Really cool faction, with a nice flow of spreading spores and using them to build and recruit! I like that you can spread the spores anywhere but it's more costly if you don't rule the clearing. And the Death Burst seems like a cool way to mitigate your damage if you know you're going to be losing you warriors anyway.

I think you can probably simplify some of the wording relating to the spore chamber. Since there are no bonuses or points related to placing them you can probably remove the directions on how to place them in the track. And since you always add 3 in Birdsong and discard any excess above 6 you might be able to get rid of the 2nd phase in Evening as well. Unless there's a way you can use spores outside of your turn that I missed. If you had 6 and discard down to 3 at the end of your turn, you'll be back up to 6 at the start of your next turn anyway. 

Temporary control of enemy pieces is a super sweet mechanic that I can't believe hasn't been done yet (outside of mercs). Super creative and I'm glad you found the design space. I think you can push the concept even further though, especially since your action economy with these fellas are a little limited. Maybe something like the infected warrior can bring a spore with them out of the clearing. Helping with your spread and giving a bit more for it to do. 

Death burst is also really fun! I think it's balanced the way you've got it, but I almost want it to trigger when an enemy falls in battle... Rather than removing a separate warrior afterwards. Tho I'm sure the way you have it is more balanced honestly. 

Really easy to follow and I love the concepts you're going for here!

Very nice and intuitive faction ! I really like the core idea of spreading tokens that also grow your action economy.

I felt curious enough to try them out in a game and I had a good time ! However, I found it really complicated  to score with this faction. I was never able to have more than 3 mushroom on the board, and they where all lightly defended. I just never had enough actions to also have at least 2 spore spared to score. 

For example, If I want to place a new building and defend it with 2 warriors, I need to :
-Spend a spore to recruit, twice.
-Spend a spore to move
-Spend a spore to build
That's 4 spores already , just for the mushroom to be easily removed with one lucky attack. Also, each of your pieces is so valuable that I never felt that it was useful to use the death burst ability. It was quite an aggressive game, so maybe they would fare better with more peaceful factions ! 

Once again, great work, and I'm sure that with a few twist this faction could be truly great !

For such a simple core idea (spend tokens to take actions), I feel like the player has a lot of interesting decisions on how to approach this faction.  I'd like to see them in action!

Those are some creepy mushrooms. Very cool faction. 

This looks like a nice concept, very interesting implementation of the Swarm theme! Balancing out which spores to use for actions and which ones to save for scoring seems like a nice 

The mechanics are very thematic, the way the faction works is easy enough to understand, good job on that! Among the things I like are the option to build mushrooms in clearings without your warriors  (should you want to...), that seems very flexible. Plus the use of artwork from other Leder titles, that's clever!

Is there any relevance to the order spores are placed in the spore chamber? It states the way it should go in and out a couple times, but I can't find a reason for it.

I'd be curious to see how they'd comeback from being wiped, it seems like a slow and arduous multi-turn process.

The description for Mind Infection in the lore text sounds awesome, I kinda wish there had been something more/cooler to it than just moving a single enemy warrior each time. 

Overall, nice job creating a very neat faction here, kudos! 

Cool faction - there's an elegant simplicity to it. I've found I come up with these big ideas that sound great but are nigh on impossible to practically apply without having to rewrite some fundamental rules for various factions, making it very messy!

The artwork is great - did you do it yourself?

Have you had a chance to test this? It feels like it might be a difficult balancing act between the Remove and Score Spores actions - taking enough Daylight actions vs leaving spores on the board to score in Evening. Curious how that would build up over turns.  I suppose the more you recruit, the more you can risk leaving spores in guarded clearings to place and score more of them on subsequent turns.

Only other thing is I wonder if there could be a bit more flavour added as to the warriors, maybe in the Playing the Faction section. Are your warriors sentient fungi? I presume they are from the badass artwork in the bottom right of the board but I was initially a bit confused at the idea of sentient mushroom warriors building non-sentient mushrooms.

That is a very minor nitpick though. Great job!