Monday, November 12, 2018
Done.
Basically.
We had a 3p test at Spielbany that was interesting. With two new players and myself playing, the game took about 90 minutes. The idea to front-load the decision about where you're going to go between turns so you can execute quickly when your turn comes up didn't really work; the new players still took some time and the decisions took a while. Even so, the game took 90 minutes, and I think, were we to run it back, 75 minutes would have been easily achieved. That's about right.
I won the game handily, which almost never happens in any game I design, ever. It makes me think the game has a learning curve and that I've started to climb up it. I don't think this is bad but it does show that players don't have a great sense for how much hubris to take, how many green cubes to need, etc. There is a player aid that gives the math but the rules and the components need to do a better job providing this info and helping them to progress more quickly from figuring out what to do to preparing well for the temple. We all had decent info and preparation, but the newer players didn't bid aggressively enough in some cases, but bidding/auction games always take some experience and maybe it's similar here.
Unfortunately, neither of the other two players liked the game very much. They felt there was too much going on, but this may have been a matter of taste, and they said as much. I think changes to simplify the game further are worth contemplating, but I don't think the game is that much more complicated than v7 was, and we never felt that was too complicated. I think it would require a big redesign to simplify this to be a sub 60 minute game, and at this late stage I'm not inclined to embark on yet another major change like this. I'm more inclined to see whether, in its present form, it can find an audience (and a publisher). I just ran a 2p solo test today, and found once again that players in my solo tests are coming within a space of each other on the temple track, and are coming down to the final roll to see who wins. I think the game is therefore fairly tight.
That said, it does still need a cycle of development. I'm not sure the experience is uniform across player counts, or that there are enough cards. I'm not sure whether it's too hard to survive the temple and whether this needs to be loosened up a bit. I'm not sure the game couldn't still have a few rough edges sanded off. But to me, those are development level changes. From a design perspective, I am calling it done. After 13 years, and almost 10 years since v7, that is a good feeling.
Monday, November 5, 2018
New ideas, new decision points
A recent 3p playtest ran about 2.5 hours. The good news is that the temple was about 20 minutes of that, worked well, and, came down to the final roll. This is important. If the game is going to have a die-rolling final hubris challenge as a day-of-reckoning determination of who really wins, it had better deliver the right payoff, with the outcome uncertain until, ideally, the very last possible roll of the dice. And for each individual player, it should be a closely run thing, such that in the hubris challenge they either purge their hubris, or die of a curse, within one roll of the other happening. People who hate luck as a resolution system will hate this incarnation of the game, but if it continues to work this well the game will really deliver for the people inclined to like that sort of thing. And, so far so good.
But there's that 2 hours of map phase length that present a concern. I think the culprit is the four-phase turn, but we need all four of those things to happen (move, encounter, look at temple info, take adventure cards from a display). But each phase prompts you for a few decisions and actions, and that seems to be slowing things down too much.
Luckily we can find some savings by cutting out some rules. I like the "enemy gets stronger in the region you visit" effect and the "some randomizer determines what type of encounter you face when you decide where you're going" effects that we've had for a long time, but the fact is that the rules that police these do add some length as you comply with them. Moreover, once you find the encounter details, then you have to prepare for the encounter by paying some cards, which is a decision that takes 30 seconds or so.
We could reduce this if your cards instead lived in a permanent display. My latest thought is that you can have six cards on the table, with new cards added, once per turn, to the right end (removing a card from the display if necessary or desired).
At the start of each round, a die roll determines which challenge category will apply for each city type for this round. When you face an encounter, the leftmost three adventure cards in your row add 2 to your investment for each that matches the challenge category, and the next three cards, one each. You can further invest by taking hubris, but the reaction to which category you face, and the associated decision about which cards to 'play' have mostly been made between turns. This helps speed things up. I like it so far.
But there's a neat consideration that it reveals, that I don't think the game has previously had. Adventure cards all have two symbols, some combination of challenge symbols (luck, fights, escape, wits, needed for the encounters outside the temple), peril symbols (heat, fear, obstruction, climb, react, and puzzle), and effect symbols (bomb, secret door). The goal in the map phase is to know what perils await you so you can have cards in your display with those perils.
Mirroring the map phase, peril symbols in your three leftmost cards of your display count double. But, you only add one card per turn in the map phase, and always to the right end. This presents a timing issue. You have to make the decision of when to start introducing those peril cards so as to give them time to 'float' to the left of the row so they can count double in the temple, but this may mean discarding, or at the least not introducing, cards with challenge symbols, and/or discarding cards with peril symbols that you're not yet sure about. It also means putting information out publicly about what you think the temple contains; people can cue off of that. Sure, you can bluff but the game is pretty short for that kind of thing. You can hold cards back, but the hand limit will be brutally small (1-2 cards max), really limiting your ability to be covert, and again you don't have time to wait forever to put cards into play, even if you don't want others to know what you know.
Thus there's this whole new problem of symbol management and getting ready to go into the temple vs. continuing to get information. This transition between phases has been present in the game obliquely all the way back to v7, but with this new system it's achieved in a nice way. I like that, even in a game that's in a late stage, we're still discovering new ideas that emerge from the systems. Originally the game was about giving players the tools to parse an information puzzle. It was simple and straightforward. Now I think it's emerging as still pretty simple, possibly even simpler than it was, yet also offering some subtle considerations and genuinely new ideas in the form of this card display and in the penalty draft-bid in the temple. We'll see if these come through for the players.
The previous post also mentioned the order problem in the temple. In the live test the other day, we played that last-in-line chooses penalty cards first, and actually this works very nicely. The player who's trailing gets first choice of what penalty to incur, the person who is leading gets to see what everyone else has bid before committing a bid. With the added change that all of your adventure cards are on the table in front of you, this means that if the leading player has seen the peril card, then they have essentially perfect information on which to base their bid decision. (I'm toying with the idea of whether players should be allowed to drop a card into the row from their hands; I'm not sure there's a non-fiddly way to implement this though). Thus, each position has its own advantages and disadvantages, an inverse correlation between the amount of choice and knowledge that the player has. I think this is balanced nicely.
But! What I'm finding is that in many cases, you simply cannot choose to invest on any of the remaining penalty cards, however much you might wish to, because you already have too much hubris, or too few green cubes, or whatever. Yes, yes, you could have prepared better for the temple, but still, this nice bidding system is only nice if you can actually take advantage of it. The best solution I've come up with is to add some extra spaces onto the temple track where you can go off the main track to get a green cube (helps purge hubris) or purge a curse or whatever. These come at the expense of forward movement in the temple, which you need to make to be able to win, but they help you to not die, which you also need to do to be able to win, and it may be that by having more ways to avoid death, players will be freed to be a bit more aggressive in the bidding. Of course just making it harder to die is also an option, but currently it seems to be that about 1/3 of players die each game, which feels about right. Any less and the game would feel too easy; any more and it will feel like just surviving is more important than making forward progress.
But there's that 2 hours of map phase length that present a concern. I think the culprit is the four-phase turn, but we need all four of those things to happen (move, encounter, look at temple info, take adventure cards from a display). But each phase prompts you for a few decisions and actions, and that seems to be slowing things down too much.
Luckily we can find some savings by cutting out some rules. I like the "enemy gets stronger in the region you visit" effect and the "some randomizer determines what type of encounter you face when you decide where you're going" effects that we've had for a long time, but the fact is that the rules that police these do add some length as you comply with them. Moreover, once you find the encounter details, then you have to prepare for the encounter by paying some cards, which is a decision that takes 30 seconds or so.
We could reduce this if your cards instead lived in a permanent display. My latest thought is that you can have six cards on the table, with new cards added, once per turn, to the right end (removing a card from the display if necessary or desired).
At the start of each round, a die roll determines which challenge category will apply for each city type for this round. When you face an encounter, the leftmost three adventure cards in your row add 2 to your investment for each that matches the challenge category, and the next three cards, one each. You can further invest by taking hubris, but the reaction to which category you face, and the associated decision about which cards to 'play' have mostly been made between turns. This helps speed things up. I like it so far.
But there's a neat consideration that it reveals, that I don't think the game has previously had. Adventure cards all have two symbols, some combination of challenge symbols (luck, fights, escape, wits, needed for the encounters outside the temple), peril symbols (heat, fear, obstruction, climb, react, and puzzle), and effect symbols (bomb, secret door). The goal in the map phase is to know what perils await you so you can have cards in your display with those perils.
Mirroring the map phase, peril symbols in your three leftmost cards of your display count double. But, you only add one card per turn in the map phase, and always to the right end. This presents a timing issue. You have to make the decision of when to start introducing those peril cards so as to give them time to 'float' to the left of the row so they can count double in the temple, but this may mean discarding, or at the least not introducing, cards with challenge symbols, and/or discarding cards with peril symbols that you're not yet sure about. It also means putting information out publicly about what you think the temple contains; people can cue off of that. Sure, you can bluff but the game is pretty short for that kind of thing. You can hold cards back, but the hand limit will be brutally small (1-2 cards max), really limiting your ability to be covert, and again you don't have time to wait forever to put cards into play, even if you don't want others to know what you know.
Thus there's this whole new problem of symbol management and getting ready to go into the temple vs. continuing to get information. This transition between phases has been present in the game obliquely all the way back to v7, but with this new system it's achieved in a nice way. I like that, even in a game that's in a late stage, we're still discovering new ideas that emerge from the systems. Originally the game was about giving players the tools to parse an information puzzle. It was simple and straightforward. Now I think it's emerging as still pretty simple, possibly even simpler than it was, yet also offering some subtle considerations and genuinely new ideas in the form of this card display and in the penalty draft-bid in the temple. We'll see if these come through for the players.
The previous post also mentioned the order problem in the temple. In the live test the other day, we played that last-in-line chooses penalty cards first, and actually this works very nicely. The player who's trailing gets first choice of what penalty to incur, the person who is leading gets to see what everyone else has bid before committing a bid. With the added change that all of your adventure cards are on the table in front of you, this means that if the leading player has seen the peril card, then they have essentially perfect information on which to base their bid decision. (I'm toying with the idea of whether players should be allowed to drop a card into the row from their hands; I'm not sure there's a non-fiddly way to implement this though). Thus, each position has its own advantages and disadvantages, an inverse correlation between the amount of choice and knowledge that the player has. I think this is balanced nicely.
But! What I'm finding is that in many cases, you simply cannot choose to invest on any of the remaining penalty cards, however much you might wish to, because you already have too much hubris, or too few green cubes, or whatever. Yes, yes, you could have prepared better for the temple, but still, this nice bidding system is only nice if you can actually take advantage of it. The best solution I've come up with is to add some extra spaces onto the temple track where you can go off the main track to get a green cube (helps purge hubris) or purge a curse or whatever. These come at the expense of forward movement in the temple, which you need to make to be able to win, but they help you to not die, which you also need to do to be able to win, and it may be that by having more ways to avoid death, players will be freed to be a bit more aggressive in the bidding. Of course just making it harder to die is also an option, but currently it seems to be that about 1/3 of players die each game, which feels about right. Any less and the game would feel too easy; any more and it will feel like just surviving is more important than making forward progress.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Three question marks and one known issue
I'm going to be optimistic and posit that the latest design, v16.1, is testing well enough that it's going to emerge as the final version of the game, or at least, a final version. But we'll certainly need a cycle of development to get all the way across the finish line, as there are still three things that need to be refined, and one issue to address.
First, the issue: bad rolling can leave a player skunked, and this is unfun. It should be rare to be skunked for the whole game, but it will happen. How to address? One option is giving out some reroll tokens during setup, or maybe "script rewrite" cards that have special effects to mitigate bad luck. Another is to add a third die to the encounter, the green die. You can subsitute the green die for the white die (or maybe, either die?) at the cost of taking one hubris. This prompts players for more decisions, which I dislike, but it may be worth a try.
Now, the three questions.
First, what happens when the enemy reaches you in an encounter? The first answer was "it ends the encounter, and you get info or cards, but not both". This worked but was pretty punitive. The latest answer is "they steal an adventure card from the display, and your next reroll is at -1". This also works, but results in the enemy really piling up a lot of cards.
I'm really not sure what to do here that isn't fiddly. Another idea is "they put a cube on a space on the temple track, and the enemy pawn can 'skip over' that space". Some alternating between this and stealing cards would be nice, but how to govern which is the thing that happens? Some clarity for what the enemy does is needed.
Second, how to balance cards and time? Currently you spend time to get adventure cards, each of which are played twice, from hand to table and from table to discard. This works well but does lead to some card-hoarding. A hand limit would help this but is inelegant. We might try something that emulates the previous system, which had a player mat. Maybe it's that you can have, say, 3 cards on the table in front of you, and these are your "fixed" character attributes. These can be freely used without discarding. It costs one time to move a card to the table to make it a fixed attribute, and you must discard a card from the table if you already have three. Any other card can be played once from your hand and discarded.
Thus you'll want to shift your display over time from challenge symbols (which help in the map phase) to peril symbols (which help in the temple phase).
