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.