Cube-pushing

Solo testing of the ideas of the previous posts has me feeling like I'm spinning my wheels and maybe struggling a bit to capture what exactly is the goal of this game.  It's odd, in that I thought that v14.4 was very close to done.  In a way it was, but the problem with v15.0 may in hindsight also have been an issue with v14.4 that merely went unnoticed.


The idea is that instead of the v7 approach of having a hand of action cards that you constantly spend and replenish, v13 and on have used a display of cards that you permanently keep; now they're on a mat, which represents your character's core attributes, and thematically it's great.  Then when you go into an encounter, you choose which of those things you want to use, and 'activate' them with cubes, but you can instead be selfish and allocate cubes to the 'rewards' area of your mat.  However, it's common that you only have one card that pertains to the current encounter, or maybe even 0.  It's not selfish to not contribute to a challenge if you're unable to, and it's not even that altruistic to contribute when you can.  This decision just isn't that suspenseful.


But that was ok when the encounter prompted players for a decision after each die roll/resolution card flip, because the real decisions were going to lie in the brinksmanship of the encounter resolution -- do I stay in or get out?  But if we're now putting the resolution on rails (mostly as a way to keep slow players from stalling out the game by peppering them for too many decisions), then the investment decisions have to carry the full freight, and so they may need to be beefed up a bit.


How to do this?  That's what I've been struggling with.  My current solution may hold some promise but it's a bit clunky.  First, you still have a mat, but you also have some cards that can correspond to different encounter attributes.  After the encounter details are revealed, everyone selects a number of cubes, and then those are revealed.  Then everyone picks a role -- you choose to be on the good guys or bad guys for the present encounter.


Then, everyone allocates the cubes they 'bid' to their mat AND to cards in hand.  Each cube you allocate costs one step on the time track, unless the associated card is already on your mat.  (Hubris factors into this as well but ignore that for now).  After the encounter, you can 'promote' a card that you used onto your mat; otherwise you must discard the card.  But keeping a card clogs up space on your mat that you might prefer to have open later for cards that interact with the temple perils.


In addition to activating cards, you can instead allocate cubes to a 'catch-all' box that can either be used to block you from harm during the encounter or to claim extra rewards after the encounter.  After all cubes are allocated, we add up the investment for each side, with each player contributing one point of investment to their side for each card they activated that pertains to the encounter (e.g. matches its challenge category or location or whatever).


Then, resolve the encounter, and winning side gets their rewards, AND gets to draw a new card each.  Losers are stuck with what they had going in, but they do get to choose the next encounter.


Now this has a fair number of steps to it in the setup, and I think that's a down side.  But I can make an argument for each one, and so it's not clear how to make it simpler. 


- The bidding cubes puts you in the driver's seat for the better roles (which carry more freebie rewards with them), but it may cost you more time. 


- Picking a side means you're judging which side seems potentially better positioned to do well based on the geography.  And picking earlier means to get a more lucrative role on the side you choose, but also that you have less info about which side seems stronger based on which side the players before you join.


- Allocating cubes is your chance to double-cross.  If your side has a couple of other players, you might allocate cubes to the shield/reward box to save your own skin as opposed to putting them on cards to strengthen your team.


If you lost any of these, your decisions would be based largely on guesswork.  For example, if I just picked roles without the cube bid, I'd be guessing about what everyone's likely to do.  If I first see, ah, you bid 6 cubes and joined the enemy this turn, he bid 3 cubes and joined the good guys, well, now I maybe have some basis for judging your relative intentions and who I want to side with.  Whereas if you just allocated your cubes to your mat in the first phase, the decisions would be much more deterministic and mathy, and there wouldn't be as much room for double-crossing.  We basically tried that live and it didn't work very well.  It should be quick -- "bid cubes, pick roles, then allocate your cubes, boom, done", but will it be?  I'm not sure.


I'm finding that it's very hard to solo test, and so it's hard to predict how it will go in live testing.  On the one hand I could see it leading to some nice decisions, but on the other I can see the three prompts leading to 20 minute encounters and another trip back to the drawing board...

