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.