#dev pile

Hey, you wanna see what chunks of my phd look like in plain language before revision? Here’s a chunk! This is a section of the text called the Concept Emergence. This segment is meant to serve as an expositional description of the process of pulling together the ideas that underpin Moonshiners and why I made it.

The backstory elements of the Moonshiners that came to form the game’s lore were necessarily a result of things that I find interesting, which means necessarily engaging with the reflective practice of what I personally find interesting.

The auction mechanic I think comes mostly from watching Cash & Guns. That game was, upon playing, a pretty simple kind of auction – players take the roles of criminals after a major heist. One player is designated the boss, and then other players are gangsters under the boss’ rule. Players then load their guns with a card (that can represent an empty chamber or a full one), and point their gun at another player. The boss can change where someone’s pointing (usually meaning the boss points people away from themselves), and people count down to either revealing their card or lowering their guns. Lowered guns get out of the hand, the revealed cards either go click or bang, and the people who’ve been shot are out of the hand. Then players distribute the items in the lot based on having survived the hand. The game’s auction system is spending a limited resource – whether or not someone has bullets is a depleting resource over the course of the game, and in that, players can treat themselves as ‘spending’ their bullets throughout the game, and the boss role can be purchased during the distribution of the lots. With that resolution system out of the way, though, the rest of the game is a series of valuations of interconnected sets, the types of loot a player can get, the type of ways those loot can interact with one another, rewards for being good at it or bad at it, that kind of thing.

This kind of intrconnected loot is what started part of the design thoughts of Moonshiners. I wanted a game where the resources players are competing for represent a variety of different related mechanical pieces. At first, art objects cared about one another and money cards, then turf cards were useful for obtaining more money cards, and businesses were a way to spend money cards that had late-game value. This initial presumption would not survive extensive playtesting.

The werewolf bootleggers comes in part I think from learning about the colorado miner strikes that led to songs like Solidarity Forever. Best I can track is that this particularly kicked off with a viewing of a Chill Goblin documentary that led to a lengthy binge of Moonshine-related distilling material on Youtube (cite, September 2023). There’s this aphorism amongst leftists that you go far enough left, you get your guns back, which while specious (as I’m pretty anarchist in my politics but don’t particularly plan on getting a gun), served as a novel take on a stereotype I knew I hadn’t really considered enough. Couple this with an interest in bootlegging and the culture of the American deep south and Appalachia alcohol culture, I found myself finding the idea of people who make alcohol out of an interest as an actual interesting, meaningful core of the storytelling.

The redneck is a well-established and well-known character in a lot of game media. They’re typically depicted as thoughtless, toothless, reckless and tasteless. While I didn’t intend to lionise it, there was also a documentary I watched about The Beverly Hillbillies (how the Beverly Hillbillies changed everything, April 2024, Quinton Reviews), where the reviewer repeatedly establishes that the Hillbillies in question were simple, not dirty. This idea of re-examining assumptions about these people helped to serve conversations with my friends about the culture of the space.

That was the next conceit. I already had ‘werewolf bootleggers’ as stated, but I didn’t have the idea of heroic redneck bootleggers brewing moonshine in the woods. That came from this point, as I grew on the idea of people who distrusted a disaffective government, who had no interest or trust in the people who were ostensibly in charge of them, and therefore, the things that those people were supposed to be getting as a benefit for their tax. They hated the revenuers, because they didn’t see any thing they were getting from the government in any kind of context, and that makes the revenuers just thieves who showed up and took from them.

That gives two parts of the fork for the concept of this game. There are the werewolves, tough and powerful characters who like to fight and brawl. They want to supply booze to the businesses they’re ensconced with, and they do this with their big social Meets. The Meets are an opportunity for characters to set boundaries and recruit members of the family who want to work with one another, without anyone being properly actually against one another. With my existing design senses, I had a few ideas for what ‘stuff’ might feed into this, such as thinking there could be a way to make players have access to proper currency and bidding. I could use whiteboards and pens so players can place bids in a Dutch auction style, but I wanted turn-based bidding so the fighting could happen. In order to have turn-based, simultaneous bidding that could burst out into violence, I needed the game to have a turn-based mechanism, which meant that I was once again turning to my beloved toolkit of decks of cards. These cards led to subsequent design challenges and new demands of the art and fiction of the game, which will be covered later.

With this in mind, I summarise it as the epiphany: Chasing Trends – I will find myself deeply fascinated with a subject, and then making game mechanics to represent that subject become more interested in it. There is a self-feeding mechanism in my practice, and that creative practice is something that can sustain itself, which means the challenge is actually in finding when to stop, in order to make something shareable. There are going to be material boundaries, which include the current ongoing problem of trying to find artists who can help actualise these ideas into physical pieces that I can then turn into the distributable game.

