Small changes are sometimes big changes

In the previous post I proposed what seemed like a simple change -- switch from individual player turns to simultaneous 'group' turns, whilst keeping essentially the same turn logic.  However, as I'm fleshing out this idea, I realize that this actually fundamentally re-wires the entire concept of the game.  Specifically, with individual turns the game is basically an efficiency puzzle with a healthy dose of risk management tossed in:  you want to parse the information puzzle efficiently, and while luck plays a role in that, managing your luck is important to cracking the information nut.  Moving to simultaneous turns inevitably moves the map phase of the game in the direction of being a game of brinksmanship, again with a healthy dose of risk management tossed in.  It has to be this way, in fact, or the simultaneous turns make no sense. 

The encounters in their present form already have an element of press-your-luck tension.  You want to keep rolling because the more checks you get, the more rewards you get.  But you want to stop rolling before the enemy reaches your city lest bad things happen to you.  This will still be the case in a multi-player version, but it can't be the only thing; it seems that there must be some degree of competing not just against the enemy clock but also against the other players who are in the encounter.  One problem is that this has already been done to great effect in Diamant, and there's a real risk of just creating a clone of that.

I think there are three ways around this, and this system should use all of them.  The first is that the rewards are asymmetric.  For each encounter, there are two equipment cards available as rewards, and the ability to look up clues from a subset of the temple cards as determined by the theme card in the city.  Second, taking a clue lookup means you remove a cube from that temple area's 'bin', and either discard it (earning you a green cube, helpful for the final hubris challenge) or add it to the current encounter, making the enemy more powerful -- for everyone who is still in!  Taken together, getting out early means you're probably going to get less stuff, but you are less likely to get closed out of an equipment card and/or can make the challenge harder for the other players. 

The third thing is to add in 'effect' symbols to some of the encounters.  'Effects' are a new feature of the temple, and basically allow you to, essentially, use the machete to destroy the rope bridge.  We could add this kind of effect here as well.  Some encounters could have two tracks, one which is 'easier' (i.e. gets to more rewards more quickly), but has an 'effect' symbol, such that, if another player reveals an equipment card with a matching effect symbol, all the players on that path take some damage.  So in addition to 'stay in/get out', there's a decision about which path to take based on what the other players might be able to do to you.  Presumably, only players still in the challenge can trigger an effect, so if you have the right equipment card, you may want to stay in simply to have the opportunity to whammy the other players.


One nice thing about these additional considerations is that they afford some additional 'handles' with which to differentiate the encounters and maybe make them feel more thematic.  Version 7 was just 'roll a die and that tells you the challenge category' -- quick and effective but quite bland.  Version 10 had encounter cards that showed you the scene you faced, but it was just chrome -- the 'basket game' or 'x marks the spot' weren't functionally different except in the challenge category and difficulty of the challenge.  But now with the success tracks and a couple of simple effects it's possible to make them feel different.  For example, maybe with the 'basket game' there's an 'explosion' symbol late on the track, so staying in too long runs the risk that another player will blow up the truck, costing you a life cube; whereas 'X marks the spot', on one track you can get to the answer with fewer total rolls but must spend a 'time' examining the room, whereas if you charge in you will have a harder time finding the tomb AND might put yourself at risk of another player throwing a 'lever', which lights the oil in the catacombs on fire...


One semi-related and also nice thing about the simultaneous system.  As I might have mentioned in the last post, each player would have several location cards, and each turn, the player who is furthest back on the time track plays one of these cards, indicating where that turn's encounter will take place.  There will only be nine turns total, so this controls the game length and makes it the same for all player counts.  But more importantly, it essentially eviscerates the 'do nothing' strategy.  If you try to sit out too many of the encounters, you'll end up in the back of the time track and will have no choice but to take turns, and this is compulsory -- you can't pass if you're last on the time track.  In light of this it might be worth revisiting the changes to the temple that were intended to kneecap the 'do nothing' strategy, as some of them might not be necessary any more. 


Apart from this it may add an additionally interesting dynamic, whereby you want to participate in a given encounter to potentially get the info that it will provide, but sitting one or two out will leave you in the back of the track, giving you the ability to control where the next encounter will be, which may sometimes be important.  So I think there will be jockeying for position on the time track and jockeying for position on the success tracks, and hopefully these together will create a really nice level of player interaction.

Alleviating tedium

An "influential playtester" had a chance to play the version of the game prior to the changes described in the post before this one.  That playtester reported on enjoying the game but now found the external or "map" phase too long and tedious.  We're awaiting some clarity on those comments but if I had to guess I suspect it's something like this:

In the latest incarnation of the map phase, turns are simple.  You move to a city, reveal an encounter card, read some flavor text about the scene it describes, collect dice (white and red, which are 'good' and 'bad', respectively) and then roll.  'Hits' on white dice move you up on the reward track, 'hits' on red dice move the enemy pawn closer to your city, and when it arrives, further hits start doing damage.  Whenever you want, you end the encounter and take whatever rewards you're entitled to. 

The problem is that although this is simple, it's not always quick:  because you might roll 6 or 7 times before the encounter has resolved, the entire turn could take as much as 3 minutes.  Each player gets seven or eight turns in this phase, so, for four players, that's almost 90 minutes.  And because the encounters are all similar in structure I could see how this could feel tedious after a while.  As this playtester is very influential, we're obligated to take this concern seriously.

There are a few things we could do:

1.  Accelerate the dice:  make the dice stronger so the challenges resolve more quickly.

2.  Accelerate the rewards:  each encounter gives you more stuff (info or equipment), so each player needs fewer turns in total

3.  Accelerate the nature of encounters:  make them more impactful or consequential as the game progresses

4.  Revamp the turn structure completely:  shared turns and simultaneous encounters.

Option 1 is easy to do but it still has the same total number of turns, so it may save some time but won't alleviate the repetitive feel.  Option 2 would require some rebalancing, and one of the nice things about the current system is that luck has time to even out over all those turns; 3 or 4 turns wouldn't be enough for this.  Option 3 might be viable as a way to relieve tedium but I'm not sure it helps with length, plus it probably requires more rules.

I'm therefore somewhat leaning toward option 4.  Instead of individual player turns, players face encounters as a group.  One way that this might work is to give each player a hand of 'city' cards.  When your turn comes up (turns in clockwise order?  Last on time track chooses?) you play one of these cards, which sets the active city for the present turn.  The active player must go there, and other players can either go there or sit the turn out -- but there's some system that caps or effectively caps the total number of turns regardless of whether you sit out or not.

The encounter card that's revealed is faced by ALL players.  Each player rolls their own white dice and moves their marker on the success track accordingly, and then the red dice are rolled for the whole group.

The upside of sitting a turn out is obvious -- it saves you some position on the time track.  But there needs to be some way to make this unfavorable.  And, there should be some way to make jockeying for position in the challenges a bit tense.  One simple thing might be to put some markers on the temple cards.  Each time you receive a card lookup you remove one of its markers, reducing the number of times that card can subsequently be viewed by other players.  So sitting turns out means that the total amount of info available is depleting.  Perhaps also there's an internal timing issue whereby dropping out of a challenge early means you get to receive your reward first, but the longer you stay in the more rewards you're likely to receive.

The real advantage of this system is that you can reduce the total number of encounters to about 8 or 9, which has the other advantage of keeping the game length about the same for all player counts.  You see fewer encounters from game to game so the 'newness' of the flavor text on the encounter deck lasts longer.  Perhaps the nicest thing about this system is that it adds direct player interaction, which the game has pretty much never had in the map phase (except that you could steal a relic in v7).  So I'm inclined to tinker with this a bit and see if it can be made to work.