We’ve been very busy working on the expansion and showing it off at Pax Unplugged. It was wonderful seeing people’s eyes light up as I described the new factions to fans at our booth.
We just updated the print-and-play kits and Tabletop Simulator files for the Homeland Expansion, which you can find here. In addition to refreshing the factions, we’ve included something new: the Squires and Disciples Deck! We’re excited to see what you think of this new stuff.
Today, I’d like to talk about how the factions’ development has come along, highlighting what we learned from the first print-and-play release and further playtesting, and giving a sense of how I feel about their current state and where we need to go next.
Twilight Council
Let’s get the hard one out of the way: The Twilight Council has always been the problem child of this expansion, and it remains so. The version I’m releasing today is a snapshot of my thinking, but to be clear: they still have quite far to go. They are in a messy place, but I am curious to see the public response!
Over time, we’ve experimented with many iterations on the idea of “Assemblies let factions use cards in order to remove warriors.” This has turned out to be very, very hard to pull off. Let’s talk a bit about the challenges involved in doing this!
The first roadblock is that convening must feel distinct from battling while introducing enough noise to be exciting for the players involved. For battles, this was the dice. For convening, we’ve moved away from the dice, instead letting the source of surprise come from the players’ actions themselves. Cards are now played facedown—you don’t know what people have played until you’re done convening. By and large, this works as a source of surprise. Good so far!
The second roadblock is tougher: Root factions care about cards very differently from each other. The Eyrie, for example, is always card-starved, so naturally they will have less to work with. These asymmetries are not always a disadvantage—embracing asymmetry is a huge point of Root, after all! But in this case it is: you simply cannot disturb players’ hands too much, or else faction dynamics collapse and people feel cheated or unable to counterplay the Bats.
To address this, I’ve implemented the ability for players to disrupt assemblies, drawing arms to battle in response to perceived unfairness. There’s a lot of precedent for violence at medieval assemblies, so thematically I’m happy. However, this has ballooned the size of the convening procedure. In our internal testing, convening has proven to be fun and interesting for those involved, but it tends to happen too often, ballooning the Bats’ turn length and making each assembly feel less impactful than it should. Also, for the players not involved, it tends to drag.
The final roadblock is differentiation from other factions. As the Knaves of the Deepwood have continued to develop, I have found that many potential mechanisms for the Bats have fit much better into the Knaves than they ever fit into the Bats. Naturally, this leaves fewer tools to work with—the factions should feel different, after all! Because the Knaves pull warriors directly off the map as Hostages, the Bats will likely need to move away from this as a conceit and transition to a design where they interfere with factions’ abilities to recruit warriors in the first place or their ability to use warriors in battle.
Because of these issues, it’s about time for me to go back to the drawing board once we get back from break in the new year. Rest assured, we don’t release anything that we don’t believe in. I’ve learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work in Root’s design space over these months of development, and I will continue to share with you how this faction is progressing!
Now, on to brighter news.
Lilypad Diaspora
The Diaspora is in a fantastic place! They are likely close to done at this point, perhaps between one and three iterations. I say “likely” because game development is funny; you can think you’re almost done and then you get hit with a huge problem that demands a rework.
When we released the first print-and-play, a big problem immediately presented itself: scoring scaling. Especially on maps that started with fewer pieces, they would routinely explode out of control, placing enclaves all around the map. Unless the table ground them down in the mid game, they could ride this expansion to a win, but if the table responded well, their scoring potential cratered out in the mid-to-late game. Generally, this kind of scoring curve isn’t ideal for a Root faction—it drastically warps the table’s attention toward the quickly scaling faction. This on its own is not necessarily an issue, but if it’s happening every time, then it makes the game feel stale quickly.
The other big problem was fiddliness, the worst offender being the Frog tokens, now called enclaves. It’s fiddly enough for a piece to have two states—face up and face down—let alone having three states like they did at the time: Peaceful, Militant but not covering its suit, and Militant and covering. This made it extremely difficult for players to track the tokens’ states; we often saw players knocking tokens around and then not remembering whether they were covering the suit or not. Now, when they’re Militant they always immediately cover the clearing suit. As a bonus, you no longer have to track whether they’re Peaceful or Militant on your board.