Here’s an academic concept, presented in plain language. I think that every game requires stuff to play it with, rules for how it plays, and a fiction for what you’re playing. In the more academic way, I say that all games are the nexus of an abstraction, an entanglement and stuffness, which are each things that create and present limitations and boundaries on one another. Even an attempt to have minimal forms of one or the other creates stressors on the others.

A not-uncommon question that follows from this from people who hear and engage with it, which is largely, people I work with who want me to explain more and are doing me a favour by asking, is ‘what about X? it doesn’t have a fiction, right?’ and the X in question is something like Checkers, Chess, or Tennis. The solution to that question is that these games have fictions, because, and this is important: You can’t avoid it.

People use stories to explain sequences of events with related experiences. Naturally speaking, any game creates the structure of a story, with rising action and a conclusion because games necessarily are made out of the structures of play that pull the game towards its conclusion. That means that necessarily any given game is going to have an outcome, a product, that the experience of its play forms a story, a sequence of events, in which, if the game has engaged its players and given them reason to care about what is or is not happening, then they are going to structure as a story.

This fiction is going to be informed by the game experience, and that game experience is going to be shaped, again, by rules and play pieces. The fiction of any given game can be found therefore, in examining the parts that make up the game, and is related and expressed by those two other elements.

First things first, games have representations. There are things that are representations of abstractions in the game rules. An example is the all-purpose tally of ‘score’ – a score is used to represent the skill or difficulty of the things the scorer succeeds at. In basketball, three-pointers and two-pointers and penalty shots are all worth different amounts, and those different amounts create a valuation, in the narrative of the game, as to what commensurate tasks are comparable to one another. For example, two teams with scores of 81 are considered to be as good as each other in the fictional test of the game, even though one of those teams got 40 2-pointers and a penalty, while the other got 27 3-pointers.

Game pieces represent the things in the fiction, and the terms used to represent them are in turn, part of the creation of a fiction. In Checkers, the pieces have one major differentation – that they are one colour, or the other; this creates the fiction that the opposing forces are almost identical, but aren’t quite identical, and they’re placed on a board which is representative of some kind of space of relationship that the checkers pieces are capable of ‘moving’ across. In chess, pieces are representative of army units, and the board represents another space, which is necessary to explain how those pieces move.

These representations can bring with them implied information and values as well. For example, there is one piece on the board of Chess that has a feminine-gendered name (the Queen), and there are three pieces with masculine-gendered names (the King, the Bishop, and the Knight). I know you may think lady knights are cool as hell, and those terms are losing their gendering, but they absolutely were not ungendered when they were first used. The implication is that in Chess, power and authority to act and win is commonly in the hands of men, but sometimes in the hands of women, and also, that women need to be exceptional to be on the battlefield alongside even the lowliest pawns.

Similarly, the relationships between things in rules creates fiction. Say we have a game of pieces that move over a distance. If I have a piece that moves 1 square, and a piece that moves 5 square, the natural assumption of how to express these movements is that the 1-move piece is ‘slow’ and the 5-move piece is ‘fast.’ This is without calling the movement ranges ‘speed’ or anything, but just the natural consequence of how these rules are reasonably expressed.

There’s also something important to how game rules use fiction to both maintain coherence. Describing game pieces in ways that make sense to a fiction makes it easier to explain why pieces work together. Many simpler games don’t bother to try and enforce this; games like Snakes and Ladders or The Game of Life use entirely random pieces that are incoherently connected to the fiction; the dice aren’t something, they’re not doing something, they’re just a game piece that creates a game action that the players enact in the name of the game. The fiction of either is about random options happening to the player, who then has to make the best of the narrative of how they experience those events.

On the other hand, to compare to a game which uses a lot of fictional coherence tools, in Magic: The Gathering, when an attacking card is marked with a quantity of interaction points equal to or in excess of their secondry primary attreibute, the card is put into a discard pile, and cards that check whether that card was put there in this way, then trigger. Except what the game says in its fiction is that if a creature is dealt too much damage, it dies, and it’s too much damage if it’s equal to or higher than its toughness. When it dies, it goes to the graveyard, and getting the card back is then fictionally themed as digging up a grave, or raising the dead.

These ideas make Magic: The Gathering much more easily handled despite its immensely complicated fiction! And that means that by treating the fiction of the game seriously, and enmeshing the rules and structures of those rules with the fiction, and using the stuff of the game to represent that fiction, the game is better and easier to play.

It’s important to understand I’m not saying that your game ‘should have a fiction’, I’m saying you can’t prevent your game from having a fiction. It might be ill-formed and vague, but necessarily, there’s going to be something that the play experience creates that the mind is going to observe like a sequence in a story. It’s not that your game ‘should’ have a story, it’s that it can’t not, and that means that the story is a thing that you need to actively consider when creating the rest of the game.