The finish line recedes once more

We had the game's first 5p session on Saturday, and it went rather poorly.  It's tempting to just write it off as a consequence of the player count and/or just a bad test, but there were a few concerns that are worth contemplating.

First, the encounters and their in-or-out decisions prompt the players for a lot of decisions in rapid succession.  For slow players, these decisions, though simple, come at a faster pace than they can keep up with.  We had progressed through 6 encounters in about 90 minutes, way too slow.

But second, one player expressed the view that the in/out decision is, game-theoretically speaking, easy and therefore uninteresting.  If you had only set aside one cube for a reward, get out early; if you have multiple cubes in for rewards, stay as long as you can.  But chances are the players with low rewards had high investment, and when they leave, everyone else wants to leave too.  Now I think there's a bit more to the decision space than this, chiefly that, if the group always leaves encounters early and with few rewards, the temple is going to eat them alive.  But if it takes a full play through to see this, maybe that's not going to give a good first player experience.

So, what to do?  A suggestion was discussed, which I think has promise.  In each encounter, there would be two teams (good guys/bad guys), and each player drafts a particular role -- the protagonist, the love interest, the antagonist, maybe even an extra, etc -- which is affiliated with one team or the other.  Then, players 'invest' by allocating cubes to the cards they have that match the encounter, and your investment goes to the team you've chosen for this encounter.  Then resolve the encounter in the usual way, but it's on rails -- no one exits until one side or the other wins, and only the players on that side get rewards.

The nice thing is that, since you choose roles before you invest, there's some speculation, but there's still the ability to double-cross.  Someone joined your team thinking you were going to make a big investment, but in reality you held back so as to benefit yourself.  But importantly, the tragedy of the commons concern, of players trying to freeload, is broken.  If I hold back so as to be selfish, it doesn't hurt all of us -- it only hurts my team.  The other team gets the reward.  

In what way can I be 'selfish' and hold back?  I'm not 100% sure but I think there might be two ways. The simpler is that the other team can deal you damage during an encounter, and so cubes you don't allocate to boost the encounter can be used to block this.

The other would lead to bigger changes.  I've said before that your mat represents your character and the cards you add to it represent attributes of your character.  What if these were arranged in a pyramid such that at the top of the pyramid is your most 'iconic' attribute -- the thing that viewers most associate with that character.  But in game terms, maybe there's some way in which this slot is also more powerful, i.e. it gets a multiplier?

Ok, so far so good.  What if also, each time a card is activated, that's you saying "this is a key attribute of this character!", and so the card moves toward the top of the pyramid (switching places with the card ahead of it?)   The thing is, cards that are useful outside the temple are only useful outside the temple, and cards useful in the temple are only useful inside.  So it might be that you'd sometimes want to select the cards that you know will be useful in the temple, so that they can start to float to the top of the pyramid and become more powerful.  Of course, allocating cubes to such cards does you no good in the encounter, but it may help you long-term.  

Relatedly, what if you also have a couple of core abilities that aren't promotable in this way, but they can help with encounters or perhaps convey special powers.  So now you must decide, where those are concerned, do I activate them now for their benefit, or do I instead activate something to promote it to a higher level so it will be more useful long-term?

And then add in to this a possible role for hubris, to promote a card before the encounter resolution rather than after, and/or just to fast-forward or short-circuit the promotion process.

Not sure about this but it might be worth thinking about at least a bit.  It might replace or supplement the idea of placing cubes in the temple to boost cards.  Instead, you're rewarded for knowing early on what cards to get and boost, and to actually spend the time boosting them.

