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.