I’ve said that part of the problem with Moonshiners’ development, and why I resist the use of generative art in it, is that I want the conversation about Moonshiners to be about immersing in its world and playing within that world’s spaces. Most of what I’ve been writing on it in this blog has been the name of fully fleshing out and realising the mechanical complexity of the game, and even as-expertly-as-possible collapsing the art needs (which yes, I have done more of). What I haven’t done much of, not lately, is pen down the lore I have to fill this space. This is a reasonable part of the mechanical structure of the game! I need the lore to cohere to the demands of the mechanics, and that’s why beyond the broadest sense, I haven’t really done any of the hard definition that I would have rathered to do.

First and smallest, we have the district called the Velvet Knows. It’s a district which, ambiguously phrased, is a pleasure district. The Velvet Knows is worth a lot to businesses in the area, it’s a high-income territory. The businesses in the Velvet Knows are grand, very expensive gaming halls, and can give a huge payout. Control over the Velvet Knows is hard to get, of course; there are only two of the cards. It’s very easy to ‘split’ it and that means nobody gets to capitalise on its wealth.

Then there’s the Hound’s Pits, which is a former police station, turned from a prison yard into a boxing gym. The Hound’s Pits is also small, but it lacks the same prestigious value as the Velvet Knows. There are only three cards with the Hound’s Pits, but there are also three businesses. That means hypothetically, control over the Hound’s Pits can get the player a lot of advantage, and that makes sense to me – it’s a place for people who like fights, and it represents three of the ‘small’ business types. Its businesses are very lucrative, if the player can pay into them to get them going. You need bank to make book after all.

The Wolf’s Throat is a throughfare in the city, a sort of main arterial that has a host of speakeasies hidden in it. They’re a little out of the way, but they’re easily reached, meaning that the Wolf’s Throat has a great value if you fully control it, though it’s not as lucrative as a smaller place like the Hound’s Pits.

Gnasher’s Mart is a district of stores and sellers, and that means there’s a ton of places for money to get laundered. None of its businesses are huge but it does have four different businesses, which means that trying to control the Gnasher’s Mart kind of implies that the player is going to be able to capitalise on a lot of different connections. Some characters care about areas, some care about businesses and I feel like the Gnasher’s Mart is not a place anyone specifically cares about.

Then there’s Cheek By Jowl. Cheek by Jowl is massive. It’s the second biggest turf in the game, and its businesses are smaller and less-lucrative. But at the same time, it’s seven cards, and controlling all of it is valuable. In my mind, Cheek by Jowl is a not-quite slum, it’s a lot of places people in the city choose to live, with huge black markets and the characters that respond to it are probably pretty lucrative, because it’s easy to feel like the king of nowhere.

Surrounding the edges of the city, and making the bulk of the edges of it, is the Ruffs. The Ruffs has escape routes, black market stalls, it has gaming halls. None of the businesses in the Ruffs are the big ones. I think characters that like the Ruffs are going to be the people who don’t actually want to go live in the city. And hey, a lot of characters don’t want to go to the city, which means that saying they care about the Ruffs means they probably just like moving things into the city.

There’s Collar Bay, which, I mean, yes, that symbol is a rope knot, let’s all get the giggles out now. But the thing with Collar Bay is that it’s the district that feeds the harbour. Great for smuggling, it benefits characters who have some pre-existing criminal skills, provided the player can control it. It’s also got two huge construction companies in it – places that want to build and maintain warehouses, and places that maintain and develop things from those warehouses. Plus, I imagine the ship constructors are a thing. There’s also a drycleaner business, which I think is there as a gateway for immigration and just kind of is the first place where people off the boat wind up, in the same way that Chinatown was a constrained environment.

Here’s our symbols for the types of businesses that show up. They’re a boxing arena, of which there aren’t many but they tend to be lucrative, a pawn store, a gaming hall, a dry cleaner and a construction company. Typically speaking, these businesses are things the characters are meant to want to react to. Some crew don’t care about where the boxing ring they hang out in is actually, they care about whether or not they can punch people. Crew that use dry cleaners to launder cash may want more of them than one of them, and that can show up in the scoring requirements.

I think that construction tends to be expensive to drive, because while a good accountant can lose a lot of suspicious money, but that money is going to need to be in big bricks. Pawn store characters are associated with deals and scoring little bits of extra money. Boxers care about violence. Construction rewards big scale things. Dry cleaners want to make things disappear. Gamers are indulgent.

Oh! And also, I should mention that thing about collapsing the art demands. Now I have the idea that the art objects can be unified under an aesthetic that divorces them from the representation of the characters. That is, they’re going to be presented as black-and-white photos with a receipt next to them, which means the pictures of the art objects can be a variety of different stock aesthetics.

Oh oh and also, I made a bunch of these icons myself!

