Hey there!

Konstantinos and I had the pleasure of seeing a lot of cities made by some of you, even getting to watch some processes directly on video. It's always great for us to see what stories and cities emerge. And it is really helpful for us in understanding how the game is played.

That said, I noticed that the rules around faction and power seem a bit confusing. People use them differently than we intended. So I put some time into thinking about how to improve that part of the game. And I'd love it if you'd find some time to playtest them and let me know what you think before they get put into the game proper.

Power as Written

During our internal playtests it seemed really important to give an indication for the relative strength of the factions. Even though the power of a faction has no actual impact on the city's development it still feels meaningful to track. So I came up with the idea of using citizen tokens to represent power. Something that felt elegant and that I was really enamored with.

The idea was that you take the tokens out of the pool as they enter the city.  Then the total citizen tokens represent the vague number of people. As factions gain power the tokens are moved off the districts and onto the factions. This represents the number of "supporters" that faction has. What I loved about it was the simplicity of only needing one token.

However it is a bit abstract. It's very intuitive (and fun!) to put citizen tokens into districts. That makes sense. These things represent people, and they move into the city. So that's clear. That works. But moving those "off the map" suddenly turns the token from a physical movement of the citizens to the abstract concept of their support shifting. And that's where people misinterpret the rules. 

This double use might be conceptually elegant, but practically unintuitive. So yeah, that's not going to work.

Power Tokens

After finishing the dungeon-builder Ex Umbra, which has two different kinds of tokens (Threat and Reward), I ended up a lot less focused on the idea of a single kind of token. That opened up room for some new solutions for Ex Novo too. 

So here's my proposed set of rules for faction power:

EDIT: These rules have been updated!

• There is a second kind of token: Power tokens
• When a power tokens is on the map or on a faction card it is counted as being "in the city" otherwise it's "in the pool"
• Whenever a resource is added to the city, put 2 power tokens from the pool on that resource on the map
• Whenever a resource is removed, move 2 power tokens from the city to the pool (from the resource on map and/or from factions)
• But the city always retains 1 power token.
• Whenever a faction gains power, pull at least one power token from the map or other factions
• Whenever a faction loses power, move at least one power token to the map or other factions
• A faction still exists, even if it has 0 power tokens. But when a faction loses power while it has no power left, you may remove it
• When a faction is removed, move all its power tokens to the map or other faction
• When instructed to add a new leading faction, add a new faction and then have it gain power in a way that means it has the most power tokens

This is the basic set of rules that you could already playtest with. If you do, please share your feedback!

Obviously this might also provide some new mechanics for the event table to play with. Think of events that add or remove power tokens to or from the city's pool. Or events that allow you to spend power tokens to add landmarks or other features... 

However, right now the goal is to make the rules around power easier to understand. So before we make things more complicated we need to find out if this set of rules actually works the way it should. And that's where you come in! If you're up for it, run a session with these rule changes and let us know how it goes! Any kind of feedback is appreciated! 

The best way to get in touch is to join the discord for our game Nowhere Prophet, which now has a brand new Ex Novo / Ex Umbra corner!

Thanks for reading,

- Martin