No dice

In its present form (v14!), the game requires 12 dice — three white, used in encounters and in the hubris challenge, three red used just in encounters, and three green used in the temple.  They work fairly well apart from needing to hand the green dice around in the temple and the white dice around in the hubris challenge.

Nevertheless I had a different idea for using cards resolving encounters that might be worth considering.  During the prep phase of the encounter, players ‘contribute’, which advances the market on the ‘investment’ track.  Ordinarily you get white dice equal to the value on that track divided by two.  But instead there could be, on each ‘resolution card’, a row of boxes that line up with the spaces on that track, and some of those boxes are filled with check marks.  For each check mark that’s in a box that is below the position of the marker on the investment track, you increment the success track, just as you would have done had you gotten ‘hits’ on the dice.  So for example, say a card has check marks at box 1, 3, 7 and 8.  If we as a group invested enough that we’re at 7 on the investment track, then we’d get 3 successes, whereas if we were at 8 or above then we’d get 4.  And the red dice could be handled similarly, and on the same card actually.

I think it’s possible this could speed up resolution a bit although it’s probably less intuitive and so might create some confusion or at least a learning curve.   But I think it has a few upsides.  The biggest is that these resolution cards could help sell the movie-making theme.  The idea of rolling dice to resolve encounters is a bit vague in terms of what it represents thematically.  These cards could be ‘storyboard’ cards, with storyboard art, and the idea could be that each flip of a card could be the screenplay saying what happens next.  (In a world where money was no object you’d have a separate resolution deck for each challenge type or city shape but I doubt we live in that world).  But viewing it this way, each player can also have a hand of a few of these cards, and they can be thought of as ‘script rewrites’ — you can play them to get a better outcome than what you just flipped, or to give the other players a worse outcome if you’re not currently in the encounter.

Another advantage is that it allows the investment to be more fine grained.  Currently every step of investment is worth half a die.  I don’t mind effects like this, but with these cards you could have 5 be better than 4 as opposed to being equal.  In fact you could still have effects like 5 is a little better than 4 but 6 is significantly better, and similar for 7, 6, and 8.  But that might be counter intuitive.

It turns out that the temple can be resolved with the same system and it’s actually much faster.  For each temple card, we find the number of peril symbols we have that match the temple card’s peril, then put ourselves on a track.  Then we each roll dice equal to the delta between our individual position on that track and that of the player who had the most matching symbols.  This requires handing dice around and is a bit slow.  But the resolution card approach could be quick.  Same as the encounter approach, there are a row of boxes with symbols and you line that card up with the track.  Just apply the symbols that appear between your marker and that of the highest player.

And the hubris challenge can be done similarly as well — look at the number of green cubes you hold, and apply all successes lower than that, each one eliminating a hubris.  In some ways this is a big improvement.  The hubris challenge can be really swingy.  I’ve seen times when on a given roll one player, rolling two dice, eliminated 4 hubris and another rolling three dice eliminated none.  This should even out but there may not be enough rolls for that to happen.  I can’t think of a way to do a shared dice pool if we’re all rolling different numbers of dice (roll one a t a time I guess but that’s slow) so this could really help making things fair.  There’s still luck but at least it’s not different luck for everyone.  Although perhaps in a way this is bad, as there’s no come from behind win; if you have 5 cubes and I have 4, you’re sure to get rid of as many hubris as I do.  Although we may not have the same number going in of course.

I see two downsides.  The first is that the number of cards needed to get a truly statistically ‘correct’ distribution may be impractical and we may simply have to settle for ‘the statistics are basically correct but we won’t see all possibilities that could theoretically have happened were we to have used dice’.  Maybe that’s ok.  And whether a particular card is good or bad depends on the circumstances.

The other is simply that rolling dice is fun and gives the ‘a-ha!’ moment of excitement.  I don’t know if these cards will still deliver that.

So this system offers a framework that can maybe enhance the theming, can give us more control over the statistics of outcomes, and can speed up some of the resolutions.  Possible downsides are inability to sample all of probability space and the loss of the tactile aspect of die rolling.

How to win

For as many years as this game has been under development, I think there's a question we've asked surprising few times:  what does winning represent?

I don't mean in the thematic sense, because we've certainly worried about that, and come to the conclusion that it should simply be 'the person who first retrieved the artifact'.  More recently we've appended "...and whose face didn't melt in the final hubris challenge" to that.



