❖ Version History ❖

December 3rd, 2023
What happened?!
Chapters #1-#8 on Royal Threadcount all took place in the span of about two weeks… now it has been nearly four months since we’ve heard from you?? What’s that all about?

Well, if you are an avid reader of the Librarium Games Design Journal, you may have enjoyed the epic narratives of Phoenix Farm. If you happened to have read Chapter #30 “The Renaissance Miracle”, you will realize that only days after I actually received the Royal Threadcount Prototype in the mail, we were actually accepted to be vendors at the Connecticut Renaissance Festival! (be sure to check out that story for some history on why Librarium Games continues to exist as a company!)

In any event, nearly every moment of my life from the first week in August 2023 until the last week of October 2023, I was swamped with getting our company to make some sales! This is great news because if it were not for this outcome, Phoenix Farm would almost certainly not exist, and we would not be enjoying dreaming up these crazy dreams of a kimono based fashion game!

But yes, at long last, when December of 2023 finally hit, I started having a few days off from my crazy schedule long enough to enjoy an evening of leisure with my friends. I got Aya in the car with me, head out to Amherst MA, and met up with Ben & Aimee for a lovely evening of Indian cuisine and bubble tea. Once we got our tea, we had a sit at the cafe & finally broke out Threacount for the very first time to be played with in a group setting!

I was particularly excited to reveal some of my crazy creations for this play test… a little of everything that I have been puzzling over during the previous summer stories!

Here we have the Collaborative Tic-Tac-Toe Board, pictured for the first time since it was 3d printed, alongside an assortment of our “Dye” & “Silk” tokens & some of our transparent cards. For our first play test of the game, there are many rules that are not… entirely established. To keep things simple, we set up the game in a similar way to how Phoenix Farm is set up, so that it is a little bit easier for everyone to understand the mechanics of “turn actions & shopping phases”.

An important part of this play test that I am going to mention right now is how we have the market set up. It is… fairly rudimentary, but this is on purpose. I am fairly uncertain about how to handle the market balances for this game to this point in time, because I have never seen other people’s brains interact with the mechanics yet. I can theorize how things should work all day long, but if there’s one thing that I know about play testing a board game, it is that yo ucan absolutely never know all the things your players are going to do to throw a curveball at your designs.

So, to keep it simple, every color card & every pattern card are all currently available at all times during a player’s turn. There is… not very much scarcity to the available resources. The only scarcity is that there is a limit to how many of each card actually got made… but there is nothing keeping a player from buying something cheap vs. something expensive when the game is in motion other than their ability to stock up on resources between turns. I am not sure if this mechanic will change into the future, because for now it is working just fine for getting us to much more important game data, like a series of final results!

It might be a little bit hard for you to see what is going on here, but these are actually some final results of our play tests. To help us discuss what we are looking at, I am going to list out the information from these final results:

Player #1 (Left image):
•Kimono :: blue-violet :: Seigaiha Pattern (6-cost)
•Hakama :: blue :: Ichimatsu Pattern (4-cost)
•Obi :: yellow-green :: Uroko Pattern (3-cost)
•Sensu :: red :: Seigaiha Pattern (6-cost)


Player #2 (Middle image):
•Kimono :: green :: Kikko Pattern (5-cost)
•Hakama :: red :: Uroko Pattern (3-cost)
•Obi :: yellow-:: Ichimatsu Pattern (4-cost)
•Sensu :: violet :: Kikko Pattern (5-cost)


Player #3 (Right image):
•Kimono :: yellow :: Asanoha Pattern (2-cost)
•Hakama :: yellow :: Asanoha Pattern (2-cost)
•Obi :: red-orange :: Asanoha Pattern (2-cost)
•Sensu :: blue :: Asanoha Pattern (2-cost)

So, to score this scenario, first we would be looking for “completed clothing”. Then we would be looking for “pattern totals / pattern bonuses”, and then finally we would be looking for “color coverage & bonuses”. Somehow… I did not actually take a picture of the final results, so I do not remember what the “Empress’s Favorite Colors” were. We will make up a placeholder of “red-orange-yellow-green” for simplicity’s sake to see how these three players would score.

Completed clothing works out to = 10-points.
Each player’s pattern score = x+x+x+x unless they have “matching patterns”
Matching patterns score: (x+x+x)*y, where, y= how many matching patterns there are.
Finally, “favorite colors” score x1 bonus point for each “hit” among final designs.

These factors considered, here’s how our players would have scored:

Player #1 (Left image):
•Clothing Score: 10-points
•Pattern Score: 3+4+(6+6)*2 = 31-points
•Color Bonus: red–yellow–green-blue-blue-violet = 2-points
•Total Score: 43 points!

Player #2 (Middle image):
•Clothing Score: 10-points
•Pattern Score: 3+4+(5+5)*2 = 27-points
•Color Bonus: red–yellow–green-violet = 2-points
•Total Score: 39 points!

Player #3 (Right image):
•Clothing Score: 10-points
•Pattern Score: (2+2+2+2)*4 = 32-points
•Color Bonus: red–orange–yellow–yellow–blue = 4-points
•Total Score: 46 points!

Some Good News, Some Bad News:

Here’s the really really good news: The game score came out nicely balanced. With several people achieving a score similar enough for only a 7-point spread from best to worst is a satisfying statistic to reach using this small scope for the study. Of course, not every round of the game will likely play out this smoothly, but this is a good place to start for “mechanics that seem like they are functioning”

Here’s the… not so good news: The game, while fun to play, took me literally just as long to figure out the score as it did to play pretty nearly the entire game. This is partially because there is no… standardization to the rules of the game quite yet (like.. there is no rule book for players to refer to so that they might score themselves..). But also, this stems from the fact that there are so many variables in how to score the game itself. I want there to be three factors in the score (because we have three types of cards coming together to form one card)… but I do not want it to take more than five minutes to deduce what you have for a score when staring at all of this data.

Unfortunately, I do not have enough time or space on this post to get into theories on how to solve this problem… so we will have to cut things here for today on our entry of the Librarium Games Design Journal. However! We will be back on this topic as soon as we can. There is much work to be done in tinkering this thing to playing a bit smoother, and I am so excited to delve into these aspects of the design. So be sure to tune in again soon my friends, and as always, thank you for reading!