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Interesting concept ! You really implemented well the choice of using worms as your faction, everything is flavorful. As some have mentioned, there are still references to the previous board with "Den", "Psychosis" or "Parliament", but otherwise the transition from owls is really clean. I do have some questions about the Tremor tokens. 

What is the use of tremor slots ? they don't seem to be doing anything mechanically, and most often opponents return them to your suply, did I miss something ? 

Do tremors need to be tokens at all ? They never go on the board, but or only given to other players, couldn't they be markers ? Or otherwise they could be cards with " Once per turn, you may give to the Annelid's player a card matching a clearing with Annelid warriors and your pieces  to return this card to their supply". It could free up some space on the board.

Overall great twist on a "secret piece" faction, well done :)

Great concept and great execution ! You really managed to create a faction that pushes other players to do correct threat assessment, because ignoring or abusing the contract could both be punishable.

About the Shrines, is it correct that you can place more than one in a clearing ? And once it's on its awakened side, it never returns on its dormant side ?

My only concern would  be that the faction might be a bit passive. Wether your opponent has the contract or not, you can score VP no matter your board state. You may want to just defend one clearing with your shrines and nothing else. There are 6 possible ways to score VP, maybe there are a bit too much fail-safes ?

Oh and of course the artworks is incredible, you didn't stop at only one cardinal, instead you've drawn a whole flock !x)

Yes you wouldn't want the medecine cart to be a point piñata for the rest of the table haha

I agree with your interpretation, it would be quite traumatizing for a bird to have scales and teeth that are starting to grow x) Although you could argue that religion could keep a critter from relapsing into drugs

Really cute faction and great concept ! However there are a few things I don't quite understand.

"Beetles cannot recycle bird waste" I thought waste were the tokens of the three suits, so what counts as a bird waste ?

If I have the mouse = rabbit engineer, does that mean I can also count rabbits as mice or only mice as rabbits ?

It says that the mill only recyles matching waste, but it seems that you also recycle other waste for 1 VP, so a mill can recycle any waste ?

In set-up do you place waste in matching clearings or at random ? Same question for industrial overflow

Overall really interesting submission and I love the artwork :)

Really cute faction of sleepy koalas ! I like the idea of omens reshaping the battle mechanism. 

How is an omen fulfilled ? Do you need to to have the matching knowledge tokens ? 

When establishing shrines, you do not need to rule the clearing to place an eucalyptus ? Meaning you could place 3 eucalyptus anywhere on the map to score 3 VP ?

Outstanding work on the artwork and on each omen card, great job

Good idea to have to species team up to achieve their goals ! Is it possible to use the haul action to move a hornbill and a scrap action to battle with mongooses ? The little action makes me wonder

Great concept ! Really like placing warrior on their side to swhow their addiction. 

When you removed the medecine cart, do you score in total 2 or 3 points (one for removing a token ?) . What happens if an addicted warrior is converted by the lizard cult or propaganda bureau ? Is it still addicted ?

Cool faction ! You really feel their nomadic and aggressive nature. If you remove 2 pieces in one battle, do you score 2 VPs ? If so it's giving me PTSD from the vagabond infamy x)

I really like the "build your own faction" with the different attribute cards. Needing a mouse card to score is a bit brutal, so the ressourceful attribute seems really important ! I'm not sure if I understand the cache correctly. Does it only affect recruitment ? If I already have 3 warriors, it means I need to have 3 cards in the cache to take the recruit action ?

Having an Hireling as your VIP is a great idea ! I really like that it works well as an hireling on its own but becomes way more important when you play it with this faction.

The barrel economy makes it very versatile, what would your starting turns look like ? I feel like getting more barrels is the top priority, so soaking should be avoided, and the first turn could be store water on the drakkar -> store water in the other clearing -> resupply to drakkar-> store water in the same clearing-> resupply to the drakkar -> store water in the same clearing -> resupply to the drakkar. And start doing this again the following turns until you are pretty much maxed out on barrels.

What does "ignoring path and linking rivers" mean for the Sail action ? Could I go from a river corner to another river corner ?

Would love to see this faction in action !

Really clean faction ! You were able to make the idea of a roaming building work ! The tortoise becoming a ruin when destroyed is very flavorful.

The core gameplay loop seems so interesting that it almost feel like a shame to have it striped down when the tortoise is gone. At this point, your only goal is to defend 3 settlements ? Well I guess that makes it a Very Important Piece :)

Hey ! Sorry if I was being unclear, let me try to rephrase it. What I meant to say is that the plan to win is simple to understand (move and collect ressources) but the limitations in the action economy makes it really hard to enact. If the sources are two clearings away from each other I think you don't have enough actions to go to the sources, collect the ressources, and bring them back to the tree each turn, but maybe every 2 turns, meaning you cannot win until turn 10. Is there something I'm missing ?

Anyway really curious to see what this faction will become, once again great work 

Really like the vibes of this faction, especially the Arrange the Future Action where you have to plan your futur turns in advance ! 

Discarding cards to take actions seems to be brutal, especially when you are expected to have cards left in hand to reveal to arrange the future. 

