The game is very polished and well-designed. Never thought that constituting the assembly and arranging the seats can be a mechanic as well. Love the cute owl animations and sounds too!
A small flaw is that voting was dragging out a little, and it seemed contrary to the spirit of democracy that the facilitator has an agenda of passing pre-determined motions (instead of accepting whatever the people decided). That said, this is probably as far as this theme can go.
Thank you! We wanted to experiment with different mechanics that would help people genuinely think about good group facilitation.
The question of what citizens' assemblies should be able to vote on is fundamental dilemma, both in terms of game design and in real-life citizens' assemblies.
In actual citizens' assemblies, there have to be constraints on topic to allow the facilitators to plan and the participants to focus on the subject at hand. We don't want them to be so open that participants can talk about anything, because that would make it impossible to arrive at meaningful agreements in a reasonable length of time.
At the same time, we don't want the parameters to be so narrow that new solutions are overlooked or that the outcome is predetermined.
In the context of this game, it's reasonable to want more freedom for the participants to direct the agenda -- one day is definitely not long enough to fully deliberate on topics like the climate emergency!