Third, how to resolve the temple perils? I like the draft/bid mechanic previously proposed, but it has a seat order effect, whereby choosing first gives an advantage, in that you're less likely to get stuck with a penalty that you really don't want. So, who gets to choose first? First in line (runaway leader?) or last in line (too easy to catch up?)? A different approach is the subject of a future post, in which you don't claim the penalty cards exclusively, so more than one person can go in on a particular penalty. This could alleviate the seat order issue but also removes some of the fun of the draft: it is pleasant to be able to stick someone with something that they don't want, it's just a question of whether it's the leader, or the trailing player, who should be getting stuck with that something.
I think these can also be solved, maybe easily, but I may be too close to the design at this point to be the one to solve them. Luckily, I think they're all issues of balance and optimization for experience, and not so much core structural design considerations. Some further testing might make some headway, but if not a developer should be able to resolve them.
Friday, October 5, 2018
A bid mechanic for another day
I thought of a tweak to the current draft/bid mechanic from the temple that probably would be too slow to work as a temple system, but it is potentially interesting.
The problem with the draft is the problem with every draft, the seat order problem: who gets to draft first, and in what order do we resolve? If it's furthest forward in the temple, that could lead to a runaway leader problem; furthest back, inadequate incentive to bid aggressively. And what about when players are on the same space? All of these can be worked out, but I had a thought for a different but similar mechanic that sidesteps some of them.
Before each bid, several penalty cards are laid out, each specifying a particular type of penalty.
Go around in clockwise order. On your turn, either add a cube to a penalty card of your choice, or fold. When you fold, claim any penalty card, and incur the penalty shown on the card in an amount equal to the cubes on the card. The number of cubes on your card are your initial bid. Continue until everyone folds.
This is then supplemented with cards in hand that match the current peril, in the usual way. Highest total bid moves furthest, and then down the line, in the usual way.
I like the potential brinksmanship of this system. You're sort of playing multiple games of chicken with the other players simultaneously. In the current system, you're taking the card of those that are left that you can best tolerate, and are trying to stick the players after you with a card that's bad for them. In this system you're trying to poison the penalty you can best tolerate for all players but yourself, and/or are trying to poison the suits they are going to pick so they don't get off scot-free, except doing so strengthens their bids, and also you don't want to poison your preferred suit too much, but oh by the way the more pain you take the higher your bid and you want to bid high. I think it could be a fun challenge.
(A different take: there could be a penalty card between each pair of players, and you can add to any card that touches you, so you're literally playing chicken against one specific player with each card; when you fold, the other player who shared that card with you has one less option).
My concern is that this would be too slow, but maybe it speeds up if each round of bidding you must place an additional cube. (So one in the 1st round, 2 in the second, and so on).
I could see an entire game being built around this idea but I'm not sure what it should be about; key would be to have something interesting that you're bidding for, and some interesting but asymmetric penalty currencies. Otherwise it's just resources you're losing, but if one currency was "how many cards you can hold" and another was "how many cubes you can play", and so on, losing different things would feel painful in different ways. The penalty currencies in Lost Adventures have this, fortunately, and each penalty you take is fairly painful, or at least risky.
The problem with the draft is the problem with every draft, the seat order problem: who gets to draft first, and in what order do we resolve? If it's furthest forward in the temple, that could lead to a runaway leader problem; furthest back, inadequate incentive to bid aggressively. And what about when players are on the same space? All of these can be worked out, but I had a thought for a different but similar mechanic that sidesteps some of them.
Before each bid, several penalty cards are laid out, each specifying a particular type of penalty.
Go around in clockwise order. On your turn, either add a cube to a penalty card of your choice, or fold. When you fold, claim any penalty card, and incur the penalty shown on the card in an amount equal to the cubes on the card. The number of cubes on your card are your initial bid. Continue until everyone folds.
This is then supplemented with cards in hand that match the current peril, in the usual way. Highest total bid moves furthest, and then down the line, in the usual way.
I like the potential brinksmanship of this system. You're sort of playing multiple games of chicken with the other players simultaneously. In the current system, you're taking the card of those that are left that you can best tolerate, and are trying to stick the players after you with a card that's bad for them. In this system you're trying to poison the penalty you can best tolerate for all players but yourself, and/or are trying to poison the suits they are going to pick so they don't get off scot-free, except doing so strengthens their bids, and also you don't want to poison your preferred suit too much, but oh by the way the more pain you take the higher your bid and you want to bid high. I think it could be a fun challenge.
(A different take: there could be a penalty card between each pair of players, and you can add to any card that touches you, so you're literally playing chicken against one specific player with each card; when you fold, the other player who shared that card with you has one less option).
My concern is that this would be too slow, but maybe it speeds up if each round of bidding you must place an additional cube. (So one in the 1st round, 2 in the second, and so on).
I could see an entire game being built around this idea but I'm not sure what it should be about; key would be to have something interesting that you're bidding for, and some interesting but asymmetric penalty currencies. Otherwise it's just resources you're losing, but if one currency was "how many cards you can hold" and another was "how many cubes you can play", and so on, losing different things would feel painful in different ways. The penalty currencies in Lost Adventures have this, fortunately, and each penalty you take is fairly painful, or at least risky.
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Some feedback
Just for fun, I entered the game in the Board Game Workshop design contest this past month. This one is a doozy: the opening round was a 2 minute video pitch about the game. This is definitely not my strong suit and I don't think I nailed it by any stretch! I can teach the full game in about 10 minutes, but still, talking about the two phases in detail in just two minutes proved challenging, so I elected to just cover some of the key features, namely: encounters, and how the enemy moving toward you creates suspense; temple, how we're clustered together and jockeying position using information from the map phase; hubris, how it makes some things easier but we have to reckon with it in the end.
Below I've posted what the judges thought (judges' names removed where they were provided). Needless to say, as befits the contest there's plenty that's said about the video itself, which clearly has room for improvement, but I think some useful thoughts about the game come through as well.
To make this more interesting I'll respond/react to two of the comments in particular.
One judge mentioned a concern that this game could end up being too similar to Eldritch Horror. I wasn't familiar with that game previously, but just had a look at its BGG entry, and it does sound like there is a lot of "move somewhere, roll some dice to resolve encounters, do what the cards say". But it's clear to me that there are significant differences (which of course the judge couldn't have known). As far as I can tell, EH is similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill is similar to Fortune and Glory is similar to Arabian Nights: in all of these you face encounters that are atmospheric, but that put together assemble a hodge-podge mish-mash that doesn't create anything like a coherent story.
Now I don't think the encounter cards in Lost Adventures self-assemble into a coherent story either, but nevertheless there's a high degree of coherency that comes from the temple itself. Those other games feature encounters that are serial in nature, and so each should feel like it is the extension of the previous thing. In contrast, in Lost Adventures, we have a hub-and-spokes model of coherency. Maybe in Anakra you get "The graveyard is deserted; your contact isn't here as they said they would be" and then in Budapest it's "you are trapped in a room of the castle that overlooks a high cliff, can you find the secret exit?". Taken serially, those aren't ipso facto part of the same story, but they nevertheless feel harmonious when you think of each encounter as a spoke that connects to the bigger hub of aggregate knowledge about the temple. Thus each one is "I'm trying to locate this one person or item who can tell me something about the overall story". They're parts of a bigger whole. I don't think it gives anything like the feeling of random atmospheric stuff being thrown like "oh, some bats just flew by. Now I discovered a strange symbol on the floor. Now there's some howling. Now the lights just went out" stuff that sets a mood but doesn't go anywhere.
Another mentioned a concern that this subject is 'colonialist'. I won't comment on the validity of this concern in general, but as pertains specifically to Lost Adventures, I'd say that making this a game about an archaeology movie actually sidesteps this concern nicely. In movies of this type, the hero's quest is noble: Indy is trying to stop the Nazis/rescue some kids/find his father; Lara Croft (new movie, anyway) is trying to find her father; the Goonies are trying to save their neighborhood. Yes, pitching the game as competitive does make it a bit like a forturne-and-glory quest, but the inclusion of hubris, and the final hubris challenge, make it clear that impure motives are punished by the powers that be.
Below I've posted what the judges thought (judges' names removed where they were provided). Needless to say, as befits the contest there's plenty that's said about the video itself, which clearly has room for improvement, but I think some useful thoughts about the game come through as well.
To make this more interesting I'll respond/react to two of the comments in particular.
One judge mentioned a concern that this game could end up being too similar to Eldritch Horror. I wasn't familiar with that game previously, but just had a look at its BGG entry, and it does sound like there is a lot of "move somewhere, roll some dice to resolve encounters, do what the cards say". But it's clear to me that there are significant differences (which of course the judge couldn't have known). As far as I can tell, EH is similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill is similar to Fortune and Glory is similar to Arabian Nights: in all of these you face encounters that are atmospheric, but that put together assemble a hodge-podge mish-mash that doesn't create anything like a coherent story.
Now I don't think the encounter cards in Lost Adventures self-assemble into a coherent story either, but nevertheless there's a high degree of coherency that comes from the temple itself. Those other games feature encounters that are serial in nature, and so each should feel like it is the extension of the previous thing. In contrast, in Lost Adventures, we have a hub-and-spokes model of coherency. Maybe in Anakra you get "The graveyard is deserted; your contact isn't here as they said they would be" and then in Budapest it's "you are trapped in a room of the castle that overlooks a high cliff, can you find the secret exit?". Taken serially, those aren't ipso facto part of the same story, but they nevertheless feel harmonious when you think of each encounter as a spoke that connects to the bigger hub of aggregate knowledge about the temple. Thus each one is "I'm trying to locate this one person or item who can tell me something about the overall story". They're parts of a bigger whole. I don't think it gives anything like the feeling of random atmospheric stuff being thrown like "oh, some bats just flew by. Now I discovered a strange symbol on the floor. Now there's some howling. Now the lights just went out" stuff that sets a mood but doesn't go anywhere.
Another mentioned a concern that this subject is 'colonialist'. I won't comment on the validity of this concern in general, but as pertains specifically to Lost Adventures, I'd say that making this a game about an archaeology movie actually sidesteps this concern nicely. In movies of this type, the hero's quest is noble: Indy is trying to stop the Nazis/rescue some kids/find his father; Lara Croft (new movie, anyway) is trying to find her father; the Goonies are trying to save their neighborhood. Yes, pitching the game as competitive does make it a bit like a forturne-and-glory quest, but the inclusion of hubris, and the final hubris challenge, make it clear that impure motives are punished by the powers that be.
Game: Lost Adventures Your theme is interesting, and some of the decision making looks interesting as well. However, I don't really know how it plays from the video, I just know a little bit about a few mechanics. --------------- Game: Lost Adventures The theme of the game sounds not exactly like other games but similar. Based off the theme I am not entirely excited by the game. I am excited by the idea of trying to be the first, but your character won't retain the artifact in the end so you have hubris as a resource. I found that to be pretty interesting. I worry about replayability and how much variety this game will offer players if each game ends the same way, but I think I need to see and know more about the game to make that judgement. So far it sounds interesting! Best of luck. --------------- Game: Lost Adventures The meta theme of making a movie about an adventure is a really compelling idea to me. I love the way that you distilled ideas down & your explanation of your design decisions was fantastic! I really want to give this one a try! --------------- Game: Lost Adventures Love the idea of the game, but I'm not quite sure how distinct it'll be from a "go to place, have encounter, roll dice" game like Eldritch Horror (among others). Hubris is a great mechanism, but I worry that most of the game will be determined by a "go to place, roll dice" pattern. Interested to see how much the bidding plays a part. --------------- Game: Lost Adventures Lost Adventures seems like a fun, fast playing game. I'm especially intrigued by the framing of 'who gets to be the protagonist' I think that's a very creative solution to a very old problem. My main questions are how individual turns play out, the specific nature of threats, and other minutiae that i understand you didn't have time to cover in the pitch. The main thing though is that I feel like the adventure archaeology thing is perhaps a little too colonialist for me. seeking lost temples and acquiring artifacts seems harmless in the context of our favorite childhood action films and video games but I think perpetuates a line of thought that says ancient peoples and their culture are simply for fun and plunder. A bank heist theme a la Ocean's 11 or an action hero movie in the vein of Mad Max Fury Road or Terminator might preserve the format and structure of the game while avoiding harmful tropes. Nevertheless I wish Lost Adventures all the best and I hope to see more! --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I really like the concept of the game, particularly how a player can build hubris doing move powerful effects but must remove it to not lose to their own hubris. The description and video did little to inform me how the game actually played, though. --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I love the idea of basically making this meta-narrative around an Indiana Jones move as a game, but what I found lacking is what we as players actually do in a turn. I hear talk of phases and hubris tokens, but not what I actually do in a phase or what the hubris tokens actually affect. In other words: I still have no idea what kind of game I am looking at! It seems like a really cool and engaging concept, but as I am lacking context in terms of the actual game, all of it falls very flat. --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I liked your initial description of the theme, but then your description of the gameplay didn't seem to fit with that theme. It sounds like players are really acting as the characters fighting the bad guy, not screenwriters. Gameplay seems to be all about how successful individual characters are in their goals, not things like how much screen time the characters get. (Not to mention that screenplays aren't written character by character, with different writers jockeying for different characters to do better.) Do you really *need* the screenwriting part? Wouldn't it be more compelling and immersive to say that players are each taking on the role of a character in an archaeology adventure movie? I'm intrigued by the hubris mechanic and would like to hear more about that. --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I like the theme. It is an underdeveloped area of design I think. Is the game semi co-op or competitive? What advantage is there to taking on hubris? How does the risk vs reward play out in that area? --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I like the 'push your luck' element, both in the bad guy approaching in the over-world, and needing to shed hubris in the temple. The main thing I would like to know more about is the overall groove of the game. Is it a race game? Where we are judging how ready we are to enter the temple? Or do we have a set amount of time to collect sets (for example) to prep for the temple phase. And our ability there sets us up to do well or not in the temple phase? --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I genuinely appreciate that the game starts with research, its a fun addition to the story. You mention action movies, but I'm not quite sure if that's the meta of the game or just the way you've described it. Good luck! --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I don't think I got a really good sense of the flow of the game. When you're pitching, at least for me, I want to know how a turn works and how that turn is a larger part of the overall game. I appreciate the end-to-end description of it, but I think I got too much of a high-level look at the encounters / hubris / the enemy without a sense of how it all fits together. That said, I do love the theme (and your spin on it), so I'd be interested in finding out more about it down the line. --------------- Game: Lost Adventures I appreciate that the theme and mechanics go hand-in-hand -- what happens during each player's turn seems very intuitive. The pitch video was great and I hope to learn more about the game in the next round.
