Working Out Loud: Witness the Card Game

Witness
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Both work fine.

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Thanks, this looks great. Should have some material to post on here by the end of today.

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Ok, I see! I don’t see any API and I think they usually host everything in their servers so definitively not a solution for the final integrated version…maybe there is something in the UI that can be of inspiration…

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Here’s my first pass at the Distrikt descriptions:

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Web content blurbs/calls to action:

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OK some timeline planning

  • Design / illustrations for cards. Status: under way - design deliveries expected for September 15.
  • Pamphlet for players:
  • Website & registration forms. @Owen: We need to get up the pages containing containing Information and registration forms for game organisers, game players and participants in the writers’ contest. Ideally within the next week - @ivan has reached out to you about this…
  • Zoom play sessions in the team. @ivan and @yudhanjaya - can you set the date for this?
  • Public Beta Test. We need a date for this asap, @ivan
  • Promo Campaign. The material for this is being produced by @Tineeka (NB: Chris has shared with us the summary texts for describing witness and the distrikts, see :point_up_2:t5:)
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Cheers- I should have the two “Invites” up and ready to look at by the end of today as well.

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Here is the one page “Invitation to players” (moving it into Google docs has made it slightly more than one page): Witness Player Invite - Google Docs

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The meat is ready. @nadia @ivan @owen @ChrisFarnell @matteo_uguzzoni have a look?

The cards: (Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.)
The documentation: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

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Comments made to @ChrisFarnell’s shared docs! Overall, website copy looks pretty good to me.

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Extremely finicky question I can’t quite find an answer for in the documentation- What century is it? I’m guessing we’re either late 21st century or early-to-mid 22nd? Do we know which?

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ping @yudhanjaya see Chris’s question re century? :point_up_2:t5:

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Late 21st but with mid 21st century tech thanks to climate change disasters taking out some pretty big countries and supply chains.

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Yeah, all the stuff I’ve seen in the cards and documents about supply chain collapse is definitely stinging a bit right now!

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Okay, here’s invite for sponsors/funders. I think it could probably user a slightly clear Call To Action, but while I know the broader outcomes you want, I wasn’t sure precisely what you want the response to this specifically to be, so let me know and I’ll tweak accordingly.
I’ve also gone through and edited the previous pieces based on feedback. I’ll leave all this for 24 hours for you guys to accumulate feedback, then I’ll take a final pass at it all on Thursday if that works for everyone?

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ping @Tineeka can you have a look at the Funder/Sponsor Invite text shared by Chris above?

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I am toying with the idea of making Public Opinion invalid for Libria (and Libria players only) and having it instead act as a “Money” mechanic of some sort.

Why? In a peak libertarian state, public opinion doesn’t matter. Everyone does their own thing. And the only way of playing Libria might be as a juggernaut corporation (the Ceasar Systems mentioned in some of the Event cards) buying services from other corps in the hopes of keeping the economy and infra stable enough to make a profit.

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Hey @yudhanjaya thank you so much for sharing this, the game is now very clear and interesting. It reminds me of deck construction games like Yu-Gi-Oh but with the twist that we are all competing against a system (the Event deck) instead that against each other.

I really like the idea of the after game moment in which we exchange cards and we build a different deck with new policies and it looks to me such a to-the-point (it’s exaclty the kind of interaction the game is aiming at ie people talking and reflecting about policies) that I wonder if there are ways to incorporate it during the gameplay. Is that something that is interesting for you?

One way could be (like in Pandemic) that there is an event card called “Policy Conference” or “Distrikt Meeting” and this card is shuffled in the first section of the deck, what this card is doing is the same thing that you were aiming for the post-game discussion.

Another way to have it - more organic to the gameplay, I’ll say - is to have a “Districkt Meeting” to be called every time one of the health indicator of a player reaches a low number, this gives a special dramatic (emergency) flavor to the meeting and to the discussion.

I really like games like Bohnanza in which the trading and the discussion is the core of the game, although there the trading is about bean crops :)) But again I think it could be interesting for example to open the system to some transaction between players (like: I’ll trade one public opinion point for a random policy from your deck and so on), since every transaction will lead to a conversation about policies which seems to me one of the goal of Witness: the game.

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You know, I think you’ve got something here.
Navin originally came up with a mechanic that would force trades between the winners and the losers. I don’t like the idea of forced trading, but I think “Distrikt Meeting” idea is brilliant. Maybe once per game, each player can “press the panic button”, so to speak, explain their dilemma, and ask the other players if those players have any cards in their hand that might help and whether they’re willing to trade.

This is a nice soft way of getting people to mix and match ideas without forcing them - cards can be returned after the game, but people will remember what ideas they had to swallow to get by. Good thinking!

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I’ve been through all the feedback on each of these and edited appropriately. Does anyone want to give it a final check for approval before it’s signed off?

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