To enable the instant replacement of clearing suit, we needed to ensure that factions who care a lot about clearing suit had an out: enemies on their own turn can now engage in Peace Talks with the Diaspora to turn a Militant enclave back to Peaceful, at the cost of a card. This doesn’t require consent like the old Reconcile, and neither does the new Reconcile—basically, if it’s your turn, you have some limited or costed ability to flip Militants to Peacefuls.
On the topic of the frog suit—let’s talk about frog cards! I’m happy to say that frog cards now show up in the deck itself rather than being in a deck of their own, and they can now be used by the Diaspora as well as by enemy factions. This is important to me from a thematic angle, since these cards represent the different cliques, movements, and groups within the faction. It would be silly if the internal politics were accessible only by enemies, making the Diaspora’s people feel like the pawns of their enemies rather than a double-edged sword.
It became clear that forcing frog cards to show up in players’ hands through natural draw was the right way to go, but I still needed a way to give players access to the specific frog cards that they cared about. The main way I addressed this was with the Pond. Whenever a frog card is discarded, it goes to the Pond, and whenever a player flips a Militant enclave back to Peaceful, the enclave’s ruler gets to draw a card, either from the deck or the top card of the Pond! This greatly reduces the time it takes to engage with them—no more searching through the deck or, as it worked in a version between the first PNP version and now, having to thumb through the main deck until you found a frog card.
Recently, I’ve been working on ensuring that the Diaspora has the ability to play more peacefully in the early game. While the Diaspora is designed in order to play more peacefully or more militantly depending on the matchup, we found that playing extremely Militant early on, then gradually transitioning to Peaceful became a dominant strategy. I disliked this, both for thematic reasons and just because it’s boring. I think I’ve addressed this problem in the most recent version, but only time will tell!
Knaves of the Deepwood
The Knaves are coming along well! They are not as close to being done as the Frogs, but I am very happy with their progress.
The Knaves had three big issues starting with their first PNP release, beyond being overpowered: First, they were fun to play but not much fun to play against, largely because it was hard to police them in a satisfying way. (Sound familiar?) Second, their turn structure led to significant analysis paralysis and was hard for other players to track. Finally, they had a lot of easy-to-forget rules.
Their policing issues mostly came down to this: they accumulated warriors more like a Militant faction than an Insurgent faction. And while they couldn’t put their Captains in the same clearings, they could still build scary stacks of warriors on their Hostage-holding Captains that were a pain to get through. This happened because they didn’t really need to defend both their Captains and their hideouts: they just didn’t care that much about losing their hideouts, since they were easy to get back on the map and losing them didn’t have much of a penalty. So they felt simultaneously too “easy come, easy go” and too hard to attack in the places they cared about. We’ve addressed this mostly by balancing out how much the Knaves care about their Captains versus their hideouts, making their warrior generation more costly, but also making Captains themselves a little more slippery, letting them retreat automatically to hideouts when they would be removed. This means they can operate with smaller forces and still feel impactful.
To address analysis paralysis, I’ve cut down the limit of items that each Captain can hold but also loosened when they can use them. Originally, my impulse on items was to restrict their use to only before or after the Captain acted, thinking that this would reduce the number of possible action combinations and sequences. However, what we found in testing was players would try to plan around this restriction, thinking about how their Captain’s location on the map would influence their item use order on the following turn, adding more analysis than the restriction removed. I also removed their ability to draw more items from their bag during their main action step, leaving this as a passive draw later in their turn. This means you never have to track which items you can and cannot use on the current turn, and it removes the need to change your plan for your current turn based on items you just drew.
The easy-to-forget rules were mostly details that were cute but needed to be cut altogether. For example, we tried various methods to allow enemies to negotiate for Hostages on their own turn, but even when it was rationally a good deal for them to do so, it always just felt…bad. You’d pay a card to get some warriors back. Fine so far. But giving points to the Knaves as well? That’s a bridge too far. Likewise, the rules for Hostages dying during battles were thematic, but far too unpredictable and difficult to factor into the attacker’s math. There wasn’t really a way to hedge your outcomes or mitigate your luck in an effective way.
To read more Design Diaries from Josh, and learn more about Root: The Homeland Expansion, check out Board Game Geek!