We broke out Umlaut for a quick session to test out some of the new rule tweaks and to further test some of the older tweaks.

In brief, we created 4 stunningly unoriginal bands and played from the start. I noticed a few things with the new mechanics and a few things which had been bothering me slightly came into the light a bit more and I can see the solution to some problems.

Main observations:

Short gigs:

Two song gigs are crap a bit pants. Gigs don't really get interesting until they reach 3 songs in length. I shortened them to make the game flow quicker and (more importantly) to give the players not involved in a gig less "downtime". But now that those players are the Audience, that's not required. So I think I'm going to put the gig length back to how it was before.

(Originally, Contenders allows fights to last Conditioning+1 rounds before you lose Traits. I changed that to Material+0. I'm going to change it back.)

Showboating:

I'm going to make Showboating unusable as the first song of a gig. there's too little to lose with the first song and it's too tempting. I'll change the card so that it says that too.

Two-in-a-row:

The change to prevent the same Style being used for two songs in a row had mixed results. Firstly, it DID prevent people from going Ballad, Ballad, Ballad etc. People seemed to be more intent on getting those crowdpleasers, which was nice. But also harder: If both bands play the same style on the first song, then the Audience know that that style can't come up in song 2. I need to make sure that the Audience can't just pick stuff they know is impossible for the bands to play, although I need to think about how to phrase that.

Otherwise, I think it went pretty well. We're all pretty burned out on the game by now, but we still managed to come up with some decent songs and stuff. I ended up with a military themed Thrash band called ArmyGeddon. Their main Ballad was called Operation: Enduring Freebird. It was a fun game.