No, what I mean is, does the game's scoring system actually award the win to the player who played the best game?  We've worried much more about the experience the game communicates, but relatively less about whether it's 'fair', strictly speaking.

I don't know the answer to that question, surprisingly, but what I want to say is that I'm more optimistic for v14 being able to answer that in the affirmative.  Up to now, the game has just been a race.  Races are by their very nature efficiency puzzles, but v7, v10, and even v12 had some risk management sprinkled in to that.  Do you dig on partial information (perhaps a 50-50 guess) or do you wait until you have full knowledge.  Do you accept that you'll only be able to make a 50-50 guess when you get to the grail room, or do you spend more time outside the temple chasing down complete knowledge on this? 

The board got more difficult as the game progressed, and the enemy stronger, so you were encouraged to go into the temple with partial information, i.e., to try to ride the risk curve.  But viewed that way, the game was really rewarding the player who was the beneficiary of the most 50-50 guesses breaking his way.  Even if you played a 'full knowledge' strategy, you were relying on the players who played more 'guess'-based strategies to guess poorly so that you could catch up with them.  It's an interesting study in playing the odds but because our decisions didn't affect each other too much, we were really exploring this space mostly in isolation and so the results were probably really as binary as the guesses tended to be.  Devising a strategy to crack the 'puzzle', which was different each time, was a fun experience, and you could identify the turning points that decided the winner, so I think it met the standard for a game, but the highly solitaire nature of the game certainly didn't leave you with the feeling you had outperformed the other players.

In some ways I wonder if all 'multiplayer solitaire' games aren't susceptible to this criticism.  That may be a bigger subject, but at least for this game, it's a legitimate question that can be raised.

But the nature of the question gives me more enthusiasm for the v14 changes, which result in a game that is much more interactive.  In the map phase, we're collaborating in encounters, by each contributing some cards that will boost the number of dice we roll -- but when you back out, you take your contribution with you.  So, this provides brinksmanship.  In the temple phase, for a given temple card, we compare the peril symbols we've acquired via adventure cards that match that card's peril, but we can also spend valuable cubes to double the symbols on a given adventure card.  This provides some doublethink.
 To be sure, many dice are rolled in this game and therefore, much of the game's skill is risk management.  But even setting that aside, the interaction between many of the player decisions directly affects the eventual outcome of the game, but not always in calculable ways.  For example, say we're in an encounter together.  You exit while the success track is on '1'; I hang in until it's on '2'.  Say that you claim a reward I wanted, a lookup of a red temple card.  I can still look at that card, but must pay 1 time penalty.  If I do that, and then use my second reward to look at a second card, I'm up one piece of info on you, but am one space behind on the time (i.e. score) track.  Which of us is better off?  It's hard to say objectively, but certainly there's at least a difference between us.

Or say we're in the temple, and both know that the next card has the peril 'fear'.  You have 2 'fear' symbols and I have 3.  But then you choose to spend a cube to double your 2 fear symbols, forcing me to roll a die, which gives me (say) +1 on the time track.  Had you not done that, maybe you would have rolled the +1 on the time track result.  So there's a one cube swing and a 2VP swing on this decision (in the sense that time track = VP, basically).  But is that a good move?  It may be, if you don't need that cube for doubling a symbol several cards hence, where you can potentially force other players to roll two dice each, or if you don't need it to increase the number of dice you roll in the hubris challenge.  Like the map phase example, there may not be an objective answer but there's definitely a difference in our positions that results from the decision.

And in some cases that decision may itself be retroactively influenced by the decision way back in the map phase.  Maybe by staying in, I got to look at that second card, which let me know that the next card is 'obstruction', for which we each have two symbols.  Because you don't know that it's obstruction, I can use my cube to double my card, going up 4-2 on you and forcing you to roll 2 dice, for a delta of 4 VP (again assuming you roll time).  So maybe I'll spend a cube on that one as well.

