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Thank you! I am hoping it will be a good puzzle of when to spread out to give out tokens and take cards to when to huddle and block nodes. While also having the puzzle of who to use for scoring vs card draw. My one fear is the more present factions being targeted more in a game than others, and that messing up their game.

The ruin interaction would be better explained in the Law, which is not made, but a Node Aide card is available. Essentially, when a facedown node is "removed" either as a building OR from ruin actions like "explore" or "raze," it is flipped faceup instead, but VP is scored as normal. Face-up nodes are just ruins that can still be explored and razed, but are not removed. They do not count towards rule for the Annelids nor as a faction piece, so the Rats would still oppress those clearings.

Essentially, they always stay on the map, but factions interact with them as normal.

Yes, those are good catches. They were pulse tokens before I made them tremor tokens. So I missed that one spot for a switch. And Psychosis was originally synthesized, so if you do not distill during the Synthesize step, then you'd draw for discarded bird cards. I have noticed two other wording changes I missed that I plan to fix after the Jam is over.

I feel like they will feel similar to smol moles who are just in clearing to match revealed cards. You want to battle them away to prevent their engine. But with being able to leave the ruin clearings regardless of the rule, and the Thrum network, I think their card draw each turn should be decent. I have not playtested them yet, so I can't speak to how much of a setback being unearthed will be, but unless all the players at the table team up together, I find it unlikely they will be unearthed by a single player in one round. And typically players have too much of their own agenda to team up in that way unless they are scoring well or "winning" via the VP track.

But you could be right, so we will definitely see.

Thematically and mechanically, this seems so fun to play. This may be my favorite Root Jam faction so far that I have read through. Very cool!

It started as a less portentous faction that was themed around being the ones who used "information" for the fight, eavesdropping and misdirecting factions with the card swap mechanic. However, when I saw other submissions, a lot mirrored what I had thematically, so I changed the skin of it. In this one, I wanted the worms, who are rather small, to have a presence that is felt but not necessarily seen. They are under you everywhere, so they see and hear everything. And they use that to disrupt alliances, advantages, etc., in order to stop this endless war. Kind of like a WA meets Corvids.

This is very cool. I love the use of the Hirelings card and barrels as actions.