The Woodland is at war. War is hell, and the common Woodfolk would prefer it ended sooner rather than later. That’s where the Twilight Council comes in. In case you’re not familiar with them yet, here’s how I pitch them:
Sickened by the enduring conflict, the Twilight Council hosts assemblies to end the war, bringing together all the Woodland from the lowliest mouse-in-a-sack to the mightiest hawk with a royal claim. The assemblies emphasize political connections over pure numbers of warriors, pushing the factions away from bloody battle and toward heated debate. As the Council progresses in their mission, they can declare edicts to change how the assemblies work, manipulating their enemies’ incentives and actions.
The Twilight Council is almost a bizarro Woodland Alliance. The Alliance wants to mobilize sympathizers through outrage, which means that the Alliance actually wants to act in ways that will generate that outrage they seek. The more atrocities, the more backlash against the oppressors—they want to sharpen the effects of the war in order to end it. The Council, on the other hand, wants to provide a framework for the Woodland to cool down the war. Though the Council faction is represented by bats, the Council as a movement as a whole includes all the Woodfolk.
The Council adds a new action to the game for everyone: assembling. This is a new way to remove warriors that deemphasizes warrior counts and emphasizes hand management. It uses the battle dice but feels very different! The assembly also adds a new way to draw cards, conceding, letting players draft their hands more effectively. I’ll describe this all in more detail throughout the diary.
In my diary on the Lilypad Diaspora, I mentioned that the core conceit of the faction clicked into place quickly and stayed solid. This was anything but the case for the Twilight Council! What their assemblies do and how they work have gone through many more major changes than the Diaspora—as of this diary, it’s on version #19.
Because this faction went through so many more major changes than the Diaspora did, I’m going to write this diary in more of a narrative way, flying from version to version and explaining how the design changed over time. So, back in time we go!
Version 1: Laws
Originally, the Bats would pass Laws, which were basically restrictions on what players could do in clearings. An example of one might be “Players cannot battle in fox clearings.” Then the Bats would attempt to enforce these Laws by getting more assemblies down and ruling clearings. If they could successfully enforce these Laws, they scored points.
This early version also used a round-robin voting system where any of the players could play cards in as Votes to influence which suit the Law affected. Because cards are a bulky currency, I let players redraw cards.
This version had tons of issues: The Laws were difficult to remember, because Root players are not used to checking the area around the board except for Dominance cards. The scoring did not scale well with player count, since it became easier for enemies to break Laws inadvertently if there were more players in the game. The Laws were difficult to strategize with—it was extremely hard to predict how a “no battle in fox clearings” Law would play out, for example, especially in the early game, so there was little incentive to participate in the assemblies except for the opportunity to ditch cards and redraw.
Version 2: Laws as Tokens
Overall, this cut was all about grounding the assembly process in specific clearings, for usability’s sake, so I turned the Laws into tokens. This did make it much easier to interpret where Laws were, but it greatly restricted how much of the map the Laws affected at a time. It just didn’t matter often enough.
I also recognized that the old round-robin system of voting could break the game flow, so I experimented with a head-to-head voting system where the player with the most pieces in the clearing could override the Law and choose a new one. This had more of an immediate tactical impact than the previous, vague system, but it introduced a poisonous dynamic. Players would simply want the Law passed that they could most immediately break, which means that their game impact was even further minimized. Clearly this wouldn’t work.
Versions 3–5: Carrots, Not Sticks
The elephant-sized problem of the previous version was that players simply would not want to engage with the laws. They were all limitations, and except in specific cases people would just want them off the map as quickly as possible. In this version, the Laws become Edicts—tools that players could use to harm each other. This immediately felt much better! …
…When it mattered. The faction just did not spread out quickly enough, since only one Edict was placed per turn and only one or two were resolved per turn. So, I expanded the assemblies so that they all got resolved, along with the option to Defer in order to skip assemblies that seemed too risky. I also abandoned some experiments with open hands that sped up assemblies but made them boring.
Versions 6–10: Warriors, Crafting Icons, Incentives
This period of design happened in the weeks before Gen Con and at Gen Con itself, where I was able to run a series of two-turn demos in our room with interested players. Largely, the changes here focused on three areas.
First, it became clear that both cards and points were both poor ways to use the assemblies. One card is a lot; one point is a lot. A single card pull or point swap is serious business—more than one, and the game’s structure starts to warp around the assemblies in an unhealthy way, cannibalizing the rest of the game. And even worse, in many cases, the assemblies would wash out their effects—Player A would steal a point from Player B, only for the reverse to happen a moment later. It was boring. The only outcome where effects did not wash out was warriors; there was nothing in the assemblies placing warriors back on the map. So I cut the card and point steals.
