Throughout history, diasporas have played a critical role in societies and their politics. Because of their precarious position, they have been used and abused by monarchs, empires, and hegemonic cultures, whether through labor exploitation, use as a political wedge, or scapegoating. So it’s about time that they got their due in Root, in the form of the Lilypad Diaspora. In case you’re not familiar with them yet, here’s how I pitch them:
Scattered long ago and suppressed ever since, the Lilypad Diaspora now returns to their Woodland home. While they hope to reintegrate peacefully, peace is rare in the midst of civil war. As they train their warriors, they must ensure that their desire for safety does not tip into outright aggression. With weapons at the ready, a simple misunderstanding between the Diaspora and the Woodland can flare into vicious reprisals, hardening the Diaspora’s militancy and spreading resentment against their cause.
To start, let’s jump right in and show the player board as it stands:
The central mechanic of the Diaspora is that it adds a new suit to the game: a new deck of Frog cards and a Frog token to add this suit to clearings. Frog tokens are double-sided, with Peaceful and Militant sides, and the faction scores points based on Peaceful Frog tokens. While a token is Peaceful, its clearing is double-suited; for example, a clearing could be both Frog and Fox suited. On the flip side, Militant Frog tokens are the only way that the Diaspora can get warriors, but they also can prompt Reprisals, replacing their clearing’s suit with Frog alone.
Throughout its concepting and design, these pillars have stayed solid, and when I first showed off the Diaspora to the public at Gen Con, I knew the faction was on the right track. People understood its concept right away, and their eyes lit up.* It was a huge breath of fresh air after working on the faction internally for many months!
* As an aside: At Gen Con, Matt Lees from Shut Up and Sit Down came by, looked at the placeholder Militant Frog tokens, and said, “Graphic design is my passion, and you simply cannot change this token art.” Please enjoy their majestic art, which to the disappointment of all has since changed:
Goals
When making a faction, it’s important to have some design goals: What should it bring to the table? How does the faction make Root feel different for everyone? What moments or feelings do you want to evoke? Here are the goals for the Diaspora:Promotes structured player politics. The Diaspora injects a critical moment of player politicking: Reconciling. By giving a card to the Diaspora, an enemy faction can flip a Frog token with their pieces to Peaceful as well as draw a Frog card from the Frog deck. If nobody Reconciles, this triggers Reprisals, where Militant Frog tokens cover their clearing suits and force mass card discards.
Deepens card play and map dynamics for everyone. They introduce a new suit to the game! Over the course of the game, this suit should feel increasingly impactful as Frog tokens are added to the map. Every faction should care about where the Frog clearings are and whether they have access to Frog cards.
Plays like an insurgent or a militant. If you play the Diaspora as a more peaceful faction, you will feel more like an insurgent. If you build up their military, you can play them militantly.
Stories
Being able to play the Diaspora more peacefully or more militantly is not an arbitrary mechanical goal. There are so many diasporas out there with so many different stories, which demand representation. Broadly, I want the faction to be able to tell three broad kinds of stories:First, a peaceful, fairly optimistic story. The Diaspora scores points each turn if they spend cards matching the clearings with their Peaceful Frog tokens. So in theory, the faction can win simply by integrating peacefully into the Woodland, finding acceptance and community. However, the other factions may not allow this…
Second, a complicated story of peace and war. The Diaspora scores some of its points from peaceful integration, some from crafting, and some from battling the other factions, sometimes in reasonable defense and sometimes as a “preventive measure.”
Third, a bloody, cynical story. The Diaspora prioritizes military build-up and their enemies refuse to reconcile, leading to mass reprisals and expelling droves of Woodfolk from their homes and burrows. This allows for the play of a Frog Dominance card, which I will describe later.
The Tokens
As I described in my first design diary, the Diaspora is not a monolith, but a fractious, multifaceted faction, and its constituents have many different ideas about the Diaspora’s history and how the faction should (or shouldn’t!) reintegrate into the Woodland. Largely, this is represented by their Militant and Peaceful Frog tokens.
While the tokens have stuck around from the beginning, the mechanics for placing, flipping, and scoring them have changed quite a bit. Let’s walk through a few of those old ways!