You know, considering the amount of effort this post is going to represent, it’s pretty funny to me that I’m probably going to be really scrounging for a word count. Anyway, I have been working on improving my playtest kit of Moonshiners. Back in April (April!), I spent a day making a print-and-play version that could be easily put on sticker paper and then playtested from there. And… well, I’m going to give you full-resolution versions of those images here. Right here. Just after the fold.

These are a4 graphic pages; if you’re looking to print them on a Letter printer, sorry you have to put up with that, but you’ll need to resize the images to make it work. I can say this with a great deal of confidence that it’s not unreasonable to expect you to do that, because I know full well, nobody’s going to do it. I might as well provide you with instructions on how to stick a fairy in a bottle. These nine images represent an entire game, and this is not a blog that attracts the print-and-play crowd, I know that much.

Here are the four card faces, and their explanations.

I think I want to show these off in part to make it clear that a prototype should be clear more vitally than it should be impressive. These are not how I imagine these cards looking, but by making them like this, they’re easy to print and easy to cut apart.

This is a crew card, represented by the werewolf icon on it. It’s worth 2 points, if you control the territory with the Fleur De Lis symbol in your total Turf. If you don’t, she’s not worth any points. She still gives you her special ability regardless. This technology, of the characters looking for territory, aims to create tension between how different territories are valued by different players. Denying you control of a territory may not get me much of anything, since I can’t control it either, but it might mean you don’t get a bunch of extra points.

These are also what I think of as ‘generously margined.’ The actual cards I’m sticking this on are 7x7cm squares, and I give a .25cm border on each side. These cards don’t need to have the text as prominently in the centre as this, but if I do it like this, this is going to be nice and clear for when I explain it to a new player.

This is one of the Art Object cards. I kind want as much of this to be done with iconography in the final version of the game, but the more I think about that idea, the more I think that an icon to express an artwork on the card is itself, a mistake.

Like consider this; if I have an Art Object icon for these cards, instead of the text ‘Art Object,’ and the card just has a nice artwork and a symbol indicating what set it’s from, isn’t that wasting the information I’m putting on the card, and indeed, wasting the cost of the art asset? If the card is as simple as this, with a nicer artwork of the art object in question, it’s not like the icon is adding information. This set is just the cards that look like this.

Turf cards are pretty simple. An icon for the place to mark on the other cards that care about what turf you control, and a number that is both the cost, and the number of cards in the set. I do think that visually, the final version of this should be a map of the city, with one specific section ‘lit up’ to indicate where in the city the Hound’s Pits are. For the sake of the prototype, though, this is all that’s necessary. There are now seven different districts, instead of the five, and there’s one new ‘mega’ district that it’s likely everyone will have a bit of. The Turf’s role in improving businesses comes along here, too;

Finally here’s a business card with all the new information. That is, these cost $3k to ‘turn’, and it’s situated in the district with a Fleur De Lis symbol. If you control that Turf, the card will improve on its own at no cost. This means you can save your money cards for later in the game. On the other hand, if you have a bunch of cheap currency cards you don’t want to hang onto, you can throw out a lot all at once to improve your businesses.

The future business card face should reflect the map in the Turf cards, and similalry be oriented in a diamond shape. That means that all the ‘place’ cards are oriented in a different grid to the art objects, which can sit or stack up differently, and the crew, which don’t stack up at all.

Making this prototype brought some more stuffness to my attention. That is, this prototype, as it is, does not exactly scream ‘bootlegger werewolves.’ The new design, where you’re trying to own businesses and have control over orders for Turf, reduces the feeling that I had originally in Moonshiners, where the player characters are kinda socialist, the remotely removed people making the booze and delivering it, but not necessarily that involved in the gang activities within the city. On the other hand, though, I do really like the way this builds a feeling of investment.

The new rules about Nana giving people stuff if they don’t wind up with anything from the Meets means there’s more of that social feel, the idea that everyone is a friend. After all, you can claw-fight and grab a bunch of stuff and leave, but that kind of thing doesn’t infringe on the fact that sure, you’re still buddies at the next Meet. With this kind of vibe in mind, and the generally jovial element, I’m hoping the increased mechanics of the crew allow for players to get further into the idea of negotiation and complaining.

I’m working on playtesting with Moonshiners and reflecting on things I’ve seen in it. You like playtesting notes? Course ya do!

The problem is pretty simple; it’s possible for a player to finish multiple seasons of Moonshiners having won no auctions and therefore having nothing in front of you. This isn’t the worst thing in the world, of course; after all, players need to be able to lose or fail at a game. But it’s still a problem where it’s possible for a player to wind up starting season three with no cards in front of them and feeling like they have to endure six auctions with no opportunity to really get into the game.

The game isn’t stuck at this point, in my opinion! It’s possible to have a lot of materiel in the early game that sucks, and doesn’t come together in the late game. Art is less about being complex sets and more about smaller pools of good effects, and it’s possible late-game lunges for value can improve things. Plus, the push to make sure the rules include negotiation is going to be part of it.

