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I am utterly in awe by this one, great job in how much this faction packs, how very unique and innovative they seem. Such a variety of things going on there in a super-strealined and easy-to-understand way, despite the crowded board. Fascinating how you managed to integrate all that, really well done.

Theme, narrative and lore are very intriguing and go well with the gameplay, it all gives them a lot of depth. 

I like how suits are used differently than they usually are and the little agency/push-your-luck element when determining next turn's weather and the way different weather conditions make different actions stronger and weaker, so you need to make do with what you have and find a way to utilize the actions that are stronger at the moment or else suffer. 

Very cool artwork as well! (Even the variation on the 'Daylight' bar is a nice touch.)

Overall, your entry is well among my absolute favourites among this year's entries! Would love to play this faction one day and find out how they feel in pratice. 

Very interesting concept that seems a lot of fun to play!

I like the way they use different suits for different actions rather than any action in different clearings... that's a novel thing and provides fresh limits and opportunities depending on the hand you are dealt. 

I wonder how many turns it might take them to get some competitive scoring going, feels like they could lag behind at the start until they've got some of the constructs up, but then they are surely a force to be reckoned with, both because of pretty good scoring and extra-strong warriors. So could be a nice curve and an interesting balance whether to bring the constructs out one after another or try and have a big burst in one turn with multiple of them... how much of a target does one want to be? :)

Good jobs, looks really cool and unique.

Hello tourist faction buddy! :)

Wow this is so good! Having gone with this theme myself, I can appreciate how well designed your sightseers are. I love the redo of the retinue/decree aesthetics as a travel itinerary, but combining it with its own deck is a fresh twist that makes for a really cool mechanism. 

Then there are so many little things that just fit naturally with the theme and the lore, like weaker battles if there are no visitor centers, hiring of local guides in the form of the clearings' inhabitants by spending cards, the Loyalty Program, collecting Souvenirs... it's all so well thought out! 

Extra points for the art, btw, they fit the theme and the faction super-well. My favourite is the top left guy on the faction board front with the flower on his hat, he looks way happy with his travel plans :)

All in all, very interesting ideas, another faction I'd love to try. Good job! 

Haha thank you :) It might need some adjusting according to player count, as others have suggested, although I'm hesitant to over-complicate set-up, so I'll keep an eye on it for now.

Thanks Tin, I very much appreciate you taking time to share your thoughts here! Yeah you nailed it, that is a super-concise summary of what they are supposed to be doing.

It's true, their recruiting is certainly a strong point of the faction. I hope it is sufficiently countered by their weakened battling due to the Stingy ability, otherwise they could easily become a super-strong policing force despite their theme. Certainly something to keep an eye on and maybe adjust if it were to not work as intended. 

Thanks so much for your kind words, means a lot! 

I'm amazed at how you create so much depth in a faction with such a simple, streamlined player board! 

The theme of the Bearcats is great and the deckbuilding fueled by your opponents' decisions is such a unique idea, that's really cool. Do I understand this correctly, the more propaganda cards other players discard to your draw pile, the longer you have access to your revealed propaganda cards for counterfeit, as they remain revealed in between turns? 

I love the concept of counterfeiting, using the shared deck cards to repeat actions from your own deck, that's a very interesting link between the two of them. I was thinking, what if counterfeiting gives you access to the top action of the card (the one that is usually reserved for other players) - that way you still have access to the weaker action while propaganda cards are revealed, but you kinda want them back in the deck to regain the stronger action. Which would give your opponents agency to delay reshuffling by discarding their propaganda cards? Just a thought... 

Anyway, really good job on that faction, I could totally see myself playing and enjoying these guys.

Not to mention the art, which is as always amazing. Huge compliments on that. My favourite is the whimsical look of the French artist draw pile dude (and I love the draw-draw pun, that's a superb joke right there!). And the meeple is top-notch, that looks so official! 

Geez you were bolder than I was... I debated not giving my faction a battle action for thematic reasons but ended up giving them a toned down one. I love that you went through and did a faction with a massive warrior count that can't fight at all from their base actions. 

All in all, really really cool concept of a faction! Some very interesting decision space in there, and some very cool interactions (Review Notices can be super strong for otters, getting trade posts back in the supply. ) Taking actions from crafting icons is such such a phenomenal idea, to think how indispensable this might make cards such as Soup Kitchens or Prop Bureau. 
Would very much love to try these out, seems fantastic so far! Great job

Yes, they are on page 3 of the pdf. There's one for every faction, one for all of the 4 suits, River, Landmark, Hireling, Trash tokens and Ruins. You only use the once for stuff that is in the game (step 2 of Setup), so some of the spots on the right of the track will remain empty unless it is a 6 player game that includes the Diaspora, Hirelings and Landmarks. 

Thanks for your comment! 

So the way it works is: Everytime you enter a clearing, you check for all the sights that are there - which is pieces of every faction and some other things such as ruins, river, hirelings, etc. You then choose the order in which you want to resolve them. Let's say you decide to start with the Marquise de Cat, so you take the corresponding token. If it is on a spot that says +1, you score a point, then place the token on the very first +0 spot on the track and slide all others over to fill the empty space. You choose rivers next, but unfortunately, you've only just been at a river clearing, so it still sits at a +0 spot and you don't score.  You still place the token at the start of the track and slide the rest of them over, including the Marquise de Cat token you just scored, so you hope the next time you move into a clearing with them, it'll be back up to a +1 (or even +2 spot) You then choose landmarks, which you haven't been to all game, so it's very far up on the track, at a +3 spot. You score 3 points and move the token to the start of the track.