Monday, September 17, 2018
Frankly and accused
In the German games era of board gaming, German games were in German and English-speaking players had to rely on English translations to play these games. These translations were evidently not always done by native English speakers, and one particularly memorable mis-translation that became part of our group's lingo was that cards held in the player's hand were "frankly" and cards played onto the table were "accused". We started using these terms in pretty much every other game where the distinction between these two states was important, and were surprised at how completely indispensible they were. How else do you describe cards in the hand vs. cards on the table? "In the hand" and "on the table", I suppose, but "frankly" and "accused" are big wins both in terms of their economy as well as their slightly quirky English usage; these are odd choices, but they are oddly correct. I'm glad to this day to have played whatever game it was that introduced us to this fun lingo.
I am thinking about this in the aftermath of a mostly successful solo test for v16. I recently adopted a rule that lets you play each adventure card twice, once from the hand to the table and once from the table to the discard pile. But in this last version, this rule only applied in the map phase; in the temple phase, everyone lays all of their adventure cards on the table and they stay there for the whole phase. You can play any adventure card in the map phase to get a boost in an encounter you face, and so, for cards that you plan to use in the temple, there's no reason not to play them in the map phase. Whether you play them in the map phase or not, as long as you don't use them more than once, they'll stay on the table and be useable for the whole temple phase. Thus it's a no-brainer to use them once in the map phase, and no-brainers are rarely desirable.
Hold that thought while we go into the temple for a moment. In the temple, there are five perils and there’s what essentially amounts to a closed-fist bid on each, with higher bids earning the right to move furthest through the temple. Your bid is paid in a currency revealed by the threat card, and it's something bad that you incur: time, hubris, injuries (but having the right adventure cards for the peril in question reduces the penalty you incur). While this works as a way of generating suspense in the bid, it's weird to not know with what currency you're bidding. And closed-fist bids are always a little heavy on guessing, although I don't mind that too much.
But anyway, these considerations led me to think about a hybrid draft-bid. We go around the table and each draft a card that shows the type of penalty we're willing to incur, and place some cubes on that card indicating how much of that penalty we'll take; each cube adds 1 to your bid.(*) Then, reveal the peril and play cards matching the peril, with each match boosting your bid by 1. Then, resolve movement in order of highest total bid.
So, your ability to bid well is helped by knowing in advance what the peril is and having acquired the right cards that match that peril. You wouldn't want to take a lot of penalties for a bid when you're already well prepared for that card's peril, so knowledge helps you. Seeing how many cubes the other players are bidding is helpful as well, but it only tells you part of the story of what they're bidding. This brings us back to the frankly/accused stuff. Say you play a card with two "heat" symbols on it in the map phase to help you with some encounter. But now, in the temple phase, that card is on the table, and so, if the next temple peril is "heat", anyone who knows that knows that your bid isn't just "3" from the 3 cubes you allocated to the penalty card you chose, it's (at least) 5, the sum of those cubes and the two heat symbols you have on display. This adds an interplayer dimension to the information game that may make this two-step bid more exciting, because we're trying to bid based on what we think the opponents have and what we think they know.(**)
(*) Thematically this seems to work better in the conception of the players as screenwriters as opposed to adventurers. We're having a writers' session, and declaring what our characters will endure -- "Oh yeah? My character will take 3 hubris for this scene"; I mean that's not a conversation an actual screenwriter would have but the point is the mechanical aspect correlates to a real-world situation. If we, the players, were also the characters, a system where we're jockeying for place would probably need to be much more about direct conflict, as in I push you off the bridge, I draw the luger and point it at you, etc. The way we previously avoided direct conflict, keeping it to a secondary element, was by making the temple exploration-based. But that had other problems.
(**) Technically you draft adventure cards from an open display so in theory if you're watching what other people draw you have accurate knowledge of what they have. This gets to the perennial hidden-trackable-information debate. My strong feeling is that this game, with its thematic trapping and dice-based resolution mechanics, won't appeal to the kind of people who claim to know players who can perfectly track everyone else's information, so I am honestly not planning to even worry about this concern at this point. This game can be enjoyed perfectly well by we mere mortals!
There are some other little things that need to be looked at as a result of this session, but overall I'm optimistic that the core elements of the design are intact and that by a few cycles of shuffling little things around and fiddling with costs, this might converge to a game that's ready for a cycle of balancing and then call it done. Maybe...
I am thinking about this in the aftermath of a mostly successful solo test for v16. I recently adopted a rule that lets you play each adventure card twice, once from the hand to the table and once from the table to the discard pile. But in this last version, this rule only applied in the map phase; in the temple phase, everyone lays all of their adventure cards on the table and they stay there for the whole phase. You can play any adventure card in the map phase to get a boost in an encounter you face, and so, for cards that you plan to use in the temple, there's no reason not to play them in the map phase. Whether you play them in the map phase or not, as long as you don't use them more than once, they'll stay on the table and be useable for the whole temple phase. Thus it's a no-brainer to use them once in the map phase, and no-brainers are rarely desirable.
Hold that thought while we go into the temple for a moment. In the temple, there are five perils and there’s what essentially amounts to a closed-fist bid on each, with higher bids earning the right to move furthest through the temple. Your bid is paid in a currency revealed by the threat card, and it's something bad that you incur: time, hubris, injuries (but having the right adventure cards for the peril in question reduces the penalty you incur). While this works as a way of generating suspense in the bid, it's weird to not know with what currency you're bidding. And closed-fist bids are always a little heavy on guessing, although I don't mind that too much.
But anyway, these considerations led me to think about a hybrid draft-bid. We go around the table and each draft a card that shows the type of penalty we're willing to incur, and place some cubes on that card indicating how much of that penalty we'll take; each cube adds 1 to your bid.(*) Then, reveal the peril and play cards matching the peril, with each match boosting your bid by 1. Then, resolve movement in order of highest total bid.
So, your ability to bid well is helped by knowing in advance what the peril is and having acquired the right cards that match that peril. You wouldn't want to take a lot of penalties for a bid when you're already well prepared for that card's peril, so knowledge helps you. Seeing how many cubes the other players are bidding is helpful as well, but it only tells you part of the story of what they're bidding. This brings us back to the frankly/accused stuff. Say you play a card with two "heat" symbols on it in the map phase to help you with some encounter. But now, in the temple phase, that card is on the table, and so, if the next temple peril is "heat", anyone who knows that knows that your bid isn't just "3" from the 3 cubes you allocated to the penalty card you chose, it's (at least) 5, the sum of those cubes and the two heat symbols you have on display. This adds an interplayer dimension to the information game that may make this two-step bid more exciting, because we're trying to bid based on what we think the opponents have and what we think they know.(**)
(*) Thematically this seems to work better in the conception of the players as screenwriters as opposed to adventurers. We're having a writers' session, and declaring what our characters will endure -- "Oh yeah? My character will take 3 hubris for this scene"; I mean that's not a conversation an actual screenwriter would have but the point is the mechanical aspect correlates to a real-world situation. If we, the players, were also the characters, a system where we're jockeying for place would probably need to be much more about direct conflict, as in I push you off the bridge, I draw the luger and point it at you, etc. The way we previously avoided direct conflict, keeping it to a secondary element, was by making the temple exploration-based. But that had other problems.
(**) Technically you draft adventure cards from an open display so in theory if you're watching what other people draw you have accurate knowledge of what they have. This gets to the perennial hidden-trackable-information debate. My strong feeling is that this game, with its thematic trapping and dice-based resolution mechanics, won't appeal to the kind of people who claim to know players who can perfectly track everyone else's information, so I am honestly not planning to even worry about this concern at this point. This game can be enjoyed perfectly well by we mere mortals!
There are some other little things that need to be looked at as a result of this session, but overall I'm optimistic that the core elements of the design are intact and that by a few cycles of shuffling little things around and fiddling with costs, this might converge to a game that's ready for a cycle of balancing and then call it done. Maybe...
Friday, August 31, 2018
Thinkiness, a somewhat recent addition to Lost Adventures
I'm proud of what we accomplished with v7; it was a complete, publishable game that unfortunately just didn't get in front of a publisher who wanted to run with it. I think we succeeded in two important ways: we found a way to implement the information puzzle in a satisfying physical and mechanical way, and we captured the right feeling of mounting tension and urgency through the enemy zeal concept.
At the same time, we didn't worry terribly much about the decision space or the competitive space of the game, and as a result I don't think it was terribly deep. I don't think that's a bad thing at all. But in thinking about v16, I think I can see quite a lot of considerations and counter-considerations that emerge from the four 'negative currencies': hubris, time, injuries, and curses.(*) And that's what this post is about.
Starting at the end: you can't win if you don't survive to the end, and most importantly that means you must purge all of your hubris in the final challenge. To do that you'll need green cubes. If you have 7 green cubes (the max) you can purge about 16 hubris over the challenge's five rolls of the white die. If you acquired less than 16 hubris, you might be able to get away with fewer green cubes, which you like, since each cube you claim helps your opponents in a small way.
Except there's another consideration: you also must roll the black die and compare to the number of curses you hold. 'Bad' rolls cost you injuries, and if you peg the injury track you die. Depending on how many curses you've acquired and how much damage you took during the temple phase, maybe you can survive all five rolls but maybe that's a close call. If you will only be able to survive a couple of rolls, you'll want to have more green cubes or fewer hubris, so as to purge your hubris in fewer rolls and exit the hubris challenge earlier.(**)
Now, you'll say that you can mitigate this concern by just taking fewer curses, and one way to avoid them is to have perfect knowledge of, e.g., the true grail. But temple card lookups are hard to come by and you probably can't look at all of them, so looking for grail information may mean you have fewer opportunities to obtain knowledge about the temple perils. (Of course, you can get more lookups by investing more heavily in encounters, but that requires either taking on hubris or playing adventure cards, which require time to acquire.) Anyway, better advance knowledge about the perils gives you the ability to acquire the right equipment and to know that it's the right equipment. So, when a given peril comes up, and you know what it is, and that you're prepared for it, you can invest (bid) accordingly. For perils you don't know, you have to bid more conservatively or else accept that your bids may incur penalties (hubris, damage, or time).
This brings us back to the hubris challenge, because your exposure to risk depends on how many injuries and how much hubris you took due to these bids. But from a game-winningness perspective, that's not the only thing you care about. Mere survival doesn't win the day. If it did, those conservative bids would be perfectly fine. But low bids ensure only that you'll move very little across the temple track, and the surviving player furthest to the right on that track is the game's winner. (Sure, you can play it safe and hope that everyone else dies, except that you might still be to the left of the enemy pawn, and thus you'll still lose).
What makes the bidding particularly difficult and, frankly, nasty, is that you don't know until after bidding what type of penalty a particular card deals out. So there's another level of deciding whether to play it safe or go for it: if, say, you have a lot of hubris and are close to the end of the time track, but have few injuries, can you get away with a high bid? You can if the penalty for this card happens to be "injury", but if it ends up being "hubris", you may put yourself in a tough spot. So do you go for it or bid safely?
What makes the bidding particularly difficult and, frankly, nasty, is that you don't know until after bidding what type of penalty a particular card deals out. So there's another level of deciding whether to play it safe or go for it: if, say, you have a lot of hubris and are close to the end of the time track, but have few injuries, can you get away with a high bid? You can if the penalty for this card happens to be "injury", but if it ends up being "hubris", you may put yourself in a tough spot. So do you go for it or bid safely?