One issue that has come up is with victory.  What does it mean?  Before, it was, thematically, "person who made the shortest movie", but that makes less sense if each encounter we're divvying up roles.  If I was the protagonist the most times, then it would seem silly that a player who was always the extra would be the winner.  Screen time should relate to victory.  There's a bit more to it than that, though -- I think the idea is that the game is about the raw material you're giving to the film's editor, and in the end the winner is the player who emerged from the editing process as the protagonist.  So it could be that a minimal contributor could be edited to be the protagonist, if the more invested character's arc results in his death.  And so maybe that's the tension -- players who acquire more screen time acquire more rewards, but are also more of a target for damage, and so maybe it all balances out.

There's the added complication that not all screen time is equal.  Screen time that you eat up being on camera is good, screen time for exposition is less good, but the combination of the two is your film's length and if it's too long you've bored everyone.  So do we also need to track "good time" and "bad time" for each character?  But this too is a bit strange, since the roles that you draft are what give you your "good time" points.  Thus maybe it's just that total running time is a guard rail you have to avoid crashing into.  That's acceptable but it means we're back to needing a concept of victory.  Maybe back to achievements that pay out VPs a la v7?

Maybe it's just as simple as you "win" each of the cards of the temple:  start city, five 'peril' cards, grail room, five hubris cards.  Winner is the person who survives to the end and possesses the most cards of the survivors.  Or shift it around such that grail room is worth 2 VP and each hubris card is worth 1/2 VP, or whatever.   This at least gives you something tangible to shoot for, and it's the thing the game seems to be telling you to shoot for anyway -- 'prepare for the temple!'  So it may not actually change the player behavior that much, and may even motivate more logical behavior.  No one has enough experience with the game to have reached this level, but you could sort of see skilled players gaming the time system in odd ways, since time ultimately equals score.  If time is instead just a finite currency you have to spend, then the winning behavior is much more straightforward and much less gamey.

The rules, and musings on player count

As a follow up to the nutshell post, here's a link to the full rule set (v14.4):  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UObIdfNkddg6VM1gSupXs3CSpH_t4CXP--cKG6NOQFU/edit?usp=sharing


The document is too long and too formatted to copy and paste it into a blog post, but hopefully the link works and everything in the rule set makes sense.


The rules state that the game now seats from 2-5, although I think with a small qualifier or two, 1-5 should be supportable.


We've always viewed 4p as the max, partly due to latency issues and partly due to timing problems associated with the turn-based mechanics of the game.  There were a few systems that depended on which player did such-and-such first, and these kind of rules can leave the last player in turn order out of luck through no fault of his/her own.


With the new rules, simultaneity addresses the latency concern and the timing concern, to some extent -- there is still a 'choose rewards in order' effect but as it affects only those players who drop out of the encounter at the same time, and as the start player should change pretty frequently, this may not be too harmful for a later player. 


It's not a certainty that there's enough information to go around in a 5p game.  I think there are at least enough cards:  each player has 7 slots on his mat, and the group as a whole will get to look at 36 cards over the game.  Of these, for each of the six perils, there are 8 symbols in the deck, and typically there will be 4 unique perils in the temple (5 cards but statistically one peril will show up twice), so that's 32 relevant peril symbols, meaning that each player in a 5p game can get about 6, and cube allocation lets you extend the value of the symbols you've gotten.


What I worry about more is the encounter system.  Players invest in the encounter, and so naturally when there are more players there is more total investment and so the encounter is 'easier'.  But how do we quantify an encounter's ease?  I think it's mostly about how close you can get to the enemy pawn and still have a chance of getting info before the pawn reaches your city.  In a big group, you'll be able to skate closer to the enemy whereas in a smaller group you'll have to travel further away.  This will cost more time in a small group than in a big group.


However, in a big group, you have more competition for the same number of rewards, which means (a) you won't always be able to get the adventure cards that you want, and (b) you'll often be looking at temple cards after other players have viewed them, meaning you have to take a time penalty.


My hope, then, is that the combination of these effects will actually make the different player counts feel qualitatively different.  This is one of my favorite aspects of Knizia's Lord of the Rings, and it would be great to have it come through here as well.  There may be some tweaks necessary to realize it, and of particular concern is whether certain character mats are too good or too weak at a given player count.