May mechanics update - representation problem

PROGRESS BITCHES. 
Most of the time we say we're gonna talk about the game but end up thinking about what things we can eat, eating said things, and then having an in-depth discussion about the things we just ate. For the first time, we had a truly super productive discussion about the concepts that we are planning on incorporating into our boardgamething.

One major issue we had was a "Representation problem". We knew that each player would be able to recruit characters into their party, so by the endgame the character would be in control of multiple characters (In my mind I randomly picked 7, because random.) Each character you recruit into your party would give you one more action in the worker placement definition of "action," and each character card have to be represented in the game world by some kind of token. Being able to represent all 7 dudes in your party would be complicated, since each character token would have to be distinct in order to uniquely represent each character card. We figured we had 4 possible options to resolve this issue:

• Have a unique character token for each character card in the deck. This allows the full complement of characters to still be available at any moment. Having recently played Betrayal at House on the Hill, we got slightly frustrated at the need to dig through a pile of small cardboard thingies, just to find a single thingie that we needed. Worse yet would be trying to find and match one out of 50 or 60 different small pictures of the dudes on the character cards. Needless to say, every time a character is recruited, this would result in a frustrating suck fest, and not the fun kind.
• Nix character cards completely, and put all stats on the back of each character token. This is a pared down version of the character system. The biggest sacrifice was having to ditch the flavor text and details on the character themselves, essentially stripping out the theme of the characters and focusing on the mechanics. Having spent the most amount of time on the host of interesting and unique characters, this was not a least preferred option.
• Restrict the party selection to one member of each of 7 "classes." For instance, on each character sheet, there's only one "General Captain Dude," there's one "Flying Wizard Man or Woman", etc. Each character card would have a designation of which class they belong to. This would actually really give a ton of strategic decision making, since each character would be forced to decide which character can fill each slot best. But, it would restrict the decisions in other ways, since each player wouldn't be able to stack their party with their favorite class.
• Have each of the character tokens hold up a number, 1 through 7. This wildly cute idea could work, but it's clearly a cop out solution. It would allow each player to recruit 7 of anythings and build their party however they see fit, but it's not special in the slightest.

After the session, we decided to just have less characters available in the party.