Thus the competition against the other players is what creates, indeed what has to create, the urge to be more aggressive than you'd otherwise prefer to be. But the way I've presented things above is slightly misleading, because once the temple starts, and once the hubris challenge starts, what you've got is what you've got. You can't get more green cubes to shore up for the extra hubris you've acquired, nor can you take on fewer curses to counteract the risk from the injuries you took as a result of reckless bidding. Certainly, going into the temple you know how many green cubes you have and you know what you know, so you know a bit about your exposure to risk, but if you overextend yourself, there's no going back to fix it. I like games like this but new players may not enjoy flaming out, although it usually won't happen until almost the end of the game.
Because of all of these considerations and the interplay between them, I think we have a nice challenge for the players that isn't just a puzzle, but neither is it an insoluble exercise in fatalism. I think the game is about managing your exposure to risk, and doing this more effectively than the other players. I'm not sure that's what we set out to do, but I think it's a good place for it to end up.
(*) But do we need all of these currencies? v7 has none of them, after all. Why four? They were added sequentially. First (v11 I think) came time/injuries, a hybrid currency that represented the total amount of stuff you could do, but getting hit by the enemy or the temple cut into this. These separated when time became your film's "running time" as a thematic nod, in v13. You can run out of screen time or your character can die, Late in v13 came the huris concept. Curses are a minor thing that emerged in v14 as a solution to the problem of what bad thing happens to you if you drink from the wrong grail? Obvious answer used to be "lose time/take injuries", but I liked the idea that it gives some risk in the hubris challenge. Now that the hubris challenge is resolved with dice, it's a perfect solution for how that second die can do you harm in a way that scales with how many curses you have. A developer could maybe merge a couple of these concepts to reduce the number of currencies but for now I like the dynamics that emerge from having all four.
(**) This is in a sense a dynamic balance: it's not a question of how much hubris or how many green cubes you have, but the ratio between them. My game Sands of Time has this same principle, where what matters is the ratio of your resource production to your unrest level. So getting unrest down is good, but getting it down lower than you need to is actually inefficient.
(*) But do we need all of these currencies? v7 has none of them, after all. Why four? They were added sequentially. First (v11 I think) came time/injuries, a hybrid currency that represented the total amount of stuff you could do, but getting hit by the enemy or the temple cut into this. These separated when time became your film's "running time" as a thematic nod, in v13. You can run out of screen time or your character can die, Late in v13 came the huris concept. Curses are a minor thing that emerged in v14 as a solution to the problem of what bad thing happens to you if you drink from the wrong grail? Obvious answer used to be "lose time/take injuries", but I liked the idea that it gives some risk in the hubris challenge. Now that the hubris challenge is resolved with dice, it's a perfect solution for how that second die can do you harm in a way that scales with how many curses you have. A developer could maybe merge a couple of these concepts to reduce the number of currencies but for now I like the dynamics that emerge from having all four.
(**) This is in a sense a dynamic balance: it's not a question of how much hubris or how many green cubes you have, but the ratio between them. My game Sands of Time has this same principle, where what matters is the ratio of your resource production to your unrest level. So getting unrest down is good, but getting it down lower than you need to is actually inefficient.
Thursday, August 30, 2018
More thoughts on encounters and variety
Thoughts after writing up the "New nutshell" post about encounters and encounter cards specifically.
Each encounter card features a scene description (flavor text), a challenge category, and a success track. I now think that the success tracks for all cards of the same city shape are going to be the same. Thus, we could perhaps just have the track(s) on the board or a mat, and the encounter cards could become mini cards. I like this, since all of the other cards in the game are mini-size cards. The encounters were the only holdouts, because they needed those tracks, and the tracks needed to be on the cards because each track was slightly different (each had a different payout curve and/or the placement of some damage points, but all of that is going away, I think).
Of course, this also means that the encounter deck is a gussied-up version of the die-roll-to-find-the-encounter-category of v7. It does exactly the same thing mechanically, but also provides a little story. Maybe that's ok. Perhaps what we actually want to do here is to have a paragraph book. It could be quite simple: roll a d6 (or d12 or whatever), look up the corresponding entry in the book for the city you're in. "Cairo 6", "Bucharest 4", etc. The entry tells you your challenge category and the pertinent flavor text. There are obvious benefits; we can make encounters city-specific to inject more flavor, in addition to having more variety; instead of 45 encounter cards we'd have 72 or even 144 encounters. And 6 or 12 entries should be easy to fit on a page, so it's a 12-page book, basically a second rulebook, which is probably not super different cost-wise from a deck of cards, maybe.
The decision of whether to implement this as decks of cards that are city-shape dependent, or as a paragraph book, is a publisher-level decision. What we need to decide is whether it's sufficient to differentiate the encounters merely by the challenge category and flavor text, or whether we need something more.
I think we may need something more, but it needs to be an extremely simple something. My current thought is that each encounter can modify the standard encounter resolution rules in some simple way, such that it brings out some aspect of the encounter but is easy to remember and implement.
For example, maybe the encounter is "the basket game" scene from Raiders, a "wits" encounter. So, flavor text might be:
"You turn the corner to find a group of large baskets; men are loading the baskets on to a truck. An enemy agent lifts the lid of each basket as it is loaded. You notice one of the lids move slightly; is your contact hiding in the basket? Which basket was it?"
Rule: a "1" on the white die turns to a "4"
Now this is easy to implement (and for the other players to help you remember), since you only roll the dice three times. It has an interesting effect. The general rules is that white die moves the success track up by the white die result IF your investment exceeds that result. So for this card, you know that an investment of 3 or less is harmed by this rule, because a "1" turns into a "4", which exceeds your investment, and gets you nothing; but, an investment of 4 or more is actually helped by this rule, as a "1" becomes much better. Thematically this fits: investing more 'wits' makes it more likely that you'll find the correct basket before the enemy, but not enough wits and you might not make it.
Or perhaps instead it's
Rule: "If the black die exceeds 4, end the encounter"
Thematically, this means that a high roll for the enemy means they've found Marion before you. Mechanically, the enemy ordinarily moves toward your city when their roll is lower than their presence (number of cubes) in the region. Thus, ordinarily high black die rolls are good for you -- less likely the enemy will move toward you. With this encounter, they're bad. As a result, do you maybe want to invest more so as to get further along the success track before this happens? Do you want to invest less but plan to use a dynamite card to cancel an unfavorable enemy roll? Oops you rolled a 5, do you want to burn a 'script rewrite' card to re-roll, or have you gotten far enough along the track?
Simple rules like these are easy enough to use, but may be substantive enough to make the encounters each feel just a bit different.
My concern is that without this, after playing a few times, you'll just gloss over the flavor text of the encounters. "Yadda yadda, the basket game, got it". Whereas with them, it might be "Oh, the basket game -- this one makes high investment especially valuable and low investment especially bad; how badly do I need this info again?"
Of course it could instead be that each encounter is an entirely distinct mini-game unto itself with particular rules for how it's resolved (e.g. "Choose a basket on the card, then roll both dice; if the white die matches your choice but the black die doesn't, get one success. Repeat 3 times" or whatever), but I think I prefer a common framework to a mini-game approach in that it will tie in better with the rest of the game, and specifically the game's "penalty currencies" - time, hubris, curses, injuries. There's another post on that subject, coming up next.
Each encounter card features a scene description (flavor text), a challenge category, and a success track. I now think that the success tracks for all cards of the same city shape are going to be the same. Thus, we could perhaps just have the track(s) on the board or a mat, and the encounter cards could become mini cards. I like this, since all of the other cards in the game are mini-size cards. The encounters were the only holdouts, because they needed those tracks, and the tracks needed to be on the cards because each track was slightly different (each had a different payout curve and/or the placement of some damage points, but all of that is going away, I think).
Of course, this also means that the encounter deck is a gussied-up version of the die-roll-to-find-the-encounter-category of v7. It does exactly the same thing mechanically, but also provides a little story. Maybe that's ok. Perhaps what we actually want to do here is to have a paragraph book. It could be quite simple: roll a d6 (or d12 or whatever), look up the corresponding entry in the book for the city you're in. "Cairo 6", "Bucharest 4", etc. The entry tells you your challenge category and the pertinent flavor text. There are obvious benefits; we can make encounters city-specific to inject more flavor, in addition to having more variety; instead of 45 encounter cards we'd have 72 or even 144 encounters. And 6 or 12 entries should be easy to fit on a page, so it's a 12-page book, basically a second rulebook, which is probably not super different cost-wise from a deck of cards, maybe.
The decision of whether to implement this as decks of cards that are city-shape dependent, or as a paragraph book, is a publisher-level decision. What we need to decide is whether it's sufficient to differentiate the encounters merely by the challenge category and flavor text, or whether we need something more.
I think we may need something more, but it needs to be an extremely simple something. My current thought is that each encounter can modify the standard encounter resolution rules in some simple way, such that it brings out some aspect of the encounter but is easy to remember and implement.
For example, maybe the encounter is "the basket game" scene from Raiders, a "wits" encounter. So, flavor text might be:
"You turn the corner to find a group of large baskets; men are loading the baskets on to a truck. An enemy agent lifts the lid of each basket as it is loaded. You notice one of the lids move slightly; is your contact hiding in the basket? Which basket was it?"
Rule: a "1" on the white die turns to a "4"
Now this is easy to implement (and for the other players to help you remember), since you only roll the dice three times. It has an interesting effect. The general rules is that white die moves the success track up by the white die result IF your investment exceeds that result. So for this card, you know that an investment of 3 or less is harmed by this rule, because a "1" turns into a "4", which exceeds your investment, and gets you nothing; but, an investment of 4 or more is actually helped by this rule, as a "1" becomes much better. Thematically this fits: investing more 'wits' makes it more likely that you'll find the correct basket before the enemy, but not enough wits and you might not make it.
Or perhaps instead it's
Rule: "If the black die exceeds 4, end the encounter"
Thematically, this means that a high roll for the enemy means they've found Marion before you. Mechanically, the enemy ordinarily moves toward your city when their roll is lower than their presence (number of cubes) in the region. Thus, ordinarily high black die rolls are good for you -- less likely the enemy will move toward you. With this encounter, they're bad. As a result, do you maybe want to invest more so as to get further along the success track before this happens? Do you want to invest less but plan to use a dynamite card to cancel an unfavorable enemy roll? Oops you rolled a 5, do you want to burn a 'script rewrite' card to re-roll, or have you gotten far enough along the track?
Simple rules like these are easy enough to use, but may be substantive enough to make the encounters each feel just a bit different.
My concern is that without this, after playing a few times, you'll just gloss over the flavor text of the encounters. "Yadda yadda, the basket game, got it". Whereas with them, it might be "Oh, the basket game -- this one makes high investment especially valuable and low investment especially bad; how badly do I need this info again?"
Of course it could instead be that each encounter is an entirely distinct mini-game unto itself with particular rules for how it's resolved (e.g. "Choose a basket on the card, then roll both dice; if the white die matches your choice but the black die doesn't, get one success. Repeat 3 times" or whatever), but I think I prefer a common framework to a mini-game approach in that it will tie in better with the rest of the game, and specifically the game's "penalty currencies" - time, hubris, curses, injuries. There's another post on that subject, coming up next.
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
New nut, new shell
v16 is coming together. It's a nice riff on the simple map phase of v7 with some tweaks for immersion, with the temple concepts that culminated in v15 welded onto the v7 map phase chassis. Is this the final version? Gosh I hope so; there are only so many different things to try and we've tried a lot of them. Anyway, here's the gist:
High concept
Lost Adventures is an adventure archaeology movie game. Players are screenwriters, trying to invest their favored characters with the most compelling narrative arc such that that character emerges as the film's protagonist in the editing room. "Doing stuff" is monetized in screen time. Endowing your character with some trait or piece of gear (a card) requires some screen time to explain how that came about; traveling from London to Ankarra requires the obligatory "red line map overlay" sequence, and so on. You can make your character's life easier by letting them take on 'hubris', but the powers that be don't like hubris and the character will face a reckoning in the end.
Thematically, then, your characters are trying to find a lost temple and gain enough information about its perils and tests that they can pass through it expeditiously to retrieve the lost artifact hidden within. So, there's a map phase in which information and gear are acquired, a temple phase in which players jockey to exploit this information so as to run furthest ahead of the pack, and a final challenge in which players must purge hubris or else have their face melt off.
Here's what this looks like, mechanically-speaking:
Map Phase
Each player gets 7 turns. On your turn, do four things:
1. Move: Move to any city. If you change regions, incur one time step. Add a black cube to the region you arrive in. Reveal a relic, if you know you're in the right city.
2. Encounter: Flip the top encounter from the deck matching your city's shape. Read the flavor text aloud. Take a white cube. Buy one white cube for each adventure card you play or hubris you take, two cubes if your adventure card matches the encounter type.
Then, roll a white and black die together, three times. If the white die is less than the number of white cubes you hold, advance the encounter card's success track by the die result. If the black die is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn closer to your city by the die result.
If the enemy pawn reaches your city, encounter ends, and only do one of the following two steps. Otherwise do both.
3. Look at Cards: Look at temple secrets cards from categories matching those on the city's theme tile; total value of temple secrets cards you view cannot exceed the final value of the success track. A temple secrets card's value is the number of green cubes on that card. For each card you view, take a green cube from that card, if you wish.
