Thinkiness, a somewhat recent addition to Lost Adventures

I'm proud of what we accomplished with v7; it was a complete, publishable game that unfortunately just didn't get in front of a publisher who wanted to run with it.  I think we succeeded in two important ways:  we found a way to implement the information puzzle in a satisfying physical and mechanical way, and we captured the right feeling of mounting tension and urgency through the enemy zeal concept.

At the same time, we didn't worry terribly much about the decision space or the competitive space of the game, and as a result I don't think it was terribly deep.  I don't think that's a bad thing at all.  But in thinking about v16, I think I can see quite a lot of considerations and counter-considerations that emerge from the four 'negative currencies': hubris, time, injuries, and curses.(*)  And that's what this post is about. 

Starting at the end:  you can't win if you don't survive to the end, and most importantly that means you must purge all of your hubris in the final challenge.  To do that you'll need green cubes.  If you have 7 green cubes (the max) you can purge about 16 hubris over the challenge's five rolls of the white die.  If you acquired less than 16 hubris, you might be able to get away with fewer green cubes, which you like, since each cube you claim helps your opponents in a small way.  

Except there's another consideration:  you also must roll the black die and compare to the number of curses you hold.  'Bad' rolls cost you injuries, and if you peg the injury track you die.  Depending on how many curses you've acquired and how much damage you took during the temple phase, maybe you can survive all five rolls but maybe that's a close call.  If you will only be able to survive a couple of rolls, you'll want to have more green cubes or fewer hubris, so as to purge your hubris in fewer rolls and exit the hubris challenge earlier.(**)

Now, you'll say that you can mitigate this concern by just taking fewer curses, and one way to avoid them is to have perfect knowledge of, e.g., the true grail.  But temple card lookups are hard to come by and you probably can't look at all of them, so looking for grail information may mean you have fewer opportunities to obtain knowledge about the temple perils.  (Of course, you can get more lookups by investing more heavily in encounters, but that requires either taking on hubris or playing adventure cards, which require time to acquire.)  Anyway, better advance knowledge about the perils gives you the ability to acquire the right equipment and to know that it's the right equipment.  So, when a given peril comes up, and you know what it is, and that you're prepared for it, you can invest (bid) accordingly.  For perils you don't know, you have to bid more conservatively or else accept that your bids may incur penalties (hubris, damage, or time). 

This brings us back to the hubris challenge, because your exposure to risk depends on how many injuries and how much hubris you took due to these bids.  But from a game-winningness perspective, that's not the only thing you care about.  Mere survival doesn't win the day.  If it did, those conservative bids would be perfectly fine.  But low bids ensure only that you'll move very little across the temple track, and the surviving player furthest to the right on that track is the game's winner.  (Sure, you can play it safe and hope that everyone else dies, except that you might still be to the left of the enemy pawn, and thus you'll still lose).

What makes the bidding particularly difficult and, frankly, nasty, is that you don't know until after bidding what type of penalty a particular card deals out.  So there's another level of deciding whether to play it safe or go for it:  if, say, you have a lot of hubris and are close to the end of the time track, but have few injuries, can you get away with a high bid?  You can if the penalty for this card happens to be "injury", but if it ends up being "hubris", you may put yourself in a tough spot.  So do you go for it or bid safely? 

Thus the competition against the other players is what creates, indeed what has to create, the urge to be more aggressive than you'd otherwise prefer to be.  But the way I've presented things above is slightly misleading, because once the temple starts, and once the hubris challenge starts, what you've got is what you've got.  You can't get more green cubes to shore up for the extra hubris you've acquired, nor can you take on fewer curses to counteract the risk from the injuries you took as a result of reckless bidding.  Certainly, going into the temple you know how many green cubes you have and you know what you know, so you know a bit about your exposure to risk, but if you overextend yourself, there's no going back to fix it.  I like games like this but new players may not enjoy flaming out, although it usually won't happen until almost the end of the game. 