Players who have a lot of resources in front of them, even if they’re comparatively worthless, *feel* better. Problem one with this is that normally I treat this as an opportunity for a player to get knocked out, and problem two is I don’t want to complicate the structure with adding explicit ‘the player in last place’ effects. After all, ‘last place’ is hard to calculate unless the players are doing live-fire evaluation of art pieces, and I don’t want anyone to have to do that.

Idea One: Nanna’s Portion

Here’s a pretty simple solution. The players are meant to be friends hanging out and divvying up a task, there’s a measure of Appalachian socialism at work. The task is itself, a task, everyone is doing their best with what they have. At the end of each Meet, then, there’s meant to be something social going on here, somethign that represents a feeling of companionship and friendliness.

That means if you walk away from the Meet with nothing – at all! – then at the end of the Meet, Nanna tells everyone, oh, let your cousin have something. And so each player who has more assets than there are players offers up a thing, and the deck offers up a thing. Then those cards, the Nanna’s Portion, is dealt out at random to the players who got nothing.

Now, there’s also going to be room for wheeling and dealing. Once the players get the Nanna’s Portion, players are allowed to negotiate for the goods – they can make promises or deals. There should be some of the feeling of hanging around, of having a chat, and letting people have stuff that’s theirs. Since everything in the game is worth some points, there’s a reason to try and throw away things you don’t want to concentrate on what you can. Turf that doesn’t have a meaningful value to you because you probably can’t control it, and you don’t expect to get businesses or crew that work with it.

Idea two: Hand provides value.

Right now, the bidding cards are meant to be fluid value. They’re meant to just go away every turn because you have bills to pay and food to eat. It’s not meant to represent building up a stockpile of meaningful cash. The whole point of the bidding cards is to be ephemeral, and having a greater success in the industry only gives you a chance at better returns. I didn’t want those mechanics to encourage hoarding or recovery or to focus on a kind of economic aspect of the game.

However, that means by the end of the game, there’s nothing to care about in your hand. Players chuck the currency into their businesses but don’t really care about having a ‘good’ hand at the end, there’s nothing to save for in the last round, and that means people run risky boards where they don’t care about having their currency stolen by a Fight.

Here’s the new rule idea: At the end of the game when scoring, players’ cards in hand represent value. You get to add your ‘cash reserves’ at the end of the game to your total value. This means players can value the cards in their hand more than the cards in the lot (at the end). This also means there needs to be some kind of way to sculpt your hand, to make it worthwhile, and means that players who are doing badly over the course of the seasons are capable of using their hands.

Before: At the end of each round, players all discard their cards and draw up to the 4 cards. Then each player who controls the majority of a Turf draws another card, and every player who has a special ability draws an extra card.

Now: At the end of each round, players discard as many of the cards they have as they want, and draw up to 4 cards. Then each player who controls the majority of a Turf draws another card, and every player who has a special ability draws an extra card.

That is to say, players who want to stockpile cash between rounds can do so, and represents saving up for later seasons. Hypothetically this means a player who never successfully wins a Fight can wind up at the end of the game with something like 24 points from just their cards in hand, which also means the rest of the deck is going to have lower values.

I think I can do both of these ideas. They’re both tenable and they don’t require a major change to any components. They’re just going to be changes to the rules booklet when it’s finished. Plus, the Nanna’s Share or negotiation elements add more space that Crew can react to. That gives me more room for more nouns and some verbs that can interact with.

Okay, good talk!

At this point, Moonshiners is rapidly approaching Road meeting Rubber. There’s going to come a point where I lose my ability to ‘do more’ while I wait on art assets to happen, and that means it’s time to talk about setting that up to optimise the chance of it happening in a timely fashion.

(Don’t worry, I did this a month ago).

What Moonshiners needs is a unifying visual presentation. I think the world of it, and the fiction of being werewolf gangsters dividing up a city for sport, is something that’s best done where things are fun and invite you to think in their world. The avenues I have for this kind of storytelling and worldbuilding are limited to the characters and the spaces, and that means having a good, personality-driven artistic expression is really necessary.

Content-Unwarning: I’m not going to have any example images of cards, and no generated images.

I refer to ‘art monsters’ in the design of many games. If a game has a hundred cards that all need unique art, that’s an example of an art monster. I like art monster games, but I can’t afford to make them. Moonshiners is teetering on the edge of being an art monster. It’s made up of two decks of cards:

A 52-card Poker Deck, which is composed of:

10 Player cards, divided into factionalised pairs:

5 ‘Claw’ cards

5 ‘Pass’ cards,

42 Currency cards

6 $1k cards

7 $2k cards

8 $3k cards

8 $4k cards

7 $5k cards

6 $6k cards

A 100-card Square deck, which is composed of

27 Art cards

39 Turf cards

20 Crew cards

14 Business cards

Art cards represent valuable items that you can buy during the game that are worth something once the prohibition ends and you have some time to breathe. These are cards that are just worth Victory points. Where once they were the whole scoring system of the game, I’ve made them less of the deck, made them smaller sets, and made them worth more. Art objects are big shocks of victory points, they’re things you want to fight over. There are still some sets, to make sure the items have some varied value to different players. Of these 27 cards, there are 15 artworks for the card faces.