4. Receive Adventure cards: Each city shape has four face-up adventure cards. Take 1/2/3/4 at a cost of 0/1/3/6 time steps.
Temple Phase
The temple is made of tarot-size 'map' cards, laid end-to-end in a row. Each card has a movement track over which player pawns will move, and an action track with 1-3 spaces. Thus, the row of cards comprise one long movement track and one long action track. Action in the temple consists of moving a marker to the next space on the action track and everyone doing what it says. There are three types of actions:
1. Gates. The last space on each card. Any player whose pawn is to the left of the gate when the marker reaches the gate takes one curse.
2. Tests. These are things like the Grail Room or Map Room, or lesser tests like locked doors. Each holds several temple secrets cards that give information about e.g. the characteristics of the true grail. Players write down their answer to the prompt (which grail is the true grail?) and then reveal simultaneously. Players who guessed right move their pawns by X, players who guessed wrong get a curse or two.
3. Perils. This is where most of the action happens. On a peril, three things happen:
i. All players select a number, representing their investment in this peril.
ii. The peril category is revealed by flipping the temple secrets card that goes with this action space, and a 'threat' card is drawn and revealed, which shows a type of penalty (time, hubris, or injury).
iii. In order of investment, players first pay off their investment and then move on the temple movement track. Paying your investment means incuring the penalty indicated on the threat card, but having adventure cards that match the current peril offsets the penalty you incur. So if you chose an investment of 6 and the peril is "heat", and you have two "heat" icons on your adventure cards, you'd only incur 4 penalties.
Movement is given by a lookup table, corresponding to bid order. High bid moves 4, low bid moves 0, or something like that. Ties are unfriendly. Enemy pawn moves in this step as well.
Final hubris challenge
Each player rolls both dice. If the white die is less than the number of green cubes you hold, purge hubris equal to the die result. If the black die is less than the number of curses you hold, take injuries equal to the die result. Repeat this five times.
If you hit the end of the time track or the end of the injury track, or if you didn't purge all of your hubris, you are eliminated. Of the remaining players, player furthest to the right on the temple track wins, UNLESS the enemy pawn is further still.
Some comments
1. The map phase is similar in conception and execution to the v7 map phase. There's the growing enemy presence, the time cost of movement, the ability to help other players and be rewarded in the process, the acquisition of knowledge. Differences (improvements?) are (i) scripted sequence instead of free-form, (ii) encounters have a bit more substance and suspense, (iii) information isn't all equivalent in cost/value, (iv) ability to use time and hubris as resources to improve your efficiency, but with possible ramifications later on.
2. Some tweaks for balance may be needed. A specific concern is that late in the game, there may be no city the enemy can't reach in three rolls. There are cards to mitigate this, but may need to go to a custom d6 for the black die.
3. Luck. Each player will roll each die 26 times, which should be enough for statistics to even out, but you'll have turns where there's no suspense and turns where you fail spectacularly due to poor rolling. May reintroduce "script rewrite" cards to allow you to buy, or impose on other players, re-rolls, to smooth out these swings of luck. I'm not even sure luck is a problem, per se, but it may mean the game won't appeal to certain players -- certainly the "no output randomness!" crowd will hate this game. I think it's ok if the game doesn't appeal to everyone.
4. The mechanics for the two phases are quite different That's how v7 worked so it's no worse, and the temple phase should be much faster than the v7 temple. A couple of attempts (v11, v15) to make the mechanics symmetric across phases didn't pan out, so here we are.
5. Encounters may be a bit samey now, but that might be strictly better than the extra rules that would be needed to make each play out differently/"thematically". The current approach appears to take the view that the flavor text that sets the stage, and the suspense of rolling the dice, are sufficient to convey the right feeling of encounters vis a vis the old system which was just a barrier you had to pay cards to surmount.
6. The game should be fairly tight, which I like. We can adjust the tightness/looseness by adjusting the length of the time track and injury track, and the number of rolls you get in the hubris challenge.
7. Nice (to me) that there's some flow to the things that you're worried about -- you're able to kick the can down the road on some things at each point, which is tempting. In the map phase, you mostly care about time and hubris, curses a bit and injuries not at all. Then in the temple time becomes a peak concern, hubris and curses are worrisome and injuries, somewhat of a concern. Then in the hubris challenge, time isn't a concern but now you're very worried about the dance between curses, hubris, and injuries -- it's the day of reckoning where you learn whether you took on too much hubris or too many curses for the number of injuries you took in the temple.
8. Corollary of this, may need to provide some first-time guidance, or an 'easy mode' setting (e.g. adjusting tracks in step 5), so first time players don't crash and burn too spectacularly first time through.
Some testing is certainly going to be required to balance everything, but from a design perspective I think it's complete and coherent with few rough edges. Is the end in sight at long last?
High concept
Lost Adventures is an adventure archaeology movie game. Players are screenwriters, trying to invest their favored characters with the most compelling narrative arc such that that character emerges as the film's protagonist in the editing room. "Doing stuff" is monetized in screen time. Endowing your character with some trait or piece of gear (a card) requires some screen time to explain how that came about; traveling from London to Ankarra requires the obligatory "red line map overlay" sequence, and so on. You can make your character's life easier by letting them take on 'hubris', but the powers that be don't like hubris and the character will face a reckoning in the end.
Thematically, then, your characters are trying to find a lost temple and gain enough information about its perils and tests that they can pass through it expeditiously to retrieve the lost artifact hidden within. So, there's a map phase in which information and gear are acquired, a temple phase in which players jockey to exploit this information so as to run furthest ahead of the pack, and a final challenge in which players must purge hubris or else have their face melt off.
Here's what this looks like, mechanically-speaking:
Map Phase
Each player gets 7 turns. On your turn, do four things:
1. Move: Move to any city. If you change regions, incur one time step. Add a black cube to the region you arrive in. Reveal a relic, if you know you're in the right city.
2. Encounter: Flip the top encounter from the deck matching your city's shape. Read the flavor text aloud. Take a white cube. Buy one white cube for each adventure card you play or hubris you take, two cubes if your adventure card matches the encounter type.
Then, roll a white and black die together, three times. If the white die is less than the number of white cubes you hold, advance the encounter card's success track by the die result. If the black die is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn closer to your city by the die result.
If the enemy pawn reaches your city, encounter ends, and only do one of the following two steps. Otherwise do both.
3. Look at Cards: Look at temple secrets cards from categories matching those on the city's theme tile; total value of temple secrets cards you view cannot exceed the final value of the success track. A temple secrets card's value is the number of green cubes on that card. For each card you view, take a green cube from that card, if you wish.
4. Receive Adventure cards: Each city shape has four face-up adventure cards. Take 1/2/3/4 at a cost of 0/1/3/6 time steps.
Temple Phase
The temple is made of tarot-size 'map' cards, laid end-to-end in a row. Each card has a movement track over which player pawns will move, and an action track with 1-3 spaces. Thus, the row of cards comprise one long movement track and one long action track. Action in the temple consists of moving a marker to the next space on the action track and everyone doing what it says. There are three types of actions:
1. Gates. The last space on each card. Any player whose pawn is to the left of the gate when the marker reaches the gate takes one curse.
2. Tests. These are things like the Grail Room or Map Room, or lesser tests like locked doors. Each holds several temple secrets cards that give information about e.g. the characteristics of the true grail. Players write down their answer to the prompt (which grail is the true grail?) and then reveal simultaneously. Players who guessed right move their pawns by X, players who guessed wrong get a curse or two.
3. Perils. This is where most of the action happens. On a peril, three things happen:
i. All players select a number, representing their investment in this peril.
ii. The peril category is revealed by flipping the temple secrets card that goes with this action space, and a 'threat' card is drawn and revealed, which shows a type of penalty (time, hubris, or injury).
iii. In order of investment, players first pay off their investment and then move on the temple movement track. Paying your investment means incuring the penalty indicated on the threat card, but having adventure cards that match the current peril offsets the penalty you incur. So if you chose an investment of 6 and the peril is "heat", and you have two "heat" icons on your adventure cards, you'd only incur 4 penalties.
Movement is given by a lookup table, corresponding to bid order. High bid moves 4, low bid moves 0, or something like that. Ties are unfriendly. Enemy pawn moves in this step as well.
Final hubris challenge
Each player rolls both dice. If the white die is less than the number of green cubes you hold, purge hubris equal to the die result. If the black die is less than the number of curses you hold, take injuries equal to the die result. Repeat this five times.
If you hit the end of the time track or the end of the injury track, or if you didn't purge all of your hubris, you are eliminated. Of the remaining players, player furthest to the right on the temple track wins, UNLESS the enemy pawn is further still.
Some comments
1. The map phase is similar in conception and execution to the v7 map phase. There's the growing enemy presence, the time cost of movement, the ability to help other players and be rewarded in the process, the acquisition of knowledge. Differences (improvements?) are (i) scripted sequence instead of free-form, (ii) encounters have a bit more substance and suspense, (iii) information isn't all equivalent in cost/value, (iv) ability to use time and hubris as resources to improve your efficiency, but with possible ramifications later on.
2. Some tweaks for balance may be needed. A specific concern is that late in the game, there may be no city the enemy can't reach in three rolls. There are cards to mitigate this, but may need to go to a custom d6 for the black die.
3. Luck. Each player will roll each die 26 times, which should be enough for statistics to even out, but you'll have turns where there's no suspense and turns where you fail spectacularly due to poor rolling. May reintroduce "script rewrite" cards to allow you to buy, or impose on other players, re-rolls, to smooth out these swings of luck. I'm not even sure luck is a problem, per se, but it may mean the game won't appeal to certain players -- certainly the "no output randomness!" crowd will hate this game. I think it's ok if the game doesn't appeal to everyone.
4. The mechanics for the two phases are quite different That's how v7 worked so it's no worse, and the temple phase should be much faster than the v7 temple. A couple of attempts (v11, v15) to make the mechanics symmetric across phases didn't pan out, so here we are.
5. Encounters may be a bit samey now, but that might be strictly better than the extra rules that would be needed to make each play out differently/"thematically". The current approach appears to take the view that the flavor text that sets the stage, and the suspense of rolling the dice, are sufficient to convey the right feeling of encounters vis a vis the old system which was just a barrier you had to pay cards to surmount.
6. The game should be fairly tight, which I like. We can adjust the tightness/looseness by adjusting the length of the time track and injury track, and the number of rolls you get in the hubris challenge.
7. Nice (to me) that there's some flow to the things that you're worried about -- you're able to kick the can down the road on some things at each point, which is tempting. In the map phase, you mostly care about time and hubris, curses a bit and injuries not at all. Then in the temple time becomes a peak concern, hubris and curses are worrisome and injuries, somewhat of a concern. Then in the hubris challenge, time isn't a concern but now you're very worried about the dance between curses, hubris, and injuries -- it's the day of reckoning where you learn whether you took on too much hubris or too many curses for the number of injuries you took in the temple.
8. Corollary of this, may need to provide some first-time guidance, or an 'easy mode' setting (e.g. adjusting tracks in step 5), so first time players don't crash and burn too spectacularly first time through.
Some testing is certainly going to be required to balance everything, but from a design perspective I think it's complete and coherent with few rough edges. Is the end in sight at long last?
Monday, August 6, 2018
Modular construction
For most of the game's development the setting has been the quest for the holy grail, but we always thought of this as one scenario among (possibly) many. For the last year or so I've wondered whether the game strictly needed different scenarios, or whether it couldn't just be thought of as a generic standalone game that encompasses all films in this genre.
I still mostly think this; at least I think we may not gain much by changing the basic layout and logic of the temple, and of the theme cards, from scenario to scenario. It doesn't matter whether it's "Liesl von Osterreich" who gives info about the true grail or "Mathilda Cottonwood" who gives info about the headpiece location. These are all just chrome. For the temple, changing the structure too much might result in a whole lot of rules to support variation without necessarily making the game more interesting to play.
I do still think we could have different map boards and different encounter cards and such for some fun variety, but I don't think these are strictly necessary either.
However, that's not to say we couldn't add just a bit of variety to the temple. Take it as a given that the temple includes five peril cards, two red (the approach to the temple) and three purple (inside the temple). Take it as a given that the temple will always feature one big knowledge check: the true grail, the staff length, the idol's weight, whatever.
Within this framework, we can shake things up just a bit. For example, we can add a "gate" or two, as described in the previous post, which presents a knowledge check or a test of some sort. Which stones are safe to step on, which key opens the big door, which chords must you play on the instrument to reveal the hidden passage, etc. These are similar to the 'big knowledge check' but maybe the stakes are lower -- a minor bonus for passing, as opposed to a steep penalty for NOT passing.
And, it's fairly straightforward to vary where in the temple these knowledge checks occur. The grail room comes at the end, the map room (staff length) comes between the red and purple perils, the idol room is after the purple perils but you must then go BACK through the purple perils, and so on. And correspondingly the gates can be placed in a couple of different spots in similar fashion.
