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.