• Authors sure do like setup. If you play this game with pure gamers who have no authorial ambitions, expect setup to take a half hour as people circle their favorite options and give punchy, cogent answers to the setup questions. If you play it with published authors, expect setup to take an hour and a half as your players construct elaborate, interwoven backstories and scenarios and entire chronologies, before the game even starts.
  
  
• Traditional RPG gamers had issues with the game's structure and instructions -- more so than either complete neophytes or experienced storygamers. Dream Askew/Apart expects a high level of fluid interchange of narrative authority, which can perplex if you're used to a game that structures narrative authority explicitly. Not being sure "how much you should GM" can lead to being hesitant to bring another player's character trouble, or to drive things to closure. Neophytes seemed more likely to jump right in to negotiating narrative authority (after all, the last storygame they played was "let's pretend", when they were eight), while some traditional RPG gamers seemed distracted by the absence of structure.

  Some modern "GMless" games -- like, say, Fiasco -- actually offer a a lot structure, marking mechanically, for instance, who initiates a scene or who decides its outcome. Dream Askew leaves that largely up to the players -- and the vagueness may be even greater in Dream Apart, because its Scenarios (parts of the setting for which different players take responsibility) are less strictly orthogonal. (There's more overlap between "The Shtetl" and "The Condition of Exile" than between "The Queer Enclave" and "The Varied Scarcities", and more between "The Wild Forest" and "The Unseen World" than between "The Outlying Gangs" and "The Psychic Maelstrom", and so on.)

• Both Jews and non-Jews had some trouble feeling confident in their ownership of the setting, but, predictably, people with more Jewish cultural immersion had a bit more context to fall back on.
  
  

The Dream Askew text follows the Apocalpyse World MC principle "make your move, but never speak its name", in suggesting that you just narrate what happens according to your move, but don't name the move itself. To some extent, this weakens the token economy, whose subtext seems to be that if someone spends a token for a strong move, they get to do that thing -- whether it's getting out of harm's way, pulling off a daring stunt, persuading enemies to ally, killing or forgiving someone -- and someone else's subsequent mere Regular Move shouldn't overrule the effect. But if you don't know which specific Strong Move was made, it's hard to respect its intent.

Similarly, if someone makes a Weak Move, their character should incur its cost; if someone else's narration immediately blunts its sting or compensates for it, narrative tension ebbs. But if you don't know whether is actually "confusing the present with the horrors of the past" or merely "getting drunk at the worst possible time" (or if you simply don't know their playbook, and so can't guess the move's limits) it's easy to blunder. Also, sometimes, people just want to know why you're spending or gaining a token!

So perhaps one should narrate these moves more like Apocalypse World player moves than MC moves; to do it, you have to do it, but in closing your narrating, you do cite the name of the move, giving explicitly the mechanical correlate to the fiction.

(It also seems desirable to nudge fellow players towards using the token economy -- "hey, sounds like you might be deducing a hidden truth, are you gonna spend a token?")

• Include a glossary of historical specific terms, and perhaps a pronunciation guide.
• Include a bibliography/mediography to get give players ideas and act as a jumping-off point for research
• Include a brief pep talk on alternate history, on making the setting your own, and on the balance of bravery and sensitivity required in "playing the other"
• Include or mention the "x-card" mechanic specifically, because it's a good idea in general but also as a way of addressing concerns about being upset, or upsetting someone else, around representation. Maybe also indie-game-culture tools like veils, debriefing, etc? Maybe this is a separate artifact from the main game? Maybe it's the place to discuss "GMless" narrative authority sharing?
• Expand Scenarios from a half-page to a page, with the left side being the existing scenario text and the right side including things like:
  • Bullet-list historical information about that aspect of the setting
  • Picklists offering choices about that aspect of the setting
  • Lists of names for the scenario's minor characters
  • Abstract rubrics capturing the scenario's essence, like the way Dogs in the Vineyard offers a codification of the religious laws of The Faith

A related issue: of the four games that got past setup, three of them ended up in a confrontation with the local goyim that put the shtetl at risk. That makes sense -- it's sort of the gun on the mantelpiece in the game as written. (The fourth game, in which "The Goyishe World" hadn't been picked as a played Scenario, ended up in a confrontation with strange otherworldly trolls and wolves from the Wild Forest that put the shtetl at risk...) Particularly in the game with the fewest Jewish players, when the pogrom started, the players reportedly looked around at each other and said, "um, so I guess then they kill us all." I think they got past that, but the point is that it's a hard balance to strike between honestly portraying the danger and inequality of the setting, while leaving the characters agency. So the additional background text ought to highlight the resources, strategies, and options available when the gun on the mantelpiece goes off.

For instance, the goyim are rarely united: if it's the peasants or garrisoned soldiers rioting, the local baron may well take umbrage at anyone else harassing "his Jews"; and if it's baron inciting the riot, maybe there are sympathetic peasants or partisans offering refuge. That a populist heretical Christian revolt is targeting the shtetl may be reason enough for the offical Church to want to protect it, and visa versa. While most of the shtetl's inhabitants are poor, the influence of wealthy merchants, advisers, estate agents and creditors may be enough to get the nobility to intervene. And then of course, there's always magic and the miraculous. Perhaps we should explicitly address this, or perhaps just putting more emphasis on the Shtetl's and the Characters' resources will do the trick...

• Some players found it awkward to pick a character before hearing "how to play a character", and to pick a Situation before hearing "how to play a situation", so perhaps the ordering should be shuffled to explain Character and Situation mechanics first.
  
  
• When players are introducing their characters, in addition to their setup choices it would be good for them to announce the Character's first Special Move, the one that acts as an incentive by giving other players tokens.
  
  
• Unlike the queer enclave in Dream Askew, the shtetl has strict gender roles; characters should perhaps explain how the shtetl genders them, and name lists should perhaps note gender (players might not know that Gittel is a girl's name but Mottel is a boy's name).
  
  

• The Midwife playbook might be too dark: the description is heavy on death and danger, and lacks the joy of successful births and the connections that come with seeing people in extreme moments.
  
  
• In every game with a Matchmaker, the allies chosen were the lovestruck blacksmith and the giggling schoolgirls: the other options are bland by comparison and should be punched up.
  
  
• Replace the Matchmaker's "untroubled heart" option with "a clear conscience", since the former contradicts the "desperately longs for" bit.
  
  
• Other things the Klezmer might long for: fame, renown, respect
  
  
• It would be a helpful mnemonic to write "spend a token" (in gray) by "Strong Moves", "gain a token" by "Weak Moves", and perhaps "free" by "Regular Moves"?
  
  

• The Unseen World description is far too complex and overwritten, particularly the "tripartite soul" sentence & the stuff about the Divine Will. Simplify and clarify.