During playtesting, I kept running into moments where you couldn’t just look up a rule and move on. You’d look up one thing, and then realise it depended on something else, which depended on something else again. What should have been a quick check turned into a small untangling of systems, and that pause was enough to break the flow of the game.
That’s the problem I’m addressing. I don’t expect anyone will ever play this game without referring to the rulebook. There are too many rules, too many nuances for that to be realistic. And that’s okay. That was never the goal. This game was never designed to be memorised or reduced down into something effortless. It was always meant to be intricate, layered, and a bit much.
But there’s a difference between something being dense, and something being difficult to resolve in the moment. You should be able to find what you need, understand it, and continue playing without having to trace threads across multiple sections of the book. So the work now is about tightening that up. Not removing complexity, not flattening the systems, but making sure that when something happens, it can be resolved cleanly, without needing to cross-reference half the rulebook to make sense of it.
I’m well aware of what most people look for in games. I watch the same reviews, read the same forums. There’s a strong pull toward games that are easy to learn but hard to master, or at least structured in a way that feels smooth and rewarding while you play. This isn’t that. This game is its own thing. It sits in a space that isn’t really being asked for, at least not loudly. It doesn’t try to compromise toward something more accessible just for the sake of it. It’s trying to be something specific; something intricate, a bit demanding, and hopefully interesting in a way that feels different. Maybe there are a few people out there who will enjoy that. Maybe not many. That’s fine. I’m not trying to make something for everyone. I’m trying to make something that feels like it should exist, and then make sure it actually works when it’s on the table. That’s where things are at right now.