The hidden hand is a great idea to have really few warriors behing able to defend all of your oracle tokens. Would an oracle token be considered defenseless when attacked if you have warriors in the hidden hand ?

Given that the caravan is a warrior, are there any mechanics preventing it from behing replaced by propaganda bureau or converted by the lizard cult ? Losing the caravan seems devastating, shutting off most of your faction, without a way to regain it. 

Really curious to see where this faction will go :)

Okay this is a fantastic concept and pun. Having the twig start in an ennemy homeland in very flavorful, and to be honest everything about this faction is a flavor win. 

The twig powers are all bonkers, so I see your ennemy being tempted to use them. As waritten however, I believe in birdsong you could chosse X=50, draw 50 cards and stay at 0VP because you can't go in the negatives. I assume this is not intentional ? Can you use all 3 twig abilities during daylight ? It might be a bit broken for let's say woodland alliance to be able to recruit 4 guys in one action.

If you are the player with the least VP, do you keep the twig ? If that's the case I think you want to be sandbagging and intentionaly stay behind on points in the early turns until you are maxed out one warriors. You could also prevent yourself from discarding each turn to end up with more than 10 cards in hand and a myriad of action.

Devoured warriors filling the track is a really good concept, even if the price of detroying an altar might be a bit too harsh.

Overall, I love it :)

Good concept for a faction ! I think there is a little bit too much going on with 2 types of buildings, one that is double-faced, double faced tokens for grapes, double faced token for the cup... There is a lot of flips and tricks to do to score consistently. 

Recruiting also seems excrutiatingly slow , you can only recruit 2 guys per turn and it costs your 2 actions. I think you best bet is to never leave your starting clearing, build 2 abbeys there and 2 vineyards in an adjacent clearing, but that's a lot of setup to do with not that many actions.

However the faction has potential, and alluring woodland critters to "party" around an everflowing cup is a great theme :)

Good concept for a faction ! I think there is a little bit too much going on with 2 types of buildings, one that is double-faced, double faced tokens for grapes, double faced token for the cup... There is a lot of flips and tricks to do to score consistently. 

Recruiting also seems excrutiatingly slow , you can only recruit 2 guys per turn and it costs your 2 actions. I think you best bet is to never leave your starting clearing, build 2 abbeys there and 2 vineyards in an adjacent clearing, but that's a lot of setup to do with not that many actions.

However the faction has potential, and alluring woodland critters to "party" around an everflowing cup is a great theme :)

I played this faction along with other Rootjam submissions and it was really fun ! Art is really cute and the gameplay loop really clever. 

I love how you push your opponents to fight the bear. You have the carrot of offering victory points when you move the bear to the berries and the stick of really not wanting to attack the hedgehogs directly because of their spikes. 

The scoring feels a bit clanky and I'm not sure what's the math and the strategy you should have around it. If you want to score 3 points, you need to feed 3 berries and have 5 left every turn, seems reallly tricky given that you don't choose how many berries the bear eats when he enters a clearing.

Other than that the faction is very intuitive and fun to play, great work :)

Your faction really pushes its concept to the max level ! Very flavorful and I really like that you start moving around a seed but it cannot be moved once it grows into a tree. Here are some thoughts :

Not having a VP marker at all and losing the game when you lose the sacred tree seems like real challenge to balance. It also seems really complicated to care for the tree each turn. You need 3 actions to collect the three ressources, and at least 2 movements to bring them back to the tree. So with a 5 card hand you need to do nothing but these 5 actions during 5 turns to have a shot at victory.

Leaving the choice to your opponents of where to place the source tokens means you will have a really hard time gathering ressources in what will most likely be the heart of ennemy territory.

Is there a reason why this faction is not able to craft ? ( besides from having more place for berry abilities instead of a crafted items box ;) ) This faction is already not fighting for VPs, this is another way it doesn't not interact with the rest of the game. Although I guess it's what makes it really unique as well :) .

Great ideas and terrific art ! Really like the idea of a faction with scoring changing in the middle of the game. I tried them in a game and they were fun, but I ended up having a few questions/remarks :

- Currently the comeback mechanism doesn't seem to work. Because Hatch as an action only takes place when your sap track is full, you never get to replace the pupa token.

- If the comeback mechanism works as intended, I see no point in trying to defend the pupa, in fact you would really like for it to be removed, because he will come back with 5 more warriors and you will not miss a single step of your turn.

- What does the clearing color mean on the monarch card ? In my game we assumed it meant it's the card color you can spend to have more actions in daylight, but we weren't sure.

-Vicious Bulwark seems weird, in which situations is it more than just a Keep but with added complexity ? Curious to have the reasoning on this

-Overall I feel like there is a bit too much going on for what you described as a "Vanilla+" faction. One suggestion I could make is removing lancers entirely, they add a lot of rules in multiple places on the board for something that I think is not the core of your faction. You could just keep "Take one less hit in the clearing with your pupa and deal one more hit in the clearing with your monarch" and you would still be left with a really interesting faction and a great gameplay loop :)

Thanks for the feedback ! Both of your questions can be answered by knowing that you can only flip the next card or the Tome when you ACHIEVE a feat, not when you take the feat action. I should find a way to make it visually clearer I think. 

