The game was taken to be play tested by the UWE Board Games society to get the perspective of board gamers and see how it stacked against similarly played games. The primary issue that we learned out of this was that many of the cards were worded ambiguously. This was a problem we hadn’t encountered in our own play tests as we were familiar with the cards enough that we didn’t need clarification on what they meant.
There were also some discussions about whether the 5 turns at the end of the game were balanced for or against the player who first went independent.
If we still allowed them to play cards on other players then the game was heavily skewed in their favour, but if we didn’t they had nothing to do for the remainder of the game and would no longer have fun playing until the game ended.