Turf cards represent parts of the city that value you and a relationship with you. When you have a Turf card, you can foster businesses in that area, and your Crew that like that district respond to it. What’s more, if you have the majority (no ties) of cards in a particular Turf, you get to draw an extra card at each Meet (the rounds of bidding that represent the main gameplay). It’s representative of how the extra work brings in more profits.

Crew cards represent people who work for your crew, and bring special skills. They’re more varied, with more unique mechanics. Some of the Crew cards impose drawbacks, for example. Some Crew cards provide their benefit to everyone. Crew give you victory points if you have access to Turf – they have places they want to go, and they get happier when they have it.

Business cards represent places in the city that you can use to launder your booze profits. This means there’s a reason to hold onto cash. Some businesses are very expensive to improve, and those ones tend to give better rewards at the end of the game. Some businesses are very cheap, but won’t give you much in return.

The crew are the most interesting part of this to me. They represent the iconography that makes the game work, they are the personality on the faces of the pieces, and that means that I want to have a good idea of how the characters should feel, but not necessarily what they ‘must’ look like. I know I want them to represent a variety of genders and races (real world races, nobody here is an elf). The new revised list of crew members and their art pitch is:

Ruby Talbot (Gender F): Poppa Teeth’s granddaughter. Probably fun, spunky.

Millie the Muzzler (Gender F): A stern, maternal woman. Maybe librarian‑coded.

Nettie the Maw (Gender F): A lady with an underbite, dangerous grin, orange‑red hair, cracking her knuckles.

Delly Jenkins (Gender F): Everyone loves grandma!

Darla Mae Mimi (Gender F): Ellie Mae Clampett but a werewolf.

Rory Rory Rory (Gender F): Big tuff himbo butch with a vest and two fists.

Trixie Lou “The Tail” McCoy (Gender F): Ellie Mae’s bestie and absolutely going to run first.

Cressie The Turn (Gender F): Older woman, serious, probably owns a tailor or something.

Harlan “Bounceback” Tate (Gender M): A hardworking city boy with a wolf pin on his tie, maybe nervous.

Tobey Grubb (Gender M): Scruffy, muddy, mechanic‑and‑driver.

Rufus Doyle (Gender M): Suspenders, big hands, big shoulders, “let’s make a deal, ey.”

“Poppa Teeth” Jebedia Talbot (Gender M): Older man, beard, silver fangs, Black.

Bo “Biscuit” McCall (Gender M): Golden‑retriever‑energy guy, very earnest.

Redd Timbers (Gender M): Hulking werewolf with braids in his beard; white, ginger, freckled.

Cletus “The Clutch” Booker (Gender M): Early‑forties man with a medical bag and long braided hair; Black.

Silvertongue Buck (Gender M): A priest with a sweet smile; kind of mousy.

Twinkletoes (Gender N): A sleek, androgynous dancer type.

Mixy The Pen (Gender N): Gender‑ambiguous journalist with a peaked cap and big eyes.

Jedd Coipin (Gender N): A soda dealer with an easy smile, maybe wearing an apron.

Masha ‘Zeke’ Howlett (Gender N): A bus‑driver‑type figure with a guitar; probably Black.

This list is pretty vague and I want to make sure the artist knows that just because there are some specifically black and non-black characters, the art should not rely on treating everyone else as a default, just that those are the only definite choices I’ve made.

This set of information is then going into an art brief. The plan is to talk to the artists who find this idea interesting, discuss with them a rate. Right now, the outside is a rate of $45 an hour, which I’m a little torn on, because I feel like if they get it done faster they’re making less money, and I do want the work to be done fast. That creates a perverse incentive. I think the hope is that I wind up deciding on a ‘expected time’ that it can be done by, and then pay the whole sum when they get it done. If they get it done faster, they don’t get penalised and I’m basically paying a delivery fee to get it expidited.

I have this spread across a few locations, but! I was able to take the latest version (v3) of Moonshiners to a family gathering and did some play testing with it. Now, part of the point of this play testing is to reflect on feelings I have in the experience, not to, in any way, represent the other people’s opinions. That is to say, no direct quotes, no names or faces of anyone involved in the play testing. But it was a play testing session and it was delightful to finally feel this ‘feature-complete’ version of the game under people’s hands, especially because finally, I was able to see how I felt about things when there was a tension between what I was experiencing and what others were. A lot of the play testing thus far, after all, has been done with either a much simpler version of the game, or, well, me playing with myself. That sounds vulgar. You know what I mean.