Although the right decision in each circumstance may be situational, what's clear is that each player's decision affects, and is affected by, the other players.  Like most games, you don't win on the strength of a single decision, but the cumulative effect of these slight asymmetries that each decision opens up will certainly have a big impact on who ends up winning.  It should be the player who got the best outcome in more of those individual decisions in the aggregate.  And I think that's more likely to be the case when our decisions directly impact one another than when we're independently navigating risk space.  My decision to stay in in that encounter was informed by my assessment of the likelihood that you would get out.  Having to take your possible decisions into account is, to me, strictly better and more interesting than just individually determining whether to push my luck in this particular encounter or not.  And therefore, I claim that the eventual outcome of the game 'means' something more when those considerations are more prevalent.  So it's not just that interaction is more fun or more interesting -- it's that it's more interesting specifically because you can connect the outcome, the eventual winner, more directly to those interactive decisions.

Accepting incremental progress

A couple of tests of the ideas described in the last couple of posts show some promise, and after a long period of dramatic changes after every test, the core structure is stable enough to leave it intact and go into tweaking mode for a while.  (This is especially good news for me, since the last 10 iterations or so have each required pretty major component overhauls.  It would be nice to have a change that is mostly just rules instead of components!)

Not all of the ideas panned out.  The idea about only being allowed to collect cards from certain categories, reflecting your character's strengths and limitations, hasn't yet made it to playtesting.  I decided to try the less restrictive approach first and see if it worked well enough, and it did.  But it nevertheless works to think of your hand limit as 'iconic characteristics and items that are associated with your character', which can include not merely equipment but also quotes and character traits and such.

Unfortunately, the temple really did not work, in the sense that there just wasn't much dice-rolling.  This was as I had feared -- if the number of dice you roll is based on your holdings relative to the other players, then not many dice are rolled when we're all clustered in our holdings, and that was what consistently happened. 

The idea holds some promise, but it needs a tweak so that more dice are rolled.  The one I'm most interested in to have a marker (maybe representing the enemy) that starts at 1 and moves up by one each temple card (of which there are 5).  Each turn, you see how many symbols you possess that match the current temple card's peril, and place your marker at that position on the track.  Then the number of dice you roll is either the difference between your marker and that of the player with the most symbols, OR the difference between your marker and the enemy's, whichever is greater.  This adds an arc to the temple, since the enemy gets stronger and so later cards in the temple are strictly more important in the temple from a preparation standpoint.  Except!  While everyone else is viewing and preparing for those, you can view and prepare for the earlier cards, forcing the other players to take more rolls on those early cards, which gives them more noise, which has a cumulative effect.  Unless they do the same thing, in which case no one takes much damage early on but no one is very well prepared later on.  And so on.  So this arc might add some interesting decisions, perhaps.

Although shared encounters outside the temple were supposed to reduce length and tedium, they don't succeed with respect to the former.  The game still takes about 2 hours to play; ironically, a live 3p session took longer than my solo 3p session!  Latency isn't a big issue, and no one felt bored, but it still just seems like an awfully long game for what it is.  Player decisions whether to join an encounter or not, and how much to commit, and then whether to stay in or get out, and then which rewards to claim, all just take time.

I'm considering whether we might at least make all decisions simultaneous outside the temple.  Basically, choose simultaneously whether you're in for the encounter and what if any you'll contribute to it, and then choose simultaneously after each roll who is in or out.  This last is a bit closer to Diamant than I had wanted to come, but the decisions aren't informed by the same considerations as those in Diamant so maybe it's ok.  The investment decision, at least, seems ok to convert to a simultaneous decision.  My original thought in making it serial was simply that, since players will have the opportunity to back out and claim rewards in turn order, it's better for players to also invest in order so earlier players have to sweeten the pot a bit if they want later players to also join in and contribute.  We could have a compromise of this, perhaps -- the first player must be in, so perhaps he must reveal his level of commitment to the encounter, and then other players decide simultaneously based on that what they're going to do.  Not perfect but maybe quicker.  Another benefit of simultaneous decisions is simply that it's more congruent with the temple phase, in which players simultaneously decide whether to invest any cubes in the current temple card.  So if "simultaneously allocate cubes" happens in both phases, maybe that also helps make the game easier to learn. 

Needless to say this is all quite different from the v7 rules, and I'm not sure what to make of that.  The encounters do seem more immersive and suspenseful than the v7 rules, but they've required a lot of changes to the other aspects of the game to make them work in a reasonable time frame, because they eat up a lot of time.  The simplicity of the theme cards is back, though.  The one thing I guess I miss most was the ease of setup -- shuffle some piles, grab a card from each, boom, go.  But I think for features like this that we've lost, there's a lot more direct player interaction, and I think that's a net gain.  Now, as for whether it works equally well across all player counts...