After all this time replaying my own game, I'm confident the core loop is solid, if a bit bland - that is, placing and utilizing elemental tokens on the board (for damage and healing) makes for a great base, but it also calls for some dynamic element as a topping.

My answer for this was the presently installed Geomancy System - which I've been recently calling "old System", but it was itself already an iteration of another, even older system (which figured in the og paper prototype).

The way the presently installed system works is by drawing a Figure (from the 16 figures pool) randomly every turn.

The figure, however, is inert - until it's activated by the player actions. This activation happens when the player orders a daimon - one of the members of his retinue - to perform a skill. If the acting daimon shares a zodiacal or planetary signature with the geomantic figure, the figure is empowered. When empowered twice, it is activated. The activation creates a new rule for the gameplay on that turn. Each of the 16 figures enables a different rule when activated.

It seems nice in paper, but it didn't work in practice (as you can presently attest playing the demo). During most turns, the figure ended up inactive; as no daimon shared a zodiacal or planetary signature with it. So either the player would account for the inactive figure, navigating amidst useless info, or simply ignored the Geomancy panel. When finally a figure was activated it was probably by accident. It didn't feel like a tactical opportunity - but an intrusion or even punishment for ignoring the (mostly useless) system.

Ok - so something needs to change. The activation system clearly is disfunctional. Either the figures should be activated from the start - forcing the player to always pay attention to them - or they should be activated in another manner.

Also, I began having second thoughts on the idea of casting a new figure every turn. It makes gameplay slower: there's text to deal with every turn, "rule changes" of a sort, which ends up being overwhelming - as the base gameplay already takes a lot of strategizing.

A new figure every turn also systematically displaced the player's attention from the board, making the experience less focused.

And finally - most the geomantic effects were too situational, or beneficial only to a few daimons. And they were also quite complex, some taking many lines of description. So they needed to be overall simplified, and also redirected to be useful in a broader array of circunstances.

So I decided to redesign the *whole Geomancy system* from the ground up. Again.

In the next posts I'll discuss more about this redesign proccess! There's a lot of reasoning put into each figure, trying to come up with interesting effects which make sense in context of the traditional symbolism of the figures - while still keeping the overall cohesion and balancing of the system.

Feel free to come along, reader, and share whatever thoughts you have!