Some thoughts on the stuffness of the game, the physical material that makes it up, well, the first thing to spring to mind is that the square deck is teetering on the edge of being shuffle-able at only a hundred cards. It’s a challenging thing to shuffle; I’ve already noticed the way that the rotational symmetry of the cards means that it’s harder to keep the cards oriented the same way.

I want to make sure that the card backs are fully rotationally symmetrical, which isn’t hard to do in the design stage, but it does impose demands on the style; it suggests viewing objects from above, which suggests for the turf places and businesses, they’re viewed from above in a ‘map’ design, and it means art objects are likely ‘laying on a table.’ That can give a nice standard card face for all the art objects, though, a table with a nice checker tablecloth on it, you know, ‘cos Nanna thinks it’d be nice and classy.

It also means that I might want to keep card information visible from all angles, so flipping them requires minimal rotation. Providing the information on two edges of the card isn’t hard, providing it on all four may be a bit of a strain. Although it might be doable with just symbols, depending on how I want to handle the art objects and their potential escalating values (more on this in Enrolment, for the point salad effect).

Cards have more room on them for information (being the size they are) than I thought when I wrote the designs. The cards can be a little more complicated, the art can be a little ‘withdrawn’ from the edges. What’s more, I just don’t need as many cards as I thought I would, meaning the auction deck can be smaller, which makes it easier to shuffle.

How many cards are necessary for this game in its current design? Well, I originally designed for 120 cards with the notion that not all cards would be seen, meaning each iteration of the game brings with it a new set of rules for players to become used to. Since the story is players dividing up a city though, it does seem better if that deck is mostly exhausted in each play through. That means I’m wondering whether or not the auction deck should be much smaller, like 80 cards.

With four players, there’s four seasons of lots, that start at 3, 4, 5 and then increase by 3 cards per season; that means it’s 12, then 15, then 18, then 21, which total to 66 cards. With five players (not currently necessarily an option), they’d be 2, 3, 4, 5, and increase by 4 each season. That is 14, then 18, then 22, then 26 – or 80 cards total. At that point, in a five player game, you can rely on the whole auction deck being used.

Though I now need to consider how I word that. After all, in my mind, that 5-player set of lots is because it’s the 4-player set of lots, but one lot is bigger. Though how to phrase that is enrolment…

Which is as good a time as any to start on it. Enrolment is thinking about the rules, how we obscure player intention and tell people how objects interact in a strictly rules-based sense.

Let me see: Deal out a number of lots, face-down, equal to the number of players there are. Each lot should have as many cards as there are players. Once these are dealt, take one card from one lot lot and put it in another lot. The lots are bid on in the order of smallest to largest.

That means in a 2 player game, you deal out one lot of 2 cards. Not a great jam but I don’t know how well the game works for two. In a 5 player game, that means the deal is 4 lots of each 5, which then become a 6, a 5, 5, 5 and 4.

I’ll think more on this. It might be worth it to just bite the bullet and make a table.

While I’m still talking about the stuff that goes into that deck, the characters that make up that deck are great, and it might not be a terrible idea that every player gets to start with a crew member in order to vary things up for each player’s bidding angle.

The big one is that the original idea behind the game was the art objects representing the end-game goal, and all other parts are about trying to acquire that. The problem is that acquiring territory and crew feels cooler, it gives me a sense of personality as I’m playing, which means that I feel like the rules are pulling in an inappropriate direction.

Right now I’m thinking of shifting to a more pure ‘point salad’ – crew members are worth points, and they have reasons to value one another (which isn’t hard to do; characters can have a simple number, then a bonus number if you have a certain other symbol in your tableau). Territory should be worth points at the end, if you control the majority of it.

Art object groupings should be smaller and more rewarding once you have collected any sets. The businesses also have a problem where their rules don’t make much sense – you dump six dollars into a business and it only advances one step? The next step is to make businesses that have a cost-to-amplify, and if they get a symbol for interaction/point bonus reasons, then the businesses can be improved if you’ve a related business. This will involve a deeper consideration of the fiction, mind you.

Fictionally some elements are really strong. I like the way the players feel like lairy, untrustworthy werewolves willing to fight at the drop of a hat, BUT I do like the idea of werewolves who forgive one another very easily. Similarly, the idea of the bidding being done with stuff, not with cash, is much better for conveying the vibe of both being a bartering-like arrangement, and an out-of-city thing but also helps to explain why cards are less reliable.

The character abilities are sometimes really clear – Rory “Rory Rory” Rory Rory is for example, very clear, when you send Rory to get a lot, she’s going to start a fight. Nice and clear. On the other hand, some characters are less clear, drawing and discarding. Hell, just the value of drawing and discard is a little vague from its original idea.

Also, nobody cashed in their art objects for cards. That rule may be totally superfluous. Most auctions were determined by fights, though which might mean there should be more lots, but smaller.

