I playtested v0.03 at the PAX Aus Collaboratory last week, which is a great avenue for local tabletop designers to get their game out in the public and gain valuable playtesting insight with a more varied crowd.

Overall I'm very happy with how the playtests went. I got a lot of great information from seeing how people played and reacted to the game.

In hindsight I realise I made a key mistake in playtesting in this environment in particular. A bunch of people were curious enough to come talk to me at the table but either didn't have time or other players around to play. I gave them copies of the rules that I had printed out. I also gave out copies to people who playtested the game. This was all well and fine until Day 2 of playtesting when I made some major updates to the game (which I feel were warranted and are reflected in v0.04) but did not print out new versions of the rules. This caused confusion with people who actually read the rules and also wasn't great for handing out. In the future I'll make sure to have updated copies available or not make such drastic changes between versions for a public-facing event like this.

Onto the v0.04 updates themselves:

• Cleaned up order of operations by splitting out an additional step. Changed naming of phases to steps to reduce jargon.
• Codified the role of the "dealer" for the round as Fate, who sets the Challenge and has a final chance to intervene in the Challenge.
• Allow players to draw an additional card, which makes it closer to how blackjack plays and adds some player choice/risk
• Redistributed the Challenge prompts from suits to numbers so you would feel a bit more diversity in Challenges faced.
• Added an option to "stand" and not draw cards to open up Aces for use
• Added a new ability with the Aces to renew Assets
• Updated the Reflection step to specifically allow for shared scenes. This might need to be expanded later.
• Added a sheet that consists of just the card prompts as a Reference Table

A lot of these are mechanical changes, which I'm currently a bit wary of as they might push towards more procedurality and distract players from collaboratively forming a narrative.

I hoped to counter this by allowing a bit more collaboration in the Reflection step, and might need to further adjust how the prompts for that step work.

We'll see how that all shakes out in the next playtests.