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...