I’m really excited by this version of the game and I can tell I’m excited because I can’t wait to go and change it up, to make another edit, to take the thing I just made and move on to the next version. I can re-prioritise what’s exciting and I can improve what I like best. This is a game about gangs that build their own identity and who are reasonably friends with one another, it’s not a cutthroat business – but still, we like to shout and boast and express ourselves.

Imagine me pulling the rip tab on a drink and sculling half of it in one go, except because I’m in my forties, this time the drink is a bottle of fridge-cooled water. It’s late at night, I spent all day making a new prototype for Moonshiners, and these are some notes of the latest version based on handling the interface of the game with all the information on it, at the scale that the final game is going to be, for the first time.

This is technically, the third complete prototype of Moonshiners, and it’s the most complete. It has actual game rules on cards, it has cards divided up by specific type and there is a direct intention behind all card parts. Cards are given special orientations and ‘faces’ that are meant to convey information about them. This was not a ‘printing’ per se. I had a printing done – sticker printed card faces – but applying them went hellishly wrong and rather than wait a week for new stickers to print, I took blank cards and just started writing on them with sharpie in as detailed a play as I possibly could. I put a show on the TV – Murderbot, if you’re curious – and a friend on discord, and then the rest of my day was spent with coloured markers and pens drawing on every single card in the deck trying to construct a minimal version of every single card face in both decks. I didn’t have a full 120 cards for the square deck, so my version is a little smaller, but that isn’t necessarily a big deal.

One of the findings already is that the square deck doesn’t have enough cool people in it. It’s a lot of stuff, which is really important, too, but I think that the mix of characters might be too small in handling lots. I mean the werewolves are building a gang, people want to express themselves and imagine a gang working for them in a particular way. I shouldn’t have such a small number if I can help it, going forward.

First things first, colour coding pens to divide up groups isn’t useful for a colourblind player, but it was useful for me making the prototype. I had my pens set up in a little rack, red, then green, then blue, and when I was done with one, I put a lid on it, put it at the back, then picked up the next one along. This is a real example of mechanical behaviour – how I’ve organised physical spaces – that’s got a direct knock on effect to the product (the colour on the paper) that then has a knock-on to how I convey meaning.

Looking at the cards in production, I can tell that there’s a distinct difference between each type, but each type is not, necessarily,visible from a distance. Since that became a problem I started putting names on the groupings of cards – vague, but meaningful ones. “Business, Small” for example, to represent all the businesses with the same kind of payout (which was, of course, small).

This also comes up with the loot cards that represent art objects for sustaining value after the prohibition ends. After all, these cards are going to be important for players trying to win the game, that means I want to make sure there’s no ambiguity about what belongs together. In the prototype they’re all signified with a letter in a ring, but that might not be the worst idea on the final versions either. I think maybe I want to include a little ‘lot tag’ on them that indicates that they’re set J1, J2, J3 etc to make it clear.

Also I think the art might want to be from the top down, which both abstracts the appearance, but also means that they look like objects set up on a table.

The playing card deck of bidding cards was in the original design, something like sixty cards. This was to make it so that there was room for players to do a lot of drawing and discarding (though they don’t discard, they put cards on the bottom). I haven’t been able to test it fully, but I think with an actual hand of cards, the chances of anyone running out of cards permanently is now less important, and instead the variance between the cards needs to be closer.

What’s more, the fungible money problem is just too overwhelming. Looking at the cards in hand I found myself unable to reconcile the way that some cards represented large numeric values with the smaller ones – how the hell do I have a bundle of hundreds, but not a bundle of fifties? Money doesn’t work like that. Because of this, the bidding notes may need to be something else, which I think means they’re going to wind up being trade goods – yes, stacks of dollars for the bottom end, but then the next tiers are somehow made of precious metals, singular objects that the werewolves are willing to use to trade.

The highest value should probably be a bar of silver (after all, we all know how dangerous that is to handle).

Square cards shuffle hard! It’s very hard to maintain their proper orientation in the deck of cards what with how they’re able to realign when a deck is being brought together. When shuffling, typically in a riffle or arch shuffle, the cards are pushed together then brought to align at a corner. In a rectangular, poker-style card, that means the cards wind up being re-set into the same alignment, and the only opportunity to reorient a card in the deck comes when the card is rotated 180 degrees before the arch.

This leads to the deck being ‘boxed,’ a term from Magic: The Gathering, where some cards are in sleeves oriented towards one another and run the risk of a sleeve being pushed into another sleeve (hence forming ‘a box’). In the case of a rectangular deck, there’s almost no way to avoid that. Rather than have to negotiate with all possible ways to hide information, this brings with it the important note that the card back for the square deck needs not just to be symmetrical on one axis, but full radially symmetrical, to ensure a boxed deck doesn’t give anything away.