Greetings, Innovators from around the world. We've been hard at work on many many things related to the game, and wanted to share what's been going on!
Artwork & Graphic Design
As we mentioned during the campaign, we've done a redesign of the card backs. We've also changed the previous checkerboard pattern on the card fronts to a design that is related to that age's back artwork:
What you can also see here is that we've done a full redesign of the latticework that connects icons when piles are splayed. In 3rd edition, we had the latticework change from age to age. Since we're doing the background art differences, this freed up the latticework to do an important new duty: Color identification!
Now, the lattices differ by card color, not age. They now have shapes related directly to the shape surrounding the card's age/value in the top right. Our goal here is for this to provide a significant distinction between card colors to anyone with color vision difficulties, and will also make each color's splayed grid look more consistent.
We're also working on making the 150+ new card images for The Unseen, Age 11 cards, and a handful of card identity changes across the other sets. Lots of cool new things to represent!
Gameplay Updates
With the playtesting resources we have available on Yucata and BoardGameArena, we've been able to play a LOT of Innovation over the past couple months, as have many of you! We've been taking in feedback and adjusting card balance based on our experiences and others. Some highlights:
Buffing some of the early Unseen cards to speed up games that were getting a bit bogged down
Lots of clarifications for self-execute/fully-execute cards that caused
Updating Aslant-splay card effects to be cooler and allow for more splayed cards
Buffs for late Cities with bonuses to give each 3x instead of 2x
Changes to several age 9/10/11 cards in Base to make the late-game flow through ages better
There are many many more changes to cards (small and large) that we've been making as we go. We're getting pretty happy with where the game is, but there's still testing to be done.
Effects / Wording Clarity
One place we've been making a number of changes is card wording clarity. Removing extraneous phrases that were confusing, general streamlining, and making cards from different sets that did similar things more consistent in their wording.
An example of this is the new keyword self-execute which replaces wording like "execute all non-demand effects on [card]. Do not share them". We've also isolated visible to only refer to cards in a stack. A splayed stack has all cards in it visible, an unsplayed stack's top card is the only one visible. Other effects that refer to icons, hex/card images, bonuses always now only refer to those on a top card or those revealed by a splay.
There is one potential wording cleanup that we'd like backer input on - cards like Masonry: "You may meld any number of cards from your hand, each with an [A]. If you melded four or more cards in this way, claim the Monument achievement."
We're considering the following options:
3E wording: "If you meld four or more cards in this way..."
Simplified: "If you meld four cards in this way..." (With rulebook definition that during verification, numbers include "or more")
Ordinal: "If you meld a fourth card in this way..." (With rulebook definition that ordinals - second, third, fourth, etc always include "or more")
There's a poll attached to this update (hopefully?) that allows you to vote for the option that you think works best. Thanks for your input on the topic!
Pledge Management/Schedule
We haven't yet opened the pledge manager, and we're probably not going to until December at this point. We need to do some back-end things with BackerKit to do with shipping before we can get that running, and frankly right now - getting the game finished is more important!
Our aim was to send the game to print around December 1, but we've undertaken a good amount of extra work with the cardbacks and more balance updates than we'd initially thought. We still very much want to submit the files to the factory by the end of the year, but it might slip a couple weeks beyond that. We still aim to deliver in the Spring - none of this was going to be on presses until after CNY regardless.
PAX Unplugged: Booth 3246
We will have a demo set of Base + Unseen (maybe one other expansion, we'll see - I have to cut them by hand) at PAX Unplugged the first weekend in December, and we'd love to have you stop by! We'll have a giant inflatable Plumplim, as is tradition. It's majestic.
