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!
Lilypad Diaspora
The Diaspora is done. The only changes in the past months is that Provoke is slightly simpler and a few frog cards have been refined. No news is good news here!
Knaves of the Deepwood
At this point, the Knaves are 99%+ done—tweaks only at this point. Let’s talk about their big changes.
After the previous PNP release, fans roared, “Don’t take away our three Captains!” And I heard you loud and clear. I’ve brought back the three Captains, but you only use one of those Captains per turn. Here’s the twist: you choose which Captain you’ll use at the end of your turn, and you keep it secret until the start of your next turn. This way, opponents will want to predict where you’ll be acting, and you can play mind games with them. The original impetus for removing the extra Captains was that the Knaves had too much ability to police any part of the map at any given time based on their immediate needs.
However, when one hand giveth, the other taketh away. Specifically: The item bag is gone. I don’t think you’ll miss it much. Bag building is fundamentally a means to an end—a game like Quacks of Quedlinburg is a fun social activity not so much because of the bag building, but because of the push-your-luck bag pulling. Everyone else gets to cheer when you bust. There was never really a comparable mechanism to complement the Knaves’ bag building, and attempts to make one felt overwrought.
Removing the bag has made way for a much more interesting item mechanism. In setup, each Captain adds two items to your Stash—six items in total. When you use items, you exhaust them, and the only time you refresh items is when you reveal a Captain. You don’t get to refresh just any items, though—only the ones shown on the Captain card. So if you reveal the Thief, you’re only refreshing your boots and teas.
This has two major consequences. First, it lets us drop the number of basic actions your Captain can take per turn. You only get one now, rather than three. The rest are actions from your three items. This makes your Captain choices matter much more to how the faction feels. Second, it adds texture to your choice of Captain from turn to turn—if you really, really need to get more warriors on the board, either you need to have tea refreshed already or you need to choose the Captain that lets you refresh tea. This gives some helpful cues in your decision space and makes it readable enough that enemies can try to predict your actions.
There are plenty more small tweaks to the faction, but I’ll let you explore those yourselves. Enjoy!
Twilight Council
The Bats have always been the problem child of this expansion, but I’m happy to say that they’re feeling stable and very fun now. Between now and the end of development, I only expect a few more tweaks. Let’s talk a little bit about how I got here and what’s different.
As of the last Print and Play, the essential problem with the Bats was this: it was two factions into one, and one of the factions wasn’t any good. I remember a playtest a while back with Cole, where I was explaining this rule and that rule, justifying each one’s presence, and I just started to feel embarrassed. After the explanation, Cole just said, “Jesus Christ, Josh,” and that’s all he had to say. So I began to aggressively cut, ripping out the half of the faction that was adding little and costing so much in rules. I’m pleased to say that the Twilight Council is now the least wordy faction in Homeland.
Immediately, you’ll notice that the warrior auction system on their player board is gone. This was a huge edifice of rules that ultimately didn’t add much. Why? Root already has a warrior auction system. Except it’s on the map, and it’s called “rule.” If we’re using rule, then “disrupting” assemblies just means battling, and so on. Worse, the assemblies didn’t do much to support the Bat’s core concept. They would convene, have meetings and debates and such, all to just push some warriors around the map and sometimes remove them. It felt like a tool in service of another tool, rather than in service of a goal. It was a gimmick.
With the auction system stripped away, this laid bare that the Bats still lacked an extremely solid goal that aligned with their conceit. But now they have just that: they want to govern clearings. Basically, you govern clearings when you place an assembly in it and, by ruling it, empower your assembly, flipping it to its Empowered side.
Governance is how they score—they want to govern clearings with enemy buildings and tokens. Likewise, they don’t have crafting pieces of their own: they craft using enemy crafting pieces. This means their scoring is intimately entangled with their enemies’ map presence. Finally, if they manage to fully empty their assemblies of enemy warriors, they can Rejoice, spending matching cards to score points.
On the flip side, enemies are severely limited in governed clearings: they can’t battle, can’t use crafting pieces, and place or otherwise manipulate pieces—so they cannot recruit warriors, flip plots, or revolt, for example—unless they’re moving or defending in battle. They can get around this if they rule the clearing, showing that they have the military might to defy the Council’s governance, or if they spend a matching card, showing that the Woodland supports them.
The Bats still have access to the key tool from the old warrior auction system: their ability to Banish, forcing enemies to move their warriors. This still happens at assemblies, is triggered with cards, and gets more effective based on your warriors—in other words, it retains many of the core dynamics. But now it’s so much simpler: it’s just a battle, but you don’t take rolled hits, and the hits you deal force moves rather than removing pieces. Easy.
You’ll find that the hoped-for dynamics of the Bats are all there. They make everyone at the table look at the game differently, emphasizing ceasefires, faction synergy and coexistence, but also parasitism and piggy-backing. They pull the Woodland into an uneasy peace, using (mostly) non-violent methods, but still antagonize their opponents and provide interesting choices for all. I’m excited to see what you think of them! There are still some changes to come, but at this point they’re coming in for the landing.
Thanks for reading, everyone, and enjoy!
To read more Design Diaries from Josh, and learn more about Root: The Homeland Expansion, check out Board Game Geek!