Journal to cover the other half of our conversation started today. We still have some huge mechanical changes that we intent to discuss from our wealth of play testing brainstorms, so be sure to check back soon! And as always, thank you for reading!