As a result you can create temples that feel slightly different. They aren't a ton different from a mechanical or strategic standpoint, but they change things up just a bit to offer some variety from game to game.
There are two challenges to implementing this vision.
The first is the player notepad. If we want a single notepad that can be used in any scenario (I think we do), how do we capture all of this variety? I think something like, have a separate area for each module on the sheet, and during setup just physically scribble out on your sheet the modules you're not using, or something like that.
The second is, how do you instruct the players how they ought to set up the game, i.e. how to select modules and where to put them? Is it done randomly, or are there a couple of prescribed setups, or do players get to choose, or what? Probably there must be at least one "default" setup for first time players, but allowing for modularity without leaving players feeling overwhelmed by the options may be challenging.
I still mostly think this; at least I think we may not gain much by changing the basic layout and logic of the temple, and of the theme cards, from scenario to scenario. It doesn't matter whether it's "Liesl von Osterreich" who gives info about the true grail or "Mathilda Cottonwood" who gives info about the headpiece location. These are all just chrome. For the temple, changing the structure too much might result in a whole lot of rules to support variation without necessarily making the game more interesting to play.
I do still think we could have different map boards and different encounter cards and such for some fun variety, but I don't think these are strictly necessary either.
However, that's not to say we couldn't add just a bit of variety to the temple. Take it as a given that the temple includes five peril cards, two red (the approach to the temple) and three purple (inside the temple). Take it as a given that the temple will always feature one big knowledge check: the true grail, the staff length, the idol's weight, whatever.
Within this framework, we can shake things up just a bit. For example, we can add a "gate" or two, as described in the previous post, which presents a knowledge check or a test of some sort. Which stones are safe to step on, which key opens the big door, which chords must you play on the instrument to reveal the hidden passage, etc. These are similar to the 'big knowledge check' but maybe the stakes are lower -- a minor bonus for passing, as opposed to a steep penalty for NOT passing.
And, it's fairly straightforward to vary where in the temple these knowledge checks occur. The grail room comes at the end, the map room (staff length) comes between the red and purple perils, the idol room is after the purple perils but you must then go BACK through the purple perils, and so on. And correspondingly the gates can be placed in a couple of different spots in similar fashion.
As a result you can create temples that feel slightly different. They aren't a ton different from a mechanical or strategic standpoint, but they change things up just a bit to offer some variety from game to game.
There are two challenges to implementing this vision.
The first is the player notepad. If we want a single notepad that can be used in any scenario (I think we do), how do we capture all of this variety? I think something like, have a separate area for each module on the sheet, and during setup just physically scribble out on your sheet the modules you're not using, or something like that.
The second is, how do you instruct the players how they ought to set up the game, i.e. how to select modules and where to put them? Is it done randomly, or are there a couple of prescribed setups, or do players get to choose, or what? Probably there must be at least one "default" setup for first time players, but allowing for modularity without leaving players feeling overwhelmed by the options may be challenging.
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
No, dice!
I've talked at length about mechanics I've come up with to evoke a movie-making theme, and the one I'm proudest of is the resolution cards. Previously I was resolving encounters with custom dice, with the number of dice you rolled for yourself and the enemy commensurate with the 'investment' of each in the encounter. I realized that you could encode the same information onto cards, albeit at a slight loss of randomness, but with the benefit that we could add other stuff to these cards. Specifically, we could include storyboard art and a description of what has happened -- "Protagonist throws punch"/"Operative draws a pistol" etc. So in resolving the challenge it's as if you're story-boarding the scene, and the cards match the challenge category you face so it's thematically appropriate. I love this idea and would hate to let it go.
But it's not without a few drawbacks. First, it's extra steps in encounter prep: "Grab the encounter deck for the appropriate challenge category, put a marker on the enemy track, put a marker on your investment". It adds some minor fiddliness: shuffle the deck you just used after the encounter. The randomness is bounded (this I consider very minor). It's another component (48 cards) that eats up some table space (4 decks). And it requires a mat for the encounter resolution, with tracks for your investment and the enemy investment. And possibly the worst part -- when you flip a resolution card, you have to place it very precisely so that the tracks on the card line up with the tracks on the mat, so you can compare your investment and the enemy's to the results indicated on the card.
Now none of these are that big a deal and the pros, to me, outweigh the cons. But it does take time, and those extra 48 cards and the mat are not insignificant in a game with a lot of parts. Compared to 10 custom dice, maybe it's a wash, but what if we could do this with standard dice? What if we can do it with just two standard dice? Unfortunately for my beloved resolution system, I think we can.
It's so simple I wonder why I didn't think of it before. When you face an encounter, roll two dice, one red, one white. For the red die, if the number is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn that many spaces closer to your city. For the white die, if the number is less than the amount that you invested in the encounter (adventure cards, basically), advance that number on the success track. Repeat this three times.
That's it. There are other bells and whistles about ways to use adventure cards to get out early, block bad results, and some things like that, but then there were some bells and whistles with the resolution card version too. The statistics are different. In the resolution card version the expected number of successes scaled linearly with investment, but here it grows with investment. But on the whole it captures some of the same suspense but with zero overhead, fewer rules and fewer components.
Ah, but there's another problem; the hubris challenge also used resolution cards, and these had two effects. First, they ate hubris, their main function. Second, they deal out penalties for curses you've acquired, e.g. if you drank from the wrong grail. Can we capture this with dice as well? Here again, two dice to the rescue. White die is for cancelling hubris, red die checks against curses. If you roll less than the number of curse tokens you have, you lose life equal to your die roll.
There are a couple of things to think through, most notably that, assuming we use a d6, there's no difference in your performance in the hubris challenge if you have more than 6 green cubes. If there are ways to lose green cubes during the challenge, then having more cubes is better. On the other hand maybe it's ok for the game to be saying that if you have more than 6, you've been inefficient, and could have played it closer to the bone. Or we could just use a d8 or d10 in the hubris challenge, although that may be swingy.
I've rolled through a few challenges this way just to try it out, and I like how quickly it sets up and resolves. Yes, you have to use your imagination a bit as to what the dice represent, but that's true of every dice-based resolution system. The biggest drawback may be that over three rolls (six dice total), the statistics just won't even out very well. Sometimes the enemy will scream to your location, sometimes they won't move at all. Sometimes you'll fly up the success track, sometimes you'll be sucking pond water. In previous versions players had "script rewrite" cards that changed an outcome in some way. We could reintroduce that concept here, maybe just in the form of a few tokens that everyone gets that you can spend for force another player, or allow yourself, to reroll a die. A different thought was to roll two dice for one or both effects and keep the ... lower? higher? That's the problem, it's not easy to define what you want! You ideally, for the white die, want the highest die that's lower than your number of white cubes. Neither "keep the lower" or "keep the higher" quite capture what you want here.
So I'm potentially very upbeat about this change, particularly since it seems to move us closer to the simplicity of the v7 system but with more substance and suspense, but will just have to see how much of a concern random swings of luck are and whether they balance out over the course of the game.
I've rolled through a few challenges this way just to try it out, and I like how quickly it sets up and resolves. Yes, you have to use your imagination a bit as to what the dice represent, but that's true of every dice-based resolution system. The biggest drawback may be that over three rolls (six dice total), the statistics just won't even out very well. Sometimes the enemy will scream to your location, sometimes they won't move at all. Sometimes you'll fly up the success track, sometimes you'll be sucking pond water. In previous versions players had "script rewrite" cards that changed an outcome in some way. We could reintroduce that concept here, maybe just in the form of a few tokens that everyone gets that you can spend for force another player, or allow yourself, to reroll a die. A different thought was to roll two dice for one or both effects and keep the ... lower? higher? That's the problem, it's not easy to define what you want! You ideally, for the white die, want the highest die that's lower than your number of white cubes. Neither "keep the lower" or "keep the higher" quite capture what you want here.
So I'm potentially very upbeat about this change, particularly since it seems to move us closer to the simplicity of the v7 system but with more substance and suspense, but will just have to see how much of a concern random swings of luck are and whether they balance out over the course of the game.
Monday, July 23, 2018
More cowbell
I finished a playtest of v15, and while it mostly worked, some issues emerged. By about the 4th of 7 turns, nearly all of the players had full information about the temple. Thus there were subsequent encounters where no one cared about the info that was available, and those encounters fell flat. Happily it made for a good stress-test to see whether the new temple system ("poison") works even when everyone has full knowledge, and the answer is a qualified yes. The experience of wanting to bid high to get to move seemed to come through successfully.
There are actually two problems bundled together here, players having full knowledge and players having identical knowledge. We can address the former by making info harder to get, but getting info is fun and increasing the frustration level is a poor solution. A different solution may be to put more information into the game.
Currently the info you can get includes:
Relic locations (2)
Temple start city (1)
Temple perils, red (2)
Temple perils, purple (3)
Aspects of the true grail (3)
That's 11 total pieces of information that are available. But, we can't add more temple perils, although that would be the easiest thing. Each one requires a bid-and-pay-and-move resolution step in the temple, so more perils would drag out the temple. In contrast, the true grail is just a quick knowledge check, and we could have more items of that sort.
On the other hand, the perils affect the map phase in a way that the grail room doesn't, in that they tell you which peril symbols you should be acquiring on equipment cards. How could a quick knowledge check also be actionable?
One easy-ish solution is to add a something like a door that is locked and requires the correct key. There are several possible keys, which are treated like relics, such that each resides in a hidden location. This adds several pieces of information, but unlike the others you don't necessarily need all of this info. Some players will go for this info, some won't, so it adds player differentiation. (And, to mitigate the effect of having spent time acquiring the wrong key, maybe each key also confers a special power in the temple).
The downside of this is that it ratchets up the number of different kinds of things that players need to know, and thus the number of different kinds of operations to perform in the temple, which is perhaps a concern. However, maybe these knowledge checks are actually different modules, and different combinations of modules, along with where in the temple they occur, can give some variety to the temple. Maybe more brainstorming on this in a future post.
The problem of players having identical knowledge is probably exacerbated by the shared encounters, so even though it will take longer, I think we need to seriously consider a return to individual turns, as described by the previous post. A nice benefit is that it removes at least some of the rules that the shared encounters require. I think the turn mechanics are shaping up and I'm encouraged by their simplicity.
Map phase:
1. Move, add a cube to the region you're in (reveal a relic if you're in the right city)
2. Face encounter (read card, invest adventure cards, flip 3 resolution cards)
3. View temple cards (total value less than or equal to the point on the succes track you reached)
4. Receive adventure cards (first is free, after that it's 1/3/6 time to take 1/2/3 cards)
Temple phase:
1. Simultaneous investment bid
2. Resolve in bid order: incur penalty equal to your bid (offset by having the correct peril symbols on adventure cards), then move on the temple track (commensurate with your relative position; ties are unfriendly)
3. Players lagging too far behind on the temple track incur some penalty
And then a couple of knowledge checks are interspersed in the temple phase. That doesn't seem all that bad. v16, here we come!
There are actually two problems bundled together here, players having full knowledge and players having identical knowledge. We can address the former by making info harder to get, but getting info is fun and increasing the frustration level is a poor solution. A different solution may be to put more information into the game.
Currently the info you can get includes:
Relic locations (2)
Temple start city (1)
Temple perils, red (2)
Temple perils, purple (3)
Aspects of the true grail (3)
That's 11 total pieces of information that are available. But, we can't add more temple perils, although that would be the easiest thing. Each one requires a bid-and-pay-and-move resolution step in the temple, so more perils would drag out the temple. In contrast, the true grail is just a quick knowledge check, and we could have more items of that sort.
On the other hand, the perils affect the map phase in a way that the grail room doesn't, in that they tell you which peril symbols you should be acquiring on equipment cards. How could a quick knowledge check also be actionable?
One easy-ish solution is to add a something like a door that is locked and requires the correct key. There are several possible keys, which are treated like relics, such that each resides in a hidden location. This adds several pieces of information, but unlike the others you don't necessarily need all of this info. Some players will go for this info, some won't, so it adds player differentiation. (And, to mitigate the effect of having spent time acquiring the wrong key, maybe each key also confers a special power in the temple).
The downside of this is that it ratchets up the number of different kinds of things that players need to know, and thus the number of different kinds of operations to perform in the temple, which is perhaps a concern. However, maybe these knowledge checks are actually different modules, and different combinations of modules, along with where in the temple they occur, can give some variety to the temple. Maybe more brainstorming on this in a future post.
The problem of players having identical knowledge is probably exacerbated by the shared encounters, so even though it will take longer, I think we need to seriously consider a return to individual turns, as described by the previous post. A nice benefit is that it removes at least some of the rules that the shared encounters require. I think the turn mechanics are shaping up and I'm encouraged by their simplicity.
Map phase:
1. Move, add a cube to the region you're in (reveal a relic if you're in the right city)
2. Face encounter (read card, invest adventure cards, flip 3 resolution cards)
3. View temple cards (total value less than or equal to the point on the succes track you reached)
4. Receive adventure cards (first is free, after that it's 1/3/6 time to take 1/2/3 cards)
Temple phase:
1. Simultaneous investment bid
2. Resolve in bid order: incur penalty equal to your bid (offset by having the correct peril symbols on adventure cards), then move on the temple track (commensurate with your relative position; ties are unfriendly)
3. Players lagging too far behind on the temple track incur some penalty
And then a couple of knowledge checks are interspersed in the temple phase. That doesn't seem all that bad. v16, here we come!