Early on, the Diaspora had a Stance track, which represented their current peacefulness or militancy. If their Stance was on its Peaceful side, they could place tokens Peaceful, and vice versa. The Frog cards represented different personalities within the faction—a warmonger or a peacemaker, for example—and both the Diaspora and other factions could use these cards to change the Stance. The Stance would drift toward neutral on each Diaspora turn, and the Stance could get stuck on Peaceful or Militant for a while if the track tipped all the way in one direction or another.
Ultimately, I threw out the Stance track because it was too porous to other players but too manageable for the Diaspora itself. Once another player had access to a Frog card that changed the Stance a lot, they could completely shift the Diaspora’s strategy with a single card play. For the Diaspora, they could carefully tune their plays of Frog cards in order to wash out their effects and keep their Stance right where they wanted it, removing any puzzle involving working around the Militant or Peaceful parts of their faction.
In the Gen Con version, the faction also faced Woodland Intolerance, where a die roll each turn flipped Peaceful tokens to Militant. I liked this mechanic because it demonstrated some antagonism between the Woodland itself and the Diaspora. However, the Reprisals mechanic already demonstrates this, through covering clearing suits and discarding cards, representing loss of support.
For placement, their scaling speed was the main concern. Let them scale too quickly, and it either means they score too quickly or it warps the game for other players, incentivizing too much killing of defenseless Frog tokens over other goals. Restrict placement only to rule, and you can over-emphasize their military game. (I want to ensure the possibility of peaceful spreading!) I’ve opted for a mixed strategy where you can either rule, guaranteeing your safety through force, or you can spend a card, using your Woodland contacts to ensure peaceful integration.
As far as scoring goes, I’ve worked through tons of ways of assessing the Peaceful tokens: simple scaling based on number of Peaceful tokens, points when placing but losing points from too many Militant tokens, points based on the clearing suit with the most Peaceful tokens, and so on. Certain methods scaled their scoring too quickly, some too slow. Others provided too many opportunities for soft lockouts where people couldn’t possibly dig themselves out of their scoring hole. Right now, I’m pretty happy with their Lizard-like scoring style, where they can spend one card each of fox, mouse, and rabbit suits (or substituting a bird as a wild), and score 1 point for each Peaceful Frog token in matching clearings. This not only adds map texture and gets the scaling right, but also adds the most thematic resonance. Integration is a relationship with multiple parties: the Diaspora itself and the foxes, rabbits, mice, and birds of the Woodland!
The Deck
The Diaspora’s Frog deck is where a lot of the interactive thematics come through. Right now, players gain access to cards from the Frog deck by reconciling with the Frogs, giving a card to the Diaspora in exchange for a Frog card and flipping a Militant Frog token to Peaceful.
It’s important to show how the Diaspora’s enemies might leverage their relations with the Diaspora for their own ends: using the Diaspora’s people for labor, engaging in peace talks (“We reconciled before. I’m not a threat. Why should you keep warriors here?”), or even declaring yourself to be the lord-host or protector of the Diaspora through its Dominance card. (Though to prove your position as protector, this may require some suppression of the Diaspora’s own warriors in the process, for their own good…)
The deck works pretty well right now, but it’s also probably the weakest part of the design, since the most common piece of Diaspora feedback right now is “Please let the Diaspora use Frog cards.” This is understandable, but there are various obstacles: Each card would need to be useful for both the Diaspora and enemies in non-broken ways, or else players would need to be able to pick and choose the cards they draw in some way. The Diaspora would also need a way to draw Frog cards without distracting too much from other suits, and they would have to actually care about the Frog suit. Right now, they care about card suits for placing and scoring Peaceful Frog tokens; the Frog suit is useless for placing tokens, and it would be too powerful to let them score all Peaceful Frog tokens by spending a Frog card.
The ideal route is unclear right now, but this is a workable question that has various solutions! There’s plenty of time for working out these issues in the months of development to come. I hope you enjoyed this look inside the Diaspora. Please come back for my next designer diary about the Twilight Council: the Bats!
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