Hello everyone, welcome back to another design journal on Who Wears the Crown? It has been a while since we have last updated you all with the progress on Who Wears the Crown? and we would liek to first apologize for that. You deserve to have a good insight into the progress of this game and how we are progressing on that. There are a number of reasons for this delay, some are that other projects took priority and helped us move forward as a company and the other big reason is that Trevor (me) took some time to get a master’s in game development (specifically in Computer Science).
Now with all of this time having passed that does not mean there was no work done on Who Wears the Crown? and we want to share that with you! Starting with the latest thing first, we now have a print and play copy of Who Wears the Crown? Available on our site! This uses the artwork we decided on made by the wonderful Kaitlyn Castellow. For this aesthetic, we did not want to focus on a hyper realistic representation of the game world for a couple of reasons.
First and foremost, realistic art is expensive and would be outside the budget we could afford at this time. This first reason is practical but also lends a more specific way to present Who Wears the Crown? differently than a number of other political and/or fantasy games out there. While not required, it certainly helps with the recognition that players would hopefully have seeing our game.
Second Who Wears the Crown? at its core is a abstract representation of political power focusing on the mechanics of king-making. By having the art be abstract players can focus more on the game itself while having the ease of clearly being able to tell apart the different pieces. Also, this abstraction allows for players to assume the role of the royal houses they are playing as without assuming a specific persona (other than the one they put on themselves).
Now at this time we are still working on refining the rule book so if you get a chance to get a Print and Play copy of Who Wears the Crown? then feel free to send us your feedback!
In the vein, we have also taken a lot of effort to ensure that the rules of Who Wears the Crown are well written and as clear as they can be. For this we have looked at a number of well constructed rule books ranging from our success with Affectionate: Cats and Cuddles, to Villainous, and even looking back at some of the features lacking for Collectors and Capers. Part of this massive effort on our part comes from the realization that Who Wears the Crown? is a different game than what most folks are expecting. There are concepts in the game that to some seem antithetical to the conventional understanding that folks have about games.
This leads us to the biggest area of change in Who Wears the Crown? the mechanics improvements. Again we are going to start with the Endgame since it has had some of the biggest changes to it. As we continued to play-test we were finding that the constant confusion and use of both a point end game and claim tokens was overly confusing and could lead to wildly variable game times. This would create confusion in players who were not aware of the end of the game coming up and meant that the learning curve of the game was more difficult than it needed to be. So to combat this we ensured that the game would have 6 rounds of play. A round is every player having a turn to sell an action (more on that in a second). This evened out the game play time as well as provided a clear indication into how far we are in a given game. With this change there was a minor scoring change as well to the number of claim tokens simply giving a flat point boost to the player(s) with the most.
The cards: one comment we got multiple times (and a thorn in our designing side) was the want that players had to remember or have indication of what cards were down on the table. Basically players wanted a way to track which cards they gave to who and a way to understand the math of the support and betrayal cards. To this end we decided to create 5 suits suns, swords, feathers, rings, and horses. In the base game for each value and suit there is always one betrayal and the rest or supports. This allowed players to figure out if they may have been given a betrayal and track the cards players had more effectively. A few minor drawbacks to this is that the setup procedure became more complicated and the card count back up to 75 but that is manageable especially once a number of cards are removed from that deck. Also the betrayal cards now are negative crown points. This means that they have more of an impact and thus are used more as a disruption tool than just a wasted play for influence tokens.
Now in terms of the actual game-play there have been major changes for the better implemented here. First, the spy action was eliminated entirely, if players want to negotiate looking a a card when they receive it they can. The spy action was rarely if ever used and constantly was ignored no matter how powerful it was. With this we also made a change that was long requested and finally realized the full utility of it: you can always offer the steal action. Now the core change here is that there are the two actions that can always be offered (Score for an Opponent or Steal) and that to skip the negotiation phase entirely you pay the 3 unique token cost. This allows for players to feel powerful offering to steal while not feeling that they paid for someone else to benefit. With the payment change players also felt more in control of what they wanted to do and were more encouraged to trade for the tokens.
Trading was also loosened up to help provide more creative trades (though a table of players cna vote down a offer they find ridiculous for that group). It is hard to litigate the complex and varied trades that could occur in a game of Who Wears the Crown? Instead we decided that placing a few key rules on the offers themselves would leave the majority of the offer up to the players to decide what is valid or not. Some would say that this is an abdication of the responsibility of rules writing but we are trying to foster the intricate deals that could be made that we may not be able to think of. Part of this decision is also an acknowledgment that the players would enforce/ignore different rules as per their groups inclination and we want to focus on groups repeatedly enjoying Who Wears the Crown?
To speed up the initial stages of the game, players pass some of their influence tokens to their neighbors (just 1 token to the next 3 people) this helped players not only establish some early goals in terms of influence token collection but also ensures that at some point players could pay 3 unique tokens to take the action they want to without worrying about the initial trades. We were also finding that some of the early game stages were simply set up for gathering tokens and were not meaningfully moving the game forward.
At this time we are now looking to work on refining the rule book, start with getting the word out, and some final blind play-tests. If you want to help out at all feel free to join us on Facebook and send us a message at info@blueherongames.com with your thoughts, suggestions, feedback, or interest!