Hey everyone! Josh here, designer of the Homeland Expansion. We’re getting close to the end of development, so I wanted to release another Print and Play. This will be the last one before release. This one is content-complete—it includes everything in the Homeland Expansion, the Squires & Disciples Deck, and the Homeland Hirelings Pack.

Compared to the previous Print and Play, it now includes The Gorge Map, Marsh Map, new Landmarks, and new Vagabonds. That said, it’s still missing some art, and there’s a touch of development left to do, which I’ll talk about later in this diary. Notably, even though the art on the Gorge Map looks done, it’s not—it’s still the original placeholder art from when Sam was developing it. Kyle is working on it right now.

So with that, let’s dig into the state of the factions!

Like many of our peers, we produce the vast majority of our games and accessory products in China and then ship them throughout the world. For us, the United States represents well over half of all of our business. The current tariff levels, if they hold steady or increase, will represent a significant barrier to our ability to operate our business as we have done in the past, just as it will for everyone in any industry that engages in international manufacturing, shipping, and sales.

In the previous development diary, I talked a bit about how my desire for system expressiveness led me astray during the game’s design and development. Figuring this out took months of work. As I mentioned in that piece, I spent a lot of time reading playtest reports, teaching the game, and trying to figure out why on earth the many little systems that seemed so robust and interactive in isolation were proving to be less than the sum of their parts.

I think part of my trouble is that I didn’t really have the vocabulary I needed to describe the problem. If you think “expressivity” is an excellent design goal, then it’s hard to make the argument to cut it. That’s really the core of what made the first month or so of cuts so vexing. I was cutting out stuff I liked without any deeper understanding of where those cuts might get me in the end.