Return of the son of the temple

A strange inversion has happened.  Several posts back, the temple system entailed each player rolling dice against each temple card until they passed a card-specified threshold, and the idea was to do this in as few rolls as possible so as to reap the benefits of position; thus, it felt like there was an element of jockeying for place.  (This led, conceptually, to the 'running time' track, which players unanimously have liked).  The map system at that time still involved individual isolated challenges.


Now, the map phase is trending towards group encounters but the temple system is back to feeling somewhat solitaire-ish:  you roll dice as before, but now dice are bad and the number you roll determines how much harm you suffer.  So you want to roll less to accumulate less harm in the aggregate, but our rolls have little impact on each other.


While I think there's room in the world for a game that shifts gears, I think that to go from a tense interplayer experience to a solitaire feel is a shift in the wrong direction.  It feels a bit like a skiing race -- everyone runs the course and we see who did the best.  There's no jostling in skiing.  What we want is more of a roller derby:  there's a goal, but there's also jostling as we all try to achieve that goal.

This might be achieved simply by allocating the dice in a different way.  Instead of "roll four, less one for each symbol you hold that matches the current temple card", it could be "player with the most symbols rolls nothing and each other player rolls dice based on how many fewer they have than the player with the most". 

There are two possible issues.  The first is that this makes the temple difficulty entirely relative.  If everyone is poorly prepared for the temple, it's functionally no different than if everyone is extremely well prepared for the temple, because you're only rolling dice relative to what other players have.  There's no sense in which the enemy or the temple itself are going to grind you into dust if you're all unprepared.  This needs thought; it may be a problem.

The second is that even though the rolls are relative, we're still not exactly jockeying or jostling -- we're just seeing who is best prepared and letting things play out accordingly.  This one, at least, I think I see how to address.  I may have mentioned previously that at each temple card, you get to place a cube on an equipment card of your choice to double its effect.  This rewards knowledge, since you presumably will double a card that matches the temple card's peril if you know what it's going to be.


But!  Add to this a twist that you have (say) four cubes for this purpose, but every time you use one it is discarded.  And, any cubes still in your possession count as green cubes in the hubris challenge, which are what you need to acquire the white dice that you'll roll to purge hubris.

This may add some jostling in the temple, because even though you may know what peril a temple card contains, and even though you can see what peril symbols your opponents possess, you don't know whether THEY know that the next card is "fear", and you don't know whether they're willing to spend a cube to double an equipment card.

Moreover there are some equipment cards that are 'parasitic' of other players' peril symbols, and others that can cause whammy effects on other players on certain temple cards.  So these combine d with the cube allocating may give enough interactivity that the vibe of the external phase is preserved.

If I have knowledge of the next temple card and have the symbol for it, why not just pay several cubes on the right symbol to really hit the other players?  I think the rules should allow this but also impose the restriction that the most anyone can be forced to roll is the number of temple dice, which is probably four or five.  So there's not much upside to dropping several cubes on a single card unless you REALLY want to win that particular card.

The next question becomes what the temple dice do to you when you have to roll them.  I still like the idea that you either generate noise or fall into a trap, but that equipment cards help with the latter.  Not sure what noise does, but maybe it's something simple like, the player with the highest number of symbols places a marker on a track -- that is the 'tolerable noise level' for the current card.  Anyone with more noise than this after rolling takes damage, and the player with the most noise (regardless of the threshold) takes damage as well.  Noise is cumulative but maybe you can also spend a cube to reduce your noise (as opposed to using it to double equipment cards).  This is still a bit fiddly but I like the theming of temple dice representing you speeding through the temple in a risky way, which might result in you tripping on a trip wire or alerting the Nazis to your presence.  In other words, there are two kinds of dangers in the temple and they function differently and the dice results allow you to be at risk for both of them, but in an asymmetric way.  But maybe making them more symmetric is worth it if it makes the game easier to learn/play.

Simpler cards and complex characters

We had a three-player playtest of the full game with fully-simultaneous shared turns in the map phase.  There were some fun filigrees.  Each encounter requires two points of 'investment' for each white die the group will roll.  Players contribute in order and then, when a player cashes out of the encounter, they take their investment out as well.  So there were times when a player would decline to join in or would pull out at an inopportune time so as to leave the other players high and dry.  I think this is important and offers something different from Diamant-esque doublethink.

I don't think the game was much shorter.  To be sure, it was a learning game, but we did try to play quickly and still it took maybe 90 minutes of playing time.  There was generally a preference for cards over information as rewards; the game still seems to reward having lots of cards as a way to navigate the temple vis a vis having lots of info and just the right cards.  It may be that too few cards are available per encounter.  Currently it's just two and they're so precious that they're scooped up quickly.  Perhaps with more cards available, it's possible for all of the encounter participants to get one and so it's more about who chose the right cards. 

