Hello and welcome back to the Banda’s Grove Overhaul Devlog! If this is your first Devlog, check out our first Devlog that explains why Banda’s Grove is getting an overhaul.

And be sure to check out Devlog 05 where we dive into the Drama Economy when using tokens!

This week, we expanded how you can use Pebbles, adding another step to their loop, updated a ton of systems to work with the expansion, tweaked our recommended safety tools, and we are playing around with removing our no-prep game tutorial.

Banda’s Grove is a Token based game, which means instead of dice rolls as a resolution mechanic to actions, players spend a quantity of tokens, called Pebbles to perform risky actions or special Moves.

Players gain Pebbles in a ton of different ways from roleplaying cozy slice of life scenes, letting your secret control you, engaging with another player in their hobby, completing Weekend Adventures, and there are Moves and Events that also award Pebbles.

Originally, these Pebbles would then be spent by players and go back to the pebble pile. Now, we have implemented an additional step: Community Resources.

Community Resources

After spending a Pebble, players can place the Pebble into one of four community resources: Flora, Fauna, Planar, and Quantum. These are the same resource categories used in Crafting.

These resources can now be used by everyone to build Facilities, plan Events, Earn Badges, and you can pull from the Community Resources in place of gathering your own ingredients for Crafting.

After the community resources are spent, they’re placed back into the main Pebble pile to be drawn from.

This reinforces the community aspect of Banda’s Grove and we purposefully included both individual and communal spends that the resources can go towards. We hope this adds in discussion and debate on how best to use these resources and balance individual wants with the wants of the community at large.

This introduces a new design problem: Tracking resources in-between games, and remembering what tokens on the table belong to what resource (or the player? or is it the main pile?)

We will write a small section on wrapping up a play session that provides guidance on what to write down in your notebook to easily setup for next time, along with some more wording in the “Sunday Night” phase that’s dedicated to this kind of housekeeping.

Safety Tools

Safety tools are getting updated slightly. We are swapping out the X-Card and Lines and Veils as the in-game recommendation for the Spotlight Tool: of Checkmark / Pause / X. This is a more robust X-Card that allows players to eliminate the need of potentially dredging up traumas you’d rather not think about before a the game. This is due in part of discussions we’ve seen where needing to discuss your triggers, can in fact be triggering. Instead of mandating that aspect in Banda’s Grove, we decided to provide tools to quickly pause, change, or stop gameplay. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still room for your table to discuss lines and veils and other safety tools, but built-in to the game, we wanted to keep it simple, and focused on player comfort in-the-moment.

New Camper Orientation Course

We spent a huge amount of time developing this tutorial in the original version of Banda’s Grove, and the more I look at and read through it, the more I realize that this tutorial was necessary because Banda’s Grove itself was confusing and poorly organized, and the tutorial itself duplicated a lot of sections in the book, which ballooned the word count.

What we’re playing with right now is organizing things in such a way that makes it simple and easy to get going in Banda’s Grove without needing a dedicated 16 page tutorial. Instead, I want the sections and rules put together at the beginning to essentially act as that tutorial.

Before the Rules and Regulations section, we have placed all the introductory sections that let you just sit down and play. Most of these were duplicated in the New Camper Orientation course originally:

• The Rule Summary, which gives a high level summary of all the mechanics and game structure in 1-2 sentences each.
• Welcome to Banda’s Grove, which introduces Banda’s Grove, it’s story, and how to play a GM-lite game.
• New Camper Checklist, which gives players an easy to follow list of the materials needed to play, how to setup the table and shared notebook, and the two ways of starting Banda’s Grove: Freeform or the QuickStart Grove.

• Make Your Camper, which is the character building section

• Discover the Grove, which provides the steps to build the Grove together at the table.

I will also update the first Weekend Adventure in the book, which acts as the first introductory adventure where all the Campers meet for the first time, solve a low-stakes mystery, and are given tasks to complete during their first Weekday Phase. As written today, the adventure is a little confusing without more guidance.

Echoes Beyond the Realm

We are in very early development for this, and testing out a lot of different options, but we are working on introducing “Echoes Beyond the Realm”, which we hope will be a fun way to give Banda’s Grove grand direction, meaning, and drama for those who want it. We will be experimenting with interactive writing and player knowledge as a way to shift game play over time. Again, very much in early development and still may not make it into the game, but since this is a devlog, this is something we’ve started developing. If it doesn’t make it into Banda’s Grove, you can probably expect to see us playing with these concepts in future games.