Monday, July 16, 2018
Mostly for Seth, a v7/v15 hybrid
Seth expressed in a tweet that he was nostalgic for v7. Naturally this got me to thinking, what would v7 looked like informed by the sensibilities of v15? In some ways this was what v13 was trying to be, but it didn't work because, at that time, the encounter system was open-ended: encounters continued until you reached either a positive or negative resolution, so they could keep going for sometimes 6 or 7 die rolls each before the player learned whether they succeeded or failed.
This led to enormous latency, to which the shared encounters of v14 were the solution. But in v15, I'm imposing a fixed length on each encounter: four resolution card flips. Could it work to have individual turns with individual encounters, each with, say, three resolution flips? Maybe, although I think there will still be latency issues. But here's how I think it would work.
First, the turn mechanic in v7 was a Tikal-like action point allowance system. Scrap that. Information is the point of the map phase, build the game around that. Time is a resource. On your turn, you can burn time to draw cards, and to travel to any city. Once there, add a black cube to that city, and reveal the top encounter card from that city type. It has a challenge category. Set the "enemy investment track" at the # of cubes in the city. Pay cards to get adventure points (cards matching challenge category worth more adv. points), set the "player investment track" at this number. Then, flip three resolution cards. For each "X" at or below the enemy investment, move enemy closer to your city. For each "check" at or below your investment, advance the success track.
If the enemy reaches your city, the encounter ends. You can look up information or get a card, but not both. Otherwise, encounter ends after the third resolution card. Then, you get to look at temple cards that match the theme card for the city you're in. The solution track tells the total value of cards you get to look at -- the further you've gotten, the more total value of cards you get to examine. A temple card's value is the number of green cubes on that card; several were placed on each card during setup. After you view a card, you can remove one green cube, making it easier for everyone else to see that card but helping you in the hubris challenge later on.
After you look at temple cards, you get to take one adventure card from the face-up display, presumably based on information you have about the temple.
Then, the temple would still be essentially the v15 version -- a map track to see who is furthest along, and players incur a series of five auctions. In each, you are bidding for how much of a penalty you're willing to take in exchange for moving further along the map track, but your bid can be offset if you have adventure cards that match the current temple card's peril. So advance knowledge, and advance preparation, both help. The encounter system above seems compatible with this: you want to progress as far as you can in each encounter so as to get max info and thus be able to draw cards wisely.
Now, in looking at this ... actually it's not too shabby. It captures some of the nice things about v7 but in different ways -- cubes added to cities to make challenges more difficult, possibility of 'sharing' information but now handled abstractly.
There's an interesting trade-off, though. The v15 encounter phase has shared encounters, which need quite a few extra rules to make them interesting, but there are fewer encounters in total so there's a big savings in time. I can't see the map phase in this hybrid version taking less than an hour, whereas in v15 it could seat 5 players and still clock in under 40 minutes, I suspect.
Now the map phase in v7 wasn't exactly quick either, because all of that sliding clues into sleeves and complying with the cube and track manipulation bureacracy ate up a fair bit of time too. So it may be that front-loading all of the turn time in the encounter resolution might not be that bad. Really now it's just the equivalent of "roll some dice three times", it's just that the dice take the form of cards. And the encounter setup is fairly automatic. Maybe that's not so bad.
But it's not just that it's an hour, it's that 28 encounters is just a lot to sit through: they're all a bit samey. But more variety would add more rules and thus more time to comply with them.
I think it still has some of the players-acting-in-isolation issue of v7 but with the enemy pawn moving around, there's an effect sort of reminiscent of Hansa, i.e. where you leave the enemy pawn influences where the next player is likely to want to go.
I'm not sure yet where hubris fits into this, but maybe I can find a couple of little ways for players to get a shortcut here or there in exchange for hubris, and of course you pick up some hubris in the temple. We could of course get rid of hubris entirely but it's grown on me so I hate to see it go.
One of the strong points of v7 was that it was pretty intuitive. Players taking individual turns makes sense to players, since most games work this way. It's less easy when it's "here are the rules that govern these shared encounters"; people have less of an intuition about what a shared encounter entails.
Anyway, this idea is actually pretty easy to solo test using most of the same components as v15 so I'll at least give it a go and see how it plays. It might just be that a return to v7, at least some aspects of it, are what's needed to really push things forward.
Monday, July 9, 2018
Is variety essential to immersion?
This is (now) supposed to be a cinematic game. Does it feel cinematic? Should it feel cinematic? I think the encounter system is converging on feeling nicely suspenseful, which is almost the same thing. The enemy pawn is creeping closer to the city, the ambiguous character might switch teams, the extra might bail out of the challenge entirely, someone might blow up the bridge -- there are lots of things that can happen (eh, maybe too many) with each card resolution card flip. But are the encounters differentiated in a meaningful way? If they all feel suspenseful, is it the same kind of suspense in each encounter, and if so, is that ok, or should you really feel differently when experiencing a brawl in a seedy dive in Nepal as opposed to a frantic rescue attempt in a bustling Cairo market?
One of the weak points all along has been that we have these action categories (luck, wits, fight, escape) that don't have any gameplay differences. All along we've settled mostly for connecting these to city types, such that each city type has two challenge categories. I've tried to differentiate the city types further by making triangles more "difficult" than pentagons are more difficult than circles. But I'm not sure that makes sense in the new version where your destination is chosen for you each turn -- there's no need to motivate a risk/reward location selection decision if you don't select your location! Still they could feel different if, say, triangles yield more clues but also tend to deal out more damage, whereas circles are safer but not as productive. This could influence your investment in a given location, coupled with the relative stage of the game and how much info you possess vs. how much you need.
But is it important, then, that, say, pentagons feature luck and wits challenges, or can every city have every kind of challenge? I don't think it makes that much difference either way, so I'm inclined to take the latter approach, for the simple reason that otherwise, it's something you have to tell the players but it really makes no impact on their decisions.
So you have cities that feel a bit different and in each you face a random challenge category. The encounter card tells you about the scene you face, and the resolution cards, with their story-board flavor, will help sell the theming a bit. But I also wonder if we shouldn't add in some kind of differentiation between the challenge categories to make them feel different as well. I can see two ways of approaching this.
One, and probably the better of the two, is to impose a single rule on each challenge category. It's simple, so it can be printed on the encounter card or the mat. Perhaps these are so unobtrusive that it's an optional rule, in the form of a single info card, that you either use or leave out entirely. But I tend to frown on optional rules like this generally.
Anyway, what could these simple rules be? I don't know, but something like:
Fight:
- Only one side will view solution cards after the encounter
- Only one cube can occupy a space on the success track
Escape
- The challenge only lasts for 3 resolution cards instead of 4
- No player may bid more than 3 time in the investment stage
Luck
- When investing, adventure cards are chosen at random; any that is 'luck' is worth an investment of 4
Wits
- Pick investment cards secretly and simultaneously -- if you match another player's, you each get +1 investment
A second approach would be to harness the fact that each category has a dedicated set of resolution cards, and each encounter has a custom success track, and make these work together.
So, for example, "escape" encounters could have on their success track several "stop" points, and the cube can't progress past this unless an "escape" icon shows up on the resolution card or someone pays an escape icon.
"Fight" encounters could have two tracks with a choke point, and only the first team to reach the choke point gets to progress past it.
"Wits" encounters could have a mini-maze: spaces could blip you back and forth but symbols on the resolution cards would let you punch through the maze.
I think I like the first approach better because it means encounters are all basically the same with each having a single rules tweak. In the second approach, really each category is a separate mini-game system. That's potentially fun but it's maybe more complexity than the game needs.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Bidding screenwriters
I think I’ve convinced myself that the “poison” version of the temple is the way to go. I think the symmetry with the map phase is a compelling argument in its favor. In both phases you’re bidding damage but this can be offset by preparation. The details of the auctions and the stakes of the auction change so it still feels like there’s a transition, but it still feels like it’s the same game.
I think there’s also a good thematic justification for this. Let’s say that the game’s premise is that we are screenwriters trying to promote our own character such that in the editing room that character will emerge as the protagonist.(*). The punitive temple didn’t make much sense — who is it that is punishing our characters? I like the poison temple better — we, the screenwriters, are punishing our own characters, creating interesting drama by being willing to subject our favorite to a greater level of struggle.
This calls for caution, though. Upon hearing that we players are screenwriters, playtesters generate a ton of suggestions about how to introduce screenwriting theming and conventions and concepts. So this theme may create expectations in people that the game doesn’t fully deliver on — i.e. in some ways you’re the character and in some ways the writer and we have to be careful about this. But I think at least most of the systems are justifiable:
- Adventure cards represent gear and traits you’re investing your character with to enable them to succeed. That one is easy.
- Encounters are scenes we’re writing together to show how our characters acquire knowledge about the temple. Also easy. Except...
- ...it makes sense that info about the temple (the peril cards) is hidden from the characters, but why is it hidden from us? I guess my hand-wave at this is that the film is already in production when we’re hired to work on it, and so the props department is already at work building sets for the temple. Getting a sneak peak at those tells us about what kinds of things we should be writing into our characters (i.e. cards we should get) to prepare for that. That doesn’t completely answer why we have to do encounters to see the temple phase sets, but I guess it will have to do.
As previously posted, though, there’s an open question as to what winning represents. In v14 it was “furthest back on the time track”, which worked but had weird thematic implications. With the temple track, “furthest along the track without dying” seems ok enough. Except, if we’re rival screenwriters, is it possible that there are other ways to win? For example, sometimes a scenery-chewing villain or a character’s heroic sacrifice or redemption arc end up being the thing you remember most about a movie, and sometimes the best or most famous actor or actress is cast in one of those supporting roles. Surely if you could choose between being the writer who created Vader or the one who created Luke you’d choose the former.
The way I want to have a whack at this is to have the spaces of the temple track numbered such that at game’s end, the space you’re on gives your score, unless you die before the end, in which case your score is zero. Except, if you die due to hubris, or accumulated injuries, or after purging a lot of hubris, you can claim the corresponding scoring card, and if no one exceeds that score on the track you win. So if no other players progress too far into the temple, the editor doesn’t have much to work with and cuts things in such a way that your compelling but doomed villain or heroic sidekick gets the most favorable treatment in the final edit.
We must be careful here not to encourage players to deliberately spike their hubris or injuries just to try to win in this alternate way. The best way to win is still to move along the track. But death should always be a possibility and if your character dies, it might be fun to nevertheless be able to win the game, if all the other players did was just hang back and not accomplish very much.
(*) Another possible premise is that whichever of us emerges with the strongest character arc will have the best actor/actress cast as our chracter. I think it has to be one or the other of these but it probably doesn’t matter much which.
I think there’s also a good thematic justification for this. Let’s say that the game’s premise is that we are screenwriters trying to promote our own character such that in the editing room that character will emerge as the protagonist.(*). The punitive temple didn’t make much sense — who is it that is punishing our characters? I like the poison temple better — we, the screenwriters, are punishing our own characters, creating interesting drama by being willing to subject our favorite to a greater level of struggle.
This calls for caution, though. Upon hearing that we players are screenwriters, playtesters generate a ton of suggestions about how to introduce screenwriting theming and conventions and concepts. So this theme may create expectations in people that the game doesn’t fully deliver on — i.e. in some ways you’re the character and in some ways the writer and we have to be careful about this. But I think at least most of the systems are justifiable:
- Adventure cards represent gear and traits you’re investing your character with to enable them to succeed. That one is easy.
- Encounters are scenes we’re writing together to show how our characters acquire knowledge about the temple. Also easy. Except...
- ...it makes sense that info about the temple (the peril cards) is hidden from the characters, but why is it hidden from us? I guess my hand-wave at this is that the film is already in production when we’re hired to work on it, and so the props department is already at work building sets for the temple. Getting a sneak peak at those tells us about what kinds of things we should be writing into our characters (i.e. cards we should get) to prepare for that. That doesn’t completely answer why we have to do encounters to see the temple phase sets, but I guess it will have to do.
As previously posted, though, there’s an open question as to what winning represents. In v14 it was “furthest back on the time track”, which worked but had weird thematic implications. With the temple track, “furthest along the track without dying” seems ok enough. Except, if we’re rival screenwriters, is it possible that there are other ways to win? For example, sometimes a scenery-chewing villain or a character’s heroic sacrifice or redemption arc end up being the thing you remember most about a movie, and sometimes the best or most famous actor or actress is cast in one of those supporting roles. Surely if you could choose between being the writer who created Vader or the one who created Luke you’d choose the former.
The way I want to have a whack at this is to have the spaces of the temple track numbered such that at game’s end, the space you’re on gives your score, unless you die before the end, in which case your score is zero. Except, if you die due to hubris, or accumulated injuries, or after purging a lot of hubris, you can claim the corresponding scoring card, and if no one exceeds that score on the track you win. So if no other players progress too far into the temple, the editor doesn’t have much to work with and cuts things in such a way that your compelling but doomed villain or heroic sidekick gets the most favorable treatment in the final edit.
