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.
I'm a little out of touch with the game's development, and I'm not sure how these shared encounters really work...
ReplyDeleteBut to be honest, this "quick description" sounds somewhat tedious and fiddly compared to what I remember from v7. It's possible that the last decade has degraded my memory of the game, and what's left is some idealistic version that never really existed, and it's also possible that the time passed could make me feel like v7 is "old fashioned" if I were to play it again now. But here's a description I wrote in my blog after playing it for the first time:
"In Lost Adventures, players play adventurers a la Indiana Jones, visiting Theme cards (such as Sallah, Henry Jones Sr, and the Grail Diary) to gather information on 3 hidden Relics, the Lost Temple and how to navigate it, and the Holy Grail. Meanwhile, a relentless enemy is searching for the Temple as well (“Nazis… I hate these guys.”)! The more information the players get, the more Enemies are added to the board and the faster they approach the Temple. Once the Temple is found (either by a player or by the Enemy), the game moves to the Temple phase where players navigate the Lost Temple in search of the Grail Room (to find the Holy Grail), and then a font to test the Grail in. Again, the Enemy is also searching for the grail, and the game ends as soon as either a player tests the True Grail in a font, or the enemy finds the Grail. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins. Points are earned by finding and delivering the Relics, finding the Temple and the Grail Room, testing the True Grail in a font, and beating up the most Nazis."
Here's a post about my initial reactions to the game: http://sedjtroll.blogspot.com/2007/09/so-how-is-this-lost-adventures-game.html
I guess that description doesn't go into mechanics at all, but the things I remember drawing me to the original (v7) design was the neat presentation of getting info (slipping a card behind the rubylith), and the idea that you could deduce information from watching opponents (though in practice, at the time, I don't think that was panning out just right).
A tweak I remember suggesting was to change the Nazi tokens to be less intricate (they used to move around the map, toward cities where player acted, if I remember correctly, and if enough of them accumulated in 1 space, they would "pop" like an outbreak in Pandemic), instead adding them to the board whenever players made progress, which essentially made that same progress harder for other players, encouraging players to differentiate quickly.
In your new post, you talked about several different tracks... I recall just 1 track: enemy zeal. To me that felt good... thematically it was an abstraction of how much progress the enemy was making (or rather, how fast they were making it), and mechanically it was a game end timer.
I do recall thinking that the challenges could have been cooler if you as a player had "stats" in each of the suits, which you could increase by getting items (a pistol gives you +1 Fight all the time), or by doing certain things perhaps -- that would factor into how well you can defeat challenges. I don't know that that would apply anymore in the latest version.
Long story short, the things that jumped out at me a decade ago I'm simply not seeing in the descriptions now. That's probably more of a comment on my interests than it is on the game -- I do recall Zev's point that for an Indiana Jones adventure game, people might be really interested in a more cinematic experience.
Well, sure, but note that your blog excerpt describes the action in thematic terms, whereas I'm describing it here in mechanical terms. I could equally well write a thematic sounding explanation of how it works that would make it sound more flashy!
ReplyDeleteI wish it were possible to post photos in the comments, but anyway, the idea with the tracks is that there's a little mat onto which you flip resolution cards. Resolution cards have two rows of boxes, one on the left edge, for the enemy, and one on the bottom edge, for the player. You compare the "hits" shown in those rows to the position of the player investment track (bottom row) and enemy investment (left row), and record successes accordingly. Basically it's a die-rolling mechanic, but the resolution cards have (or will have) storyboard art and text so it feels more like the scene is unfolding than it would if we just did it with dice.
But it's this progressive resolution that makes the encounter feel cinematic. You're waiting to see how far on the success track you can advance before the enemy reaches your city and shuts things down.
We've been trying variations of this for a year and it's been pretty successful. I think it's an upgrade over: "Roll a die. If it's 1-3, your challenge category is X; 2-5, it's Y. Discard AP cards in an amount equal to the number of cubes in the city; AP cards in the matching category are worth 3."
That was a perfectly ok simple-to-resolve system but it was very abstract. The general consensus was that something more suspenseful was wanted. I think the new system achieves that, the question is simply about whether it's quick enough to resolve that it can be part of a player turn, or whether it's involved enough that we need to do shared turns to get the length down.
No more enemy zeal or progress -- there is a game clock but it's schedule-driven instead of event-driven. The game length is scripted and is out of the player's hands, mostly a product of the linear/procedural temple.
But, no worries if the game no longer appeals to you. We still appreciate your input over the years.
I realized that description was thematic and not mechanical -- maybe if I looked harder I could find where I described it in mechanical terms back then (unfortunately I was short on time earlier, and just took the first thing I found). The link to the other post might have been more helpful in that regard.
ReplyDeleteOf course, it's possible that the current version of the game just doesn't excite me like the old one did, and it's also possible I'd love this new version if I had a clearer view of what it really was (so far it hasn't come together for me like the old version did).
Sure. I guess one thing that gives me hope, and maybe you as well, is that most of the folks who were late-stage Sands testers and who basically were the ones to 'sign off' on its final form, have tested this one in the last year or two. I of course haven't taken every suggestion they've offered, but nothing they've actively disliked has survived for any length of time. So I'm hopeful that in the end there's a good game that will emerge, but whether it scratches the original itch, whether people who liked it once will like it in the end, that's hard to say. v7 still exists and is available to any publisher who wants to sign it, of course!
ReplyDelete(Also probably worth observing that I've shifted philosophically to the strong view that it has been detrimental to gaming to have moved away from German-era systems of interaction, and so I'm interested in designing interaction into games as a primary player consideration. That was never a major goal of the Lost Adventures project originally, we just wanted to find a way to realize the information puzzle mechanically. But I think that was a mistake, and I'm trying to see whether we can retain the spirit of the original project but with much more interactive gameplay.
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