Thank you so much to all 20 of you, who saw this game and decided to give it a chance. It might not seem like a lot of folks in comparison to my extremely optimistic goal, but whenever I wake up and check on the campaign, seeing a new name that I don't recognize is the best feeling. It means that you all took enough of a liking to my project to invest in it, and that's what's been keeping me going the past week or so as I obsessively the project page while on break between teaching classes.

So thank you. Here's to celebrating more milestones before the campaign ends!

More post-mortem-y stuff coming before the end of the week this week.

Hey folks, apologies for not updating yesterday like I promised, the semester's started and yesterday was my first day of teaching and all the running around getting things set up wiped me out.

First off, the answer to last update's answer is that there are only 3 roles because it was easiest to test three roles in a game that's 4 or more players. Every roles gets an equal amount of testing, and it's a lot easier to adjust any interactions between roles without upsetting the balance too much on other roles.

More importantly though, if you're in the New York City area, I'm hosting a demo of Swords at Dusk over at Hex and Co. East Sunday evening. It's free to play Swords at Dusk, but it'll cost you if you decide to hang around and play other board games as well. I'll be providing free teatime refreshments for anyone who comes by.

RSVP on Partiful so I can figure out how much tea I should brew!

I didn’t know about Blood on the Clocktower when I started making Swords at Dusk. Actually, I never played Blood on the Clocktower until like, this summer. However, very much like that game, I started out twisting the original Werewolf formula the way many designers start modifying that style of game– making a whole lotta roles with special powers and watching them bounce off each other. 

While brainstorming all these cool roles and seeing them in action was fun, it was hard to keep track of them all, Even for me, and I made the thing. Obviously, something needed to change; So in the next iteration, I cherrypicked the best performing (and personal favorite) mechanics from all these roles, and ended mixing them together into the three roles you see today:

The Killer has more or less stayed the same since the game was made.

The Admirer took the Storyteller's Shame, but otherwise has remained the same.

The Noble has the "Dramatic reveal" that the Coward had, and I added the Wallflower's win condition. A lot of times, the Fool role often stuck players in that "Critical decision" scenario I wanted to play out with The Detective, and I figured it would be easier and more flexible just to make

I chose these three because the most interesting stories often involved certain roles over others. Over time, I would see many different ways to play each role, and start weeding out mechanics or roles that felt like they weren't adding anything. At the end, cutting and combining these roles allowed my game to be easier to pick up, and that having a bunch of "special" roles wasn't needed to keep a social deduction game interesting.

However, early on in playtesting I discovered why I should cut back on "special" roles in the game, and it's the main reason there’s only three special roles in the game, what do you think that reason might be? 

Curious about what "Stars" and "Clovers" the prototype card mentions? Think I should've kept one of my original roles? Let me know in the comments! 

If you don't want to wait until next week for the answer, backers get the answer right away...

It looks like my crowdfund was unpublished, so if you're seeing this, don't panic! It should be fixed quickly.

Edit: Having received the update email, I realize how panic-inducing the headline is. Don't worry, I'm not in trouble, I may have accidentally enrolled this project in a beta thing, but that beta thing rescheduled my project's date, but I've emailed Backerkit and hopefully they'll resolve this quickly.

Edit edit: Fixed!

-- Oliver

Over the course of the campaign, I’d like to take the opportunity to do a sort of “Post-mortem” of Swords at Dusk.  Swords at Dusk has been a prototype I’ve been working on and off for the past four years, and over that time, I’ve compiled a bunch of notes and documentation of what the game looked and played like throughout its development, and throughout this crowdfunding campaign, I’ll share with you my experience making the game, as well as explain how the game works now.

Twice a week during the campaign I will send updates with little peeks behind the curtain and document the on and off development of the game throughout its various iterations. I will also update you on any upcoming demo events coming up if you're in the New York area.