Into the temple again

A playtest this week seems to indicate that the latest version of the encounter mechanic outside the temple is working reasonably well.  You flip a card, which describes the scene you face and provides you with a track.  You collect some white dice (good) and red dice (bad), and roll; successes move your marker up the track, bad results move the enemy pawn closer to your city, and when the pawn reaches you, further bad results start to cause damage.  It's straightforward but surprisingly enjoyable and tense -- you can feel like you're safe and then suddenly the enemy closes in on you really quickly!  So it does at least seem to be a way of creating tension and suspense in the encounter phase
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A more interesting design challenge is shaping up to be in the temple phase.  At present, three are two rows of three cards (representing, in the Grail scenario, the traversal from the start city to the temple, and the temple entrance to the grail room), followed by the grail room itself, and then the final hubris challenge.




Each of those two rows of cards has three cards in it, and I tried something simpler than what the previous post describes:  each card has a single 'peril' on it, of which there are six types.  You must roll four red (bad) dice against the challenge, less one for each symbol you have on an equipment card that matches the card's peril.  And then each 'hit' on the red dice gives a token, and at the end of each card, whoever has the most tokens flips over and resolves a whammy card, and then discards their tokens.




This system turns out to be a bit fragile with respect to two different forms of what I call the "trivial strategy".  The first form is, I forego acquiring information and simply acquire equipment cards, since there's a good chance that any equipment card I pick has a good chance of doing me at least some good.  The second form is, I do almost nothing outside the temple, accept that I'm going to roll poorly in the temple and take damage, and then just try to scoot through the hubris challenge and win by being furthest back on the time track (which increments each time you actually do stuff on a turn outside the temple).




It's hard to address both of these trivial strategies with a single solution.  For example, if we want to make the 'do nothing' strategy a loser, then we could make the whammy cards really bad, such that being totally unprepared means you're really going to get whomped by the temple.  But that doesn't make me want information -- if anything, it pushes you even more into the arms of the 'just get equipment' strategy, because you want as many cards as you can possibly get.  Whereas, any system where I want to get equipment AND info to know what to do with it takes twice as many actions, and so I might feel that just doing nothing is ultimately a better solution.


What makes this even harder to solve is that any modification probably adds steps to the resolution phase, which right now is very quick, and probably adds additional information that you have to record in the map phase as you're getting to look at temple cards.


The next thing I'm planning to try is hopefully an acceptable compromise that also addresses both trivial strategy.  Each slot in the temple will now have a 'peril' card and a 'challenge' card.  You roll 4 'temple dice' on each card, less one for each symbol on your equipment that matches the peril card.  The outcomes on this die are either 'traps' (which cause damage), or 'noise' (which give you 'noise tokens').  On each future card, you also roll red dice, one for each noise token that you hold.  These are the same dice you rolled in encounters and represent the enemy, so it maybe makes thematic sense -- make noise in the temple and it draws the enemy closer to catching you.  The results of the red dice also cause damage.


If you discard an equipment card that matches the 'challenge card' for your current temple slot, you get to cancel the damage you get from traps or from the enemy die.


But!  Prior to revealing the temple card, everyone puts a marker on any one of their equipment cards, and that card's symbols are doubled.  So, this can help you roll fewer temple dice as well as cancel the effects of BOTH traps and enemy dice with a single discard.


But!  You also have a special card with all of the peril symbols and equipment symbols on them, and you can place a marker on any one symbol on that card instead of on one of your equipment cards.  This is useful if, for example, you know the peril but didn't acquire the right equipment for that peril -- at least your info still helps you a bit.


I think that this helps counteract both trivial strategies.  Having equipment and knowledge is strictly better than equipment alone because of the doubling effects.  And both are better than having no equipment, because you're going to take a beating both from the temple dice and the enemy dice.


It might be possible to get a similar effect out a single type of die but I sort of like the feedback loop of noise begetting enemy dice.


The biggest downside seems to be that it's just a bit fiddly for each person to set up for each card.  It would go much faster if each player has their own stash of dice, but including 40 dice in the box doesn't seem very likely.  Maybe dice could be sold separately as a way of accelerating the game, though.  Or maybe there's a way to roll all of the dice together for all players but each player only looks at the number of dice that they're supposed to have rolled.