The encounter has two parts, the 'investment' part in which everyone decides to be in or out, and the resolution part, where we roll dice.  The latter requires a few too many rolls but that can be sped up by tweaking the dice.  But the investment is also slower than it should be, and if I had to guess, I think it's that there's a bit too much that each player can do and so reminding yourself of all of your options is still eating up too much game time.  I think the cards can be simplified further such that each card does exactly one thing, ideally a thing that can be represented by an icon.  If we look back at version 7, it's incredibly streamlined; all of the equipment cards have one challenge category, and all of the theme cards have 1-3 icons for their clue categories.  The amount of information conveyed by v7 of the game was really quite minimal.  I think we probably need to get back to this.

On the other hand, a suggestion was made to diversify what some of the cards do, in particular the starting cards you're given.  If we're all Indy and we all have a Whip, Pistol, Satchel, and Fedora, then we're all the same; some asymmetry might be more interesting.  That might not be so hard to do.  Perhaps one character has a pistol (good at fight encounters) whereas another has something that makes them good in circle cities and another still good in the Middle East.  These might all benefit an encounter in Cairo (say) but won't all be as effective in different places.


One consequence of simplifying to one-effect-per-card is that you presumably need more cards in the game to get the same net number of effects, and this could mean that everyone will acquire many cards over the game.  A glut of cards, though, adds to the decision space. One simple counter is to impose a hand limit, which will force you to keep the cards you especially plan to use, and in particular to transition from cards that are map-useful to cards that are temple-useful.  (I guess each card could have a map phase effect and a temple phase effect, but again, that's getting away from the simplicity that I think the game probably really needs.  One effect per card!!!!)

But, this led me to ask, what does the hand limit represent?  In an adventure game, the obvious thing is your 'carrying capacity'.  But this is a game about an adventure movie, and is there a more cinematic option?  Perhaps the hand limit could represent the attributes that the audience will associate with the character -- a catch phrase, an accessory, an article of clothing, a weapon.  Trying to have too many things would lead to a confusingly articulated character, so the cap says how many things the audience can be expected to keep straight. 

This could be implemented in a way that allows for a secondary effect.  Specifically, the cards could be categorized in a way that's distinct from the effect they create.  Perhaps this is color-coded.  And you could have a player mat that has seven (say) colored boxes, indicating what categories of cards you can carry, but each player's mat could be different based on their archetypical character.  So for example "very strong person" may have three of their seven boxes be for 'equipment' cards (brown, let's say), whereas "slippery eel character" may have only a single box for equipment but two for 'alliances' (pink, let's say).  'Very strong person' can choose what equipment he's holding and 'slippery eel person' can choose which entities he'll ally with, as represented by the cards they each draft, but the competition for cards is informed in some ways by these considerations. 

I'm a bit worried about simplifying one thing only to add additional complexity somewhere else.  But, I'm intrigued by this idea as a way to shape player strategies while still allowing for flexibility.  I'm not sure I've seen this implemented previously, although I suppose that it must have been used somewhere.

Immediacy is important

We had a chance to playtest a few turns of the simultaneous system described in the previous posts.  In some ways it works -- it does reduce the total number of turns overall, it does provide some brinksmanship, it does speed up the resolution.

But there was one important thing that it lost.  When you're facing an encounter in the previous version you roll your white and red dice at the same time -- so you get some good results, but also the bad results at the same time.  Thus, with each roll, the enemy is getting closer and closer and the tension mounts.

In this version, we each take turns rolling, then the enemy rolls, and based on that brief description you would think that the tension is similarly pretty palpable.  But what really happens is, for each roll, you  collect your dice, then roll, then increment the track, then decide if you're going to get out, then (if you do) collect your rewards.  If you take a reward it may be upwards of a minute before the next person rolls while you do that.  Then the process repeats for each player and THEN, at last, the enemy rolls and maybe moves.  And then the process repeats.  The encounter just takes long enough that the sense of suspense is hard to sustain.

We had a very nice playtester suggestion that I think might help with this.  He proposed viewing the encounters as semi-cooperative.  Meaning that, at the start of the encounter, each player reveals how much they will commit to the encounter (equipment cards or black cubes).  Then the number of white dice the /group as a whole/ will roll is based on what everyone contributed.  Then, roll all those white dice, and the red dice, all together, and move a /single/ marker along the card's success track.  Each person can decide whether to get out after each roll (receiving rewards for whatever space the group marker is on), and a player who gets out takes their equipment card(s) with them, so the remaining group is a bit weaker. 

To preserve the quick resolution, I think it would be that you don't receive rewards until the challenge has ended.  So the encounter is the action sequence where Indy is frantically trying to grab the headpiece from the burning building, and then in the aftermath he looks at it and actually reads what it says and gets to think about it.  So thematically I think this approach is ok.  And we also thought that these temporary 'alliances' seem basically compatible with the theme -- in one sense we're all participating in the scene to make it exciting, in another sense our characters are perhaps temporarily cooperating to make the challenge a success but you're still trying to get maximal individual advantage out of the challenge.

One other problem was homogeneity -- everyone basically ends up with exactly the same information.  Perhaps it could be that if you get out early, you put a marker on the info you're going to claim, and anyone else who puts a marker on that same card when they get out must pay some cost to access it (or maybe they just flat out can't access it, although that probably won't work -- not enough info to go around in that case).