The Tome is meant to be a Push your luck mechanism. When you achieve a feat, you may want to flip the next card to have a new action and more chances to place renown, or you may choose to play it safe and flip the whole Tome to be sure to score points in Evening and not remove half of your renown.

In practice it is really complicated to get all 9 feat actions, because to achieve the feat it usually requires more than the action given by the feat. Also you need to have 8 renown on the map already in order to set-up a Tome with 9 feat cards, that would be quite difficult.

One of my favorite factions from this RootJam ! Really creative and a great use of this year's prompt !

I really like the schedule action system, even though it felt like you needed to do a LOT a planning at the start of Daylight to really have a solid turn. The two (and three) drawings on the schedule tiles really helped understand how it worked.

A faction of exterminators trying to eradicate a factionless swarm is a great idea, and i feel like you implemented it really well ! It took me a few turn to start scoring before I had enough militia to prevent more scarabs from spawning. In the end, I found that the best way to go about the swarm was to not even try to fight it, just baiting it from clearing to clearing. Because when all scarabs are in clearings at the beginning of the turn, none of them can be placed in the forest, and that's how I scored big x).

Excellent faction all around, would love to play it again ! 

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 !

Thank you so much ! For character art I based it on Kyle's Ferrin artwork for the Mechanical Marquise 1.0 that I modified and added upon  using procreate. For the tokens and buildings I started from scratch on procreate as well.

Thanks for the clarification ! Helps me understand the faction better. To reply more specificly  to your answers : 

1- Okay ! Just wanted to make sure because to me it felt more intutive that it worked when you were the attacker, sort of a twist on the extra-hit-in-battle-as-attacker effect we  have seen with other factions. But this offers a lot of interesting choices as well.

3- Okay so we played it right, good to know. However it seems that there is a LOT a hoops to jump through just to add a monopoly item to your armory. As I understand it, you need to : craft an item, craft another card to spend, remove the item to place two monoploy items to your crafted box, craft yet another card to spend, hope your opponents do not switch their own items with your monoply items, and finaly you can add a monoply item to your armory.

5-I dont remember the specifics but it went like this : starting hand a bird,a fox,a bunny, I place 6 warriors in a river bunny clearing during setup. 

Turn 1 I exhaust the horn and remove 2 warriors to draw 3 cards. I refresh the horn by exhausting to other items and revealing the fox card. I exhaust once again the horn. I now have 8 cards in hand :3 birds, 2 bunny, 2 mouse, a fox . I exhaust a winged boot to move one warrior to an empty adjacent mouse clearing. 

During reveal actions I place three anchors in the bunny clearing and flip 2 of them ( 3 warriors placed in total )and build forges in the mouse clearing

Evening I refresh all my items, and so on everyturn where I draw 6 cards, find a least 2 bunny or bird card to place and flip an anchor...

Thank you for taking the time to answer my previous comment, really helps ! 

I can only agree ! So I just played a game with the Tusked Riders and I have a few questions and remarks , if you don't mind helping me clarify things a bit :D 

1 - Naval War
-Can you reroll one of the battle dice as defender ?

2 - Transfer
- What do you mean by item track ? Is it the lord of the hundred's hoard ?
-Can the vagabond aid a player to take a monopoly item from their crafted item box ??

3 - Enhance
-What  do you ean by "spending a crafted card" ? Is it spending a crafted improvement that you crafted on a previous turn ? That's how we played in in our game.
-From where do you remove the non-monopoly item ? Is it from your crafted item box or from the supply ?

4 - Chastise
-As it's written right now, you can choose to remove any piece you want in the clearing in question. So for example you could remove the cat's keep, so maybe it's a bit to harsh ? What about removing warriors first like with the vagabond's crossbow ?

5-Exhausting items
-The horn is EXTREMELY powerful and it is all I've been doing all game. I spent the game in only two clearings, just recruiting with hammers and flipping anchors, to then remove 4 warriors to draw 6 cards to place more anchors and reveal a lot of pairs. It was a very passive game were I never moved or attacked, I just stayed there revealing 8 cards a turn to score 4 points. 
-Stealing cards every turn with the harpoon is a bit harsh I feel, especially when you are already stealing cards during evening.
-Do you need to exhaust any two items to refresh a monoploy item as well as revaling a card ?

6-Retrieve
-What is a removed non-monopoly item ? One you removed during the bestow action ?

Thanks ! 

Hey ! I'm planning on testing your factions, seems great ! Just to be sure, do each of the five different monopoly items have 4 copies ?

Thanks for the question! Yes, like the Vagabond pawn, scrap tokens can be attacked, and are removed when they take hits. However, they can be defenseless and in that case, they deal the extra hit instead of the attacker. Lore-wise, you could imagine a warrior being reassigned to trash duty... or dying of tetanus after lunging into a rusty pile of junk.