Second, cards as votes proved too restrictive. Generally, the question of “Do I put in a card as a vote?” boiled down to “If it’s not a bird card, then yes. If it’s a bird card, maybe no.” There needed to be more differentiation between cards—a reason to want to keep one card over another. In one playtest, Cole mentioned the idea of using crafting suits as the currency instead of the card suit, which was a great idea! The number of crafting icons measures the size or influence of the group you’re trying to get to come to your side, so it’s a natural fit for the assembly. (If you’re confused and want to read more on thematic considerations in the Craft action, you can read my post about it here!)
Finally, I knew the Bats’ scoring system wouldn’t produce the themes I wanted to see. At this point, the Bats would score simply based on their number of assemblies or the number of assemblies they ruled. This didn’t express the most important thing: were assemblies happening and doing their job? At various points in this period, assemblies would score points when run or score points based on how many warriors they pulled off the map, in various ways.
Versions 11–16: A Major Rebuild
The demos and tests at Gen Con were useful but ultimately frustrating for me. At this point, the Frogs were clearly resonating with people more strongly than the Bats. The Bats were still fiddly and too complicated, and they did not have a strong thematic hook. The best I could do was say “they can remove warriors permanently.”
So I knew I needed to go back to basics. They needed to remove warriors with assemblies, which needed to involve cards somehow, and likely their crafting suits. Those were my assumptions; everything else I considered subject to change, and change I did. The faction ended up much, much leaner and more flexible all at once.
The critical change in this version is to the assembly process: instead of an intricate, multi-round assembly where everyone got a seat at the table and lots of cards were placed out on the table, I reconceptualized it as a battle replacement. This makes sense—if its function is removing warriors, then it slots naturally into the flow of play when battles would happen. This also had the great knock-on effect that players could run assemblies on their turn. With this added flexibility, I could increase how much assemblies suppressed the war—now, if players battled at all in clearings with assemblies, they were heavily penalized.
Version 17–19: Coming Up to Speed
The rebuild paid many dividends, but I began running into considerable issues with the faction’s puzzle and its identity. It was obvious what the Bats needed to do on their turn. In one playtest, Nick Brachmann, a fellow developer at Leder Games, mentioned that the Council’s puzzle was just too easy to math out, since they could snipe warriors at a known cost. The faction did not ask the player to engage in much strategic thinking or tradeoffs, and the assemblies themselves just did not feel very much like assemblies. To try to address this, I experimented with various systems, including the Loyalist system shown below, but they all proved too much of a table space hog and not particularly interesting.
But after some soul-searching, I realized that some of my design goals for the assembly were holding me back. Specifically, I had hoped to avoid designing an assembly system that felt like battling, which to me meant that I couldn’t use dice. But at this point I had exhausted every conceivable diceless system, so what would the harm be in breaking that rule and experimenting with the dice? Turns out, this was exactly the right decision.
I’m reminded of my design work on the Keepers in Iron. On its face, the use of a card-slotting system like the Eyrie gives some people the impression that they must feel like the Eyrie, but this is completely wrong. Likewise, the assembly system uses the dice from the battle system, but it feels very different due to some critical tweaks.
- The fact that it isn’t a battle means you can get around abilities like the Alliance’s Guerilla Warfare and the Lizard Cult’s Acolytes.
- The concede option and reroll order give much more control to defenders than in battle.
- The lack of hit limit based on warrior count makes it feasible, and even preferable sometimes, to approach a large force of warriors with just one or two.
Finally, moving to a system with more uncertainty let me hone in on the most straightforward, thematic scoring system that the faction has seen so far: they simply score a point for each assembly that resolved during the Council’s turn and survived it.
Where We’re At
And we’re up to the present! Here’s the player board as it stands:
This version has been testing extremely well—people are enjoying it, and after running through the assembly once or twice the whole process clicks. After much struggling, the core conceit works! The next step for the Council is iterating their Edict cards. Here are a few of them:
Basically, near the end of the Council’s turn, they can declare a single Edict as long as they have enough Active Assemblies and revealed cards of the right suit. These are the youngest part of the design. Basically, they are designed to give the Council the ability to change how assemblies work, along with some once-in-a-while action flexibility, letting do things they otherwise couldn’t, like moving and battling. Their costing is all out of whack, and it remains to be seen how things like revealed bird cards play into fulfilling their suit costs.
One thorny issue of note: The Council is particularly weak right now against extremely belligerent factions like the Lord of the Hundreds, so the Council will likely receive some countermeasures in their Edicts—maybe something like drawing cards that others discard from their Woodland Pacifism ability, maybe a more direct downside for battling assemblies like making them give no victory points when removed, or something else.
Anyway, that’s all for this week. Come back to hear about the new maps—the Gorge Map and the Swamp (or Marsh) Map. See you then!
Root: The Homeland Expansion adds new factions and two new maps to Root! Its Kickstarter launches on October 22nd, 2024. If you would like to sign up to be reminded, click here.
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