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.