Seasonal Invasions

I'm making slow but steady progress on Invaded and am working on yet another revision of the game: the new version is number 13. This iteration is actually a relatively small change from version 12, being mostly component tweaks, hopefully improving clarity, and a little reworking of some of the card texts, as well as introducing "default" setups which mean that first-time players won't need to worry about initial placement of their pieces.

One of the small, cosmetic changes, though, is reflecting the way I have been explaining the game, and the realisation that I might as well just embrace a metaphor.  The way the game works, you "activate" your units on the board in order to take an action, and activation means moving the piece from one space on a card to another.  One round is a "square" round and all the pieces move into the square space, and when everything is in the square on the card, the round is over. The next round is then a "circle" round, and units move back to the circle spaces. It's basically just a way to keep track of what pieces have been used without having to reset everything at the end of each round.

This works well, but some people find it a bit abstract and weird, so I have started explaining it as, "You might want to think about one round being one season, say the spring, and the circle is where you put units that have done something in the spring," and so on.  This metaphor seems to work pretty well, so I figured I might as well make it explicit in the game.

Subtle season signage.

So all I did was to add the words "spring" and "autumn" into the two activation spaces on the location cards, and now the explanation will reference these and I am hoping this will make things a little more intuitive.  I'm hoping to do some playtesting this week, so we'll soon see how it goes down.

Of course, I'm bracing myself for comments and questions about whether the seasons are mechanically different -- they aren't.  If I wanted to get thematic I could make seasons have an effect on resource gathering (for example, grain is more plentiful in the autumn), but I suspect this might be adding more complexity for no real gain.  We'll see...