In short: You score more if you visit things you haven't visited for a longer time. If you move from one river clearing to another river clearing, for example, it is not a novel sight for the touristic bumblebees, so they don't like it as much and score less. 

I hope that clears it up a bit. 

Very true, I apologize that I didn't pick up on that. Makes a lot of sense, thanks for clarifying! 

Hi & thank you for your feedback, great to hear your thoughts on the faction. 

So I envisioned them as being mainly a peaceful faction (kind of reminiscent of Ghandi in the COIN game), given their thematic role as tourist rather than warriors. Stingy is my attempt of a compromise to give them the opportunity to pick up points from battles and kill of lone warriors where they need to, but not let them be a huge policing force which would be inappropriate for a crowd of sightseers (and which they could be due to warrior count and recruiting prowess). 

Thanks for taking the time to sharing your comments, much appreciated!

Thanks for the feedback, your compliments are much appreciated!

Thanks a bunch for your feedback, much appreciated! I did consider adjusting the scoring track based on player count, but I ended up not wanting to over-complicate set-up. It's a very good point thought that it might be worth revisiting something like covering up the first spots of the track in lower player-count games. I'll keep it in mind, thanks for the suggestion! 

Matching revealing cards to clearings you move into is very much intentional given the theme that they are looking at the clearings they want to visit next, not the ones they leave behind. 

Thanks also for your feedback on trash tokens... it might be something to look at, but the idea there is that how many will be left on the map is going to be a balance between card draw and recruiting... although some fine-tuning might very well be needed. The intention is for them to sometimes be easy point fodder for opponents, given that the bumblebees can't leave warriors behind to guard them due to their ability forcing them to take all warriors when moving... 

I'm very grateful for your in-depth feedback, thanks for taking the time to look into the faction so closely! Best of luck for the jam to you 

Awesome theme and really cool art, very well done! I like how you use simple mechanics in order to achieve some interesting decision space, such as scoring by leaving your buildings less (much less) defended, or using up actions to draw cards. Overall very elegant and cool faction, I like it

This seems like a lot of fun! 

The way different suited warriors have different uses certainly makes for a nice puzzle and the mechanics are super-unique! 

Can you clarify what your approach to the Swarm theme was here? It's not immediately clear to me...

Other than that, nice job!

This has some really interesting concepts and ideas! I like that your faction uses paths in a way no other faction does. I like (in theory) that it doesn't have the usual limit of 5 cards in hand. I like the scoring of a group of connected clearings. And using revealed cards as crafting pieces for other revealed cards is really unique as well! So again, some very nice ideas in there, congratulations on those!

I do think some streamlining might be required - consecrated paths in particular is very wordy, perhaps Charity might break the flow of the game a bit (not sure). I'd be curious to see how a 30 warrior faction that seems rather limited on actions fits in the design space. And I imagine a guaranteed draw to 8 cards every turn would really affect the speed at which you go through the deck (and hoard cards from other players), so that could be something to keep an eye on. There are also some inconsistencies in the terminology between law and faction board, which I don't really mind and are very understandable, what with the time pressure of the contest, just wanted to point it out :)

Other that that, well done and some neat notions!

Oh also, just out of curiosity, did you have any animal species in mind for them (unless I missed it)?

I really dig the theme of reforestation for a faction! Permanent buildings are a very interesting concept. 

I'd be a little worried if opponents would ever even let you get there - given that you can only ever have one 'actual' warrior to defend them and permanently blocking building spots + passive scoring is quite scary. On the other hand, the chance to use matching cards as mini-ambushes to add 'temporary' warriors for protection is neat. I'd be curious to see if this is enough defense for your trees, especially once they are on the verge of becoming permanent. Maybe as an alternative Public Support could add warriors of other factions present in the clearing to the defenders, or work like WA's Guerilla War at the price of a matching card? The way it is, it might also need some clarifications (do you actually place a warrior there? What if there are none in the supply? How do you deal with snares or the keep? And does this (I assume) ignore the restriction that you can only have 1 warrior per clearing?)

But I definitely think you have some nice ideas in there, like having more seedlings/saplings than mature trees in order to spread out the opportunities to grow them, or the way you incorporate the swarming theme in the attack mechanism.

I'm a big fan of the notion of evolving buildings, well incorporated!

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! 

Thank you so much for the comment, I do appreciate you taking your time to share your thoughts! 

Yes, that's a perfect summary of the scoring system! In a way, it works like Ark Nova's action selection system. You are correct, unless it's a 6 player game with landmarks and promoted hirelings (a wild idea), the higher spots of the track will remain empty. 

Thanks again for your kind words, much appreciated! I'll make sure to check out your entry as soon as I find the time.

Wow, you guys are so fast with your feedback! Thank you so much, it's very much appreciated. 

This is indeed a concern - I'd argue that you would then have spent an entire turn without doing anything for scoring, plus they aren't exactly supposed to be an aggressive faction anyway given that there is Stingy, but you are of course right that 18 is scary. I'll certainly take it into consideration, thank you for your comment.