Piotrek Jeremicz
Wandering PineSmall dev diary: while working out the committee track, I updated the intrigue cards so they now leverage the new action spaces in Vienna. The two systems are starting to talk to each other, which is exactly what I wanted. One step toward iteration 3.5.
Servants with proxy letters have been in Vienna 1814 for a while — small, useful, and quietly liked by players. An aristocrat hands off a letter, a servant carries an action where they cannot go themselves.
In iteration 3.5, the same mechanic now reaches the committee: a servant with a proxy can move the work forward by one step, opening a higher space the aristocrat may use later that turn.
A small extension of something that already works.
A small design question I am sitting with: on the locations of Vienna 1814, should action names stay, or should the icons speak for themselves?
The thematic names ("Foster Relationships", "Spark a Scandal", "Spreading Rumours") give playtesters a hook — narrative context that helps the icons land. A more experienced designer suggested cutting all the fluff text. He may well be right.
This is still a wireframe, and I am still arguing with myself.
Today I put #deeplink on the board in #ZarazJade. This is one of the few features I want refined and 100% in harmony with the architecture.
The coordinator is the basis of my navigation, so I’ll hook up the deep paths there, too.
Everything should work out of the box.
#DevDiary
A small but important shift on the committee track: each player carries a personal pool of cubes that grows across the game, one added per committee action.
This means the system rewards long-term investment rather than a single decisive turn — and tilts the strategic question from "when do I act?" toward "when do I commit?"
One sentence dev diary: the committee track now has two layered tracks — a round ceiling that advances slowly, and a work-progress marker that pushes against it — so political reform feels less like a race and more like patient pressure.
The research infrastructure behind Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations has entered its third generation.
It started with a single spreadsheet. When that hit fifty sheets, it moved to a multi-file architecture. Now even that has been outgrown — everything lives in a properly connected research system.
Not a productivity post. Each step happened because the game asked for it. The material is too entangled to live in flat files.
Player board update for Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations, iteration 3.5.
I am aiming for a wireframe direction: mostly black and white, no visuals beyond icons. Unicode and emoji icons have been replaced with monochromatic ones from game-icons.net. The character portraits stay, but toned down so they sit better with the rest, but I couldn't bring myself to remove them entirely.
Strongly recommend game-icons.net for tabletop prototyping.
#BoardGameDesign #HistoricalGames #CongressOfVienna #DevDiary
I am aiming for a wireframe direction: mostly black and white, no visuals beyond icons. Unicode and emoji icons have been replaced with monochromatic ones from game-icons.net. The character portraits stay, but toned down so they sit better with the rest, but I couldn't bring myself to remove them entirely.
Strongly recommend game-icons.net for tabletop prototyping.
#BoardGameDesign #HistoricalGames #CongressOfVienna #DevDiary
Today I am also designing a new icon set for iteration 3.5 of Vienna 1814: Waltz of Nations.
Until now the prototype used Unicode icons (📚 🏛️ 🦚 💰 ❤️ 🕵️ 🗺️ and more). They were quick to drop into the files, but their bright, inconsistent colours were actually working against readability — the eye kept chasing the icon instead of the information.
Time for something quieter and more coherent.