We must be careful here not to encourage players to deliberately spike their hubris or injuries just to try to win in this alternate way. The best way to win is still to move along the track. But death should always be a possibility and if your character dies, it might be fun to nevertheless be able to win the game, if all the other players did was just hang back and not accomplish very much.
(*) Another possible premise is that whichever of us emerges with the strongest character arc will have the best actor/actress cast as our chracter. I think it has to be one or the other of these but it probably doesn’t matter much which.
Monday, June 25, 2018
Temple: punitive or poisonous?
Let's stipulate to the previous post's framework as being, at least notionally, the path forward for the encounter system:
- Perform a Dutch auction to resolve investment, and assign roles
- Resolve the encounter and then give out rewards (temple card lookups) in role order
- Then, each player choose one equipment card, some of which match the temple perils.
So you're getting info about the temple's perils, and cards to help traverse those perils. What do you do with it? Actually, there are two possible answers:
Punitive temple
This is closest to the version we tried most recently. For each temple card, reveal the card, and then order the players based on how many of that card's peril symbol they have on their equipment cards. Then allocate penalties; the further you are from the most-prepared player, the larger your punishment.
This works well enough and it lets players' relative preparation matter, so it's nice. It's reasonably simple, and it's reasonably thematic. A downside is that it bears little mechanical similarity to the map phase, so it's like you've started a whole new game, albeit a quick one.
Poisonous temple
What if instead there's some sort of map or track with spaces that represent progress through the temple. We've had things like this before so it's not a full deparature. But for each temple card, now there would be a bid (closed fist, I suspect). Mirroring the map phase bid, you 'pay for' your bid by a combination of the matching peril symbols on your equipment cards, and some poison that you drink.
In the map phase, that poison is movement on the time track. Maybe here it's time, or hubris, or damage, or maybe it blips between these from card to card. The point being, if you have the highest bid, you have to have the right equipment cards or be willing to drink some poison.
But then the benefit is, we move our pawns across this temple mat in bid order, with the highest bid moving furthest. Maybe the lowest bid even has to move backward! Maybe there are spatial effects -- a bridge that leading players can "blow", forcing trailing players to take the long way, etc.
The temple cards progress from red ("approaching the temple"), to purple ("inside the temple"), to yellow ("the grail room"), to green ("hubris challenge"). Maybe the track or map mirrors this, such that if, when the temple card switches to the next color, if your piece isn't in the similarly-colored region on the track/map, you are eliminated or punished or whatever.
The nice thing is that it creates urgency asymmetrically. I may be poorly prepared for the next temple card but I still need to bid high because the downside is being left way behind.
Another advantage is that it has direct mechanical similarities to the map phase. On the other hand, it means the game is basically an auction game all the way through, but maybe that's ok.
What got me thinking about it in the first place was my endless concern about the "trivial strategy" -- i.e. is a player who does nothing in the information game still able to do well in the temple phase simply by randomly grabbing some equipment cards in the map phase? There are ways to counteract this in the punitive temple, i.e. by making the punishments more severe, but in the poison temple, maybe you handle it organically: the player, by being poorly prepared, will either consistently lose bids and thus be hopelessly far behind, OR will have to drink so much poison to be competitive that he effectively eliminates himself just in the very act of trying to keep up.
This still needs more thought but there are benefits to either approach. I would have thought before today that the punitive temple was the only way to go, but the poison temple may have some upsides as well.
- Perform a Dutch auction to resolve investment, and assign roles
- Resolve the encounter and then give out rewards (temple card lookups) in role order
- Then, each player choose one equipment card, some of which match the temple perils.
So you're getting info about the temple's perils, and cards to help traverse those perils. What do you do with it? Actually, there are two possible answers:
Punitive temple
This is closest to the version we tried most recently. For each temple card, reveal the card, and then order the players based on how many of that card's peril symbol they have on their equipment cards. Then allocate penalties; the further you are from the most-prepared player, the larger your punishment.
This works well enough and it lets players' relative preparation matter, so it's nice. It's reasonably simple, and it's reasonably thematic. A downside is that it bears little mechanical similarity to the map phase, so it's like you've started a whole new game, albeit a quick one.
Poisonous temple
What if instead there's some sort of map or track with spaces that represent progress through the temple. We've had things like this before so it's not a full deparature. But for each temple card, now there would be a bid (closed fist, I suspect). Mirroring the map phase bid, you 'pay for' your bid by a combination of the matching peril symbols on your equipment cards, and some poison that you drink.
In the map phase, that poison is movement on the time track. Maybe here it's time, or hubris, or damage, or maybe it blips between these from card to card. The point being, if you have the highest bid, you have to have the right equipment cards or be willing to drink some poison.
But then the benefit is, we move our pawns across this temple mat in bid order, with the highest bid moving furthest. Maybe the lowest bid even has to move backward! Maybe there are spatial effects -- a bridge that leading players can "blow", forcing trailing players to take the long way, etc.
The temple cards progress from red ("approaching the temple"), to purple ("inside the temple"), to yellow ("the grail room"), to green ("hubris challenge"). Maybe the track or map mirrors this, such that if, when the temple card switches to the next color, if your piece isn't in the similarly-colored region on the track/map, you are eliminated or punished or whatever.
The nice thing is that it creates urgency asymmetrically. I may be poorly prepared for the next temple card but I still need to bid high because the downside is being left way behind.
Another advantage is that it has direct mechanical similarities to the map phase. On the other hand, it means the game is basically an auction game all the way through, but maybe that's ok.
What got me thinking about it in the first place was my endless concern about the "trivial strategy" -- i.e. is a player who does nothing in the information game still able to do well in the temple phase simply by randomly grabbing some equipment cards in the map phase? There are ways to counteract this in the punitive temple, i.e. by making the punishments more severe, but in the poison temple, maybe you handle it organically: the player, by being poorly prepared, will either consistently lose bids and thus be hopelessly far behind, OR will have to drink so much poison to be competitive that he effectively eliminates himself just in the very act of trying to keep up.
This still needs more thought but there are benefits to either approach. I would have thought before today that the punitive temple was the only way to go, but the poison temple may have some upsides as well.
Worth the wait (?)
In the last post I talked about which elements of the past couple of years' worth of activity I want to try to keep. Now I need to think about how to fit it into an encounter system that works.
First, I think we need to put the challenge setup on rails. You get a randomly chosen tile, which is placed in a randomly determined city. The tile says which one, or two, solution categories are available this encounter. Then reveal an encounter card, and read what it says.
Then comes the twist on previous versions. The first shared-encounter version let players commit cubes, either to help the group or set themselves up individually for rewards. Some playtesters felt this was broken (it may have been), so we split the players into teams. Now it's more tense: if you are too selfish your team will lose, but the other team will still get stuff. But this resulted in a lot of extra rules: first bid cubes, then choose teams, then decide how to split up the cubes between helping your team and rewards. And I'm not sure "be selfish/be altruistic?" is super interesting or that it is that evocative of the theme.
An easier solution should have been obvious all along: the cubes you bid are also the ones you use to claim rewards at the end of the encounter. Also, put the team selection on rails: there are four roles on the "good guys" team and one on the "bad guys" team. You take the top-most card on the team you wish to join, in bid order.
But instead of a closed-fist bid, how about a Dutch auction? This will reduce the problem of ties quite a bit, and I like the psychology of this style of bidding in another game I'm using it in.
So, bid for roles, committing some cubes. Cubes you commit, you have to pay for, either with adventure cards or with moves on the time track. Increase the 'investment track' for your team on the encounter mat.
Then, when resolution cards are revealed, compare the boxes on the encounter card to which boxes are filled on the investment track. But there are some ways that you can lose cubes as the encounter proceeds.
Then, after the encounter ends, gain any bonus cubes specified by your role, and then in role order, claim rewards. What are rewards? Before it was the right to look at solution cards, or the equipment cards you need to traverse the temple's perils. Now, it's just solution lookups.
Each solution card will get, during setup, a specified number of green cubes. To look at a solution card, you have to 'pay' cubes equal to the number of green cubes on the card. If you want to, you can keep one of those green cubes. This helps you in the hubris challenge, but also means that anyone else wanting to look at that solution card will have an easier time.
There's a catch; actually two. If the enemy pawn is further along the progress track on the encounter card than the "good guys" pawn, the good guys get nothing. So this is one reason to maybe want to be on the enemy team for an encounter: the potential that you can be the one to skunk your opponents.
In addition, however far back you are from the final space on the track, there's a hubris penalty. This reflects that you didn't exactly reach the end of the encounter, and you're being hubristic (?) to push on when the forces guarding the information clearly have decreed that you should not have it! This bit is fiddly so we'll see if it survives.
After the encounter, everyone gets a free turn. Move to a different city, and in that city, either take two (face-down) adventure cards, take one (face-up) equipment card (for the temple), or if appropriate reveal a relic, which gives freebie cubes that help you get information from certain solution categories.
I think this basically works, and while it's not trivially simple, I think it's easy enough to internalize. The limitation of this system may be that the encounters aren't all that well differentiated; it may not feel that much like you're in a Cairo market or an Austrian castle. But I'm not sure the extra rules needed to achieve these kinds of differences are worth the trouble. For now I think the main thing is getting in place a framework that works well, and then seeing how to embellish this if needed.
Taken collectively I'm not sure this is an earth-shatteringly brilliant new direction that really needed a six month delay to be realized, but I do think it achieves the qualities articulated in the previous post but is simpler and more compact than any of the other directions that I had tried up to that point, so if it sets us on a solid footing from which to begin tweaking, then certainly it will have been worth a delay.
First, I think we need to put the challenge setup on rails. You get a randomly chosen tile, which is placed in a randomly determined city. The tile says which one, or two, solution categories are available this encounter. Then reveal an encounter card, and read what it says.
Then comes the twist on previous versions. The first shared-encounter version let players commit cubes, either to help the group or set themselves up individually for rewards. Some playtesters felt this was broken (it may have been), so we split the players into teams. Now it's more tense: if you are too selfish your team will lose, but the other team will still get stuff. But this resulted in a lot of extra rules: first bid cubes, then choose teams, then decide how to split up the cubes between helping your team and rewards. And I'm not sure "be selfish/be altruistic?" is super interesting or that it is that evocative of the theme.
An easier solution should have been obvious all along: the cubes you bid are also the ones you use to claim rewards at the end of the encounter. Also, put the team selection on rails: there are four roles on the "good guys" team and one on the "bad guys" team. You take the top-most card on the team you wish to join, in bid order.
But instead of a closed-fist bid, how about a Dutch auction? This will reduce the problem of ties quite a bit, and I like the psychology of this style of bidding in another game I'm using it in.
So, bid for roles, committing some cubes. Cubes you commit, you have to pay for, either with adventure cards or with moves on the time track. Increase the 'investment track' for your team on the encounter mat.
Then, when resolution cards are revealed, compare the boxes on the encounter card to which boxes are filled on the investment track. But there are some ways that you can lose cubes as the encounter proceeds.
Then, after the encounter ends, gain any bonus cubes specified by your role, and then in role order, claim rewards. What are rewards? Before it was the right to look at solution cards, or the equipment cards you need to traverse the temple's perils. Now, it's just solution lookups.
Each solution card will get, during setup, a specified number of green cubes. To look at a solution card, you have to 'pay' cubes equal to the number of green cubes on the card. If you want to, you can keep one of those green cubes. This helps you in the hubris challenge, but also means that anyone else wanting to look at that solution card will have an easier time.
There's a catch; actually two. If the enemy pawn is further along the progress track on the encounter card than the "good guys" pawn, the good guys get nothing. So this is one reason to maybe want to be on the enemy team for an encounter: the potential that you can be the one to skunk your opponents.
In addition, however far back you are from the final space on the track, there's a hubris penalty. This reflects that you didn't exactly reach the end of the encounter, and you're being hubristic (?) to push on when the forces guarding the information clearly have decreed that you should not have it! This bit is fiddly so we'll see if it survives.
After the encounter, everyone gets a free turn. Move to a different city, and in that city, either take two (face-down) adventure cards, take one (face-up) equipment card (for the temple), or if appropriate reveal a relic, which gives freebie cubes that help you get information from certain solution categories.
I think this basically works, and while it's not trivially simple, I think it's easy enough to internalize. The limitation of this system may be that the encounters aren't all that well differentiated; it may not feel that much like you're in a Cairo market or an Austrian castle. But I'm not sure the extra rules needed to achieve these kinds of differences are worth the trouble. For now I think the main thing is getting in place a framework that works well, and then seeing how to embellish this if needed.
Taken collectively I'm not sure this is an earth-shatteringly brilliant new direction that really needed a six month delay to be realized, but I do think it achieves the qualities articulated in the previous post but is simpler and more compact than any of the other directions that I had tried up to that point, so if it sets us on a solid footing from which to begin tweaking, then certainly it will have been worth a delay.
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