wanderingpine

Follow-up to my earlier post here about Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations a medium-heavy thematic Euro about the Congress of Vienna, the salons-and-gossip side rather than the maps-and-borders side. Still in development.

The game has two main routes to influence: throwing parties, and pursuing political goals. And playtesters kept quietly drifting toward the political one. Not because it was stronger, but because it was easier to understand. That's the kind of signal you can't argue with: if people avoid a whole subsystem, the subsystem is the problem.

The party side had three things wrong with it. Too much luck up front a bad opening draw could make organising a party painfully hard through no fault of your own. An unreadable payoff – you couldn't reasonably estimate how many points a party was worth before committing to it. And death by a thousand exceptions – the attractions, the music, the food each carried their own little pile of special-case rules. Elegant in isolation, chaos on the table.

So this iteration was, honestly, mostly deletion. I unified the three sub-mechanics into one consistent shape, cut the exceptions, and pulled the worst of the luck out of the setup. Same feeling as when I cut my rulebook down a while back. I removed far more than I added.

The honest cliffhanger: it's rebuilt, not yet tested. Playtests start next week, and I don't know whether I've made the party genuinely competitive with the political route, or flattened it into something too safe. Ask me in a while.

Attaching entertainment card design – I am still in wireframe mode, but it is much clearer then the previous iteration.

For the heavier-game players here: when players keep avoiding one part of a game, how do you tell whether it's genuinely broken – or just needs a few more plays to click? I read it as broken this time. Curious where others draw that line.

I'm working on a historical board game called Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations and wanted to ask people who actually play heavier games what they think.

It's a medium-heavy thematic Euro about the Congress of Vienna, but not the usual maps-and-borders take. This one is about the social side: salons, gossip, romance, intrigue, ambition. The characters are real historical figures and their abilities come from who they actually were. I'm trying to make the social maneuvering the actual engine of the game, not decoration on top of a point salad.

It comes out of a lot of reading: memoirs, letters, the gossip that was genuinely circulating in Vienna in 1814. Some of that stuff is too good to leave as a footnote, so it becomes a mechanic instead. Still a prototype. I'm sharing the process as I go, and crowdfunding is one option I'm thinking about down the line, but that's not where I'm at yet.

Mostly I'm curious: how much appetite is there right now for niche medium-heavy thematic Euros, especially historical ones that come at the subject from a weird angle? And what makes you decide to follow a heavier design while it's still in development?