Tavern Wars 11/23 Update
Added 2023-11-09 21:57:29 +0000 UTCHey everyone, I decided to post some updates on this for those who have been interested!
I spent a fair portion of September and October creating more art for the game, which has definitely slowed down after I finished the Amenities and started on the Staff and Heroes. Midjourney continues to be a massive lifesaver here, but when it struggles with something (like multiple characters in one picture doing different things, having different emotional expressions, or even being different races), it struggles hard, and some pieces took me a couple hours of off-and-on iterating to get what I wanted. I've heard DALLE-3 is better at this, so might try that out.
I also redesigned the core mechanic from dice rolls (which I tend to dislike in any board game other than Tabletop RPGs) to being a quasi-deckbuilder. A friend of mine coded up a small program to get a sense of what drawing distributions would be, and after about a week of tweaking numbers it felt ready for a playtest.
So I bought a bunch of blank cardstock and sleeves, then another friend helped turn my spreadsheet and basic card mockups into perfect-for-print sheets that we could cut up and put over the sleeved blanks.
After borrowing some money tokens from another board game, I gathered some people to do the first playtest of the new game rules, and it went really well! People had fun, and despite the late hour we ended up chatting for a while about mechanics and what tweaks to make to certain cards or rules.
I'm excited to playtest again soon, and just having the proxy-version of the game is honestly very satisfying. Once all the art is done I can even have that put into the printouts instead of the placeholder art, and then... we'll see :)