Because of all of these considerations and the interplay between them, I think we have a nice challenge for the players that isn't just a puzzle, but neither is it an insoluble exercise in fatalism.  I think the game is about managing your exposure to risk, and doing this more effectively than the other players.   I'm not sure that's what we set out to do, but I think it's a good place for it to end up.



(*) But do we need all of these currencies?  v7 has none of them, after all.  Why four?  They were added sequentially.  First (v11 I think) came time/injuries, a hybrid currency that represented the total amount of stuff you could do, but getting hit by the enemy or the temple cut into this.  These separated when time became your film's "running time" as a thematic nod, in v13.  You can run out of screen time or your character can die,   Late in v13 came the huris concept.  Curses are a minor thing that emerged in v14 as a solution to the problem of what bad thing happens to you if you drink from the wrong grail?  Obvious answer used to be "lose time/take injuries", but I liked the idea that it gives some risk in the hubris challenge.  Now that the hubris challenge is resolved with dice, it's a perfect solution for how that second die can do you harm in a way that scales with how many curses you have.  A developer could maybe merge a couple of these concepts to reduce the number of currencies but for now I like the dynamics that emerge from having all four.


(**) This is in a sense a dynamic balance: it's not a question of how much hubris or how many green cubes you have, but the ratio between them.  My game Sands of Time has this same principle, where what matters is the ratio of your resource production to your unrest level.  So getting unrest down is good, but getting it down lower than you need to is actually inefficient.

More thoughts on encounters and variety

Thoughts after writing up the "New nutshell" post about encounters and encounter cards specifically.


Each encounter card features a scene description (flavor text), a challenge category, and a success track.  I now think that the success tracks for all cards of the same city shape are going to be the same.  Thus, we could perhaps just have the track(s) on the board or a mat, and the encounter cards could become mini cards.  I like this, since all of the other cards in the game are mini-size cards.  The encounters were the only holdouts, because they needed those tracks, and the tracks needed to be on the cards because each track was slightly different (each had a different payout curve and/or the placement of some damage points, but all of that is going away, I think).


Of course, this also means that the encounter deck is a gussied-up version of the die-roll-to-find-the-encounter-category of v7.  It does exactly the same thing mechanically, but also provides a little story.  Maybe that's ok.  Perhaps what we actually want to do here is to have a paragraph book.  It could be quite simple:  roll a d6 (or d12 or whatever), look up the corresponding entry in the book for the city you're in.  "Cairo 6", "Bucharest 4", etc.  The entry tells you your challenge category and the pertinent flavor text.  There are obvious benefits; we can make encounters city-specific to inject more flavor, in addition to having more variety; instead of 45 encounter cards we'd have 72 or even 144 encounters.  And 6 or 12 entries should be easy to fit on a page, so it's a 12-page book, basically a second rulebook, which is probably not super different cost-wise from a deck of cards, maybe.


The decision of whether to implement this as decks of cards that are city-shape dependent, or as a paragraph book, is a publisher-level decision.  What we need to decide is whether it's sufficient to differentiate the encounters merely by the challenge category and flavor text, or whether we need something more.


I think we may need something more, but it needs to be an extremely simple something.  My current thought is that each encounter can modify the standard encounter resolution rules in some simple way, such that it brings out some aspect of the encounter but is easy to remember and implement.


For example, maybe the encounter is "the basket game" scene from Raiders, a "wits" encounter.  So, flavor text might be:


"You turn the corner to find a group of large baskets; men are loading the baskets on to a truck.  An enemy agent lifts the lid of each basket as it is loaded.  You notice one of the lids move slightly; is your contact hiding in the basket?  Which basket was it?"


Rule:  a "1" on the white die turns to a "4"


Now this is easy to implement (and for the other players to help you remember), since you only roll the dice three times.  It has an interesting effect.  The general rules is that white die moves the success track up by the white die result IF your investment exceeds that result.  So for this card, you know that an investment of 3 or less is harmed by this rule, because a "1" turns into a "4", which exceeds your investment, and gets you nothing; but, an investment of 4 or more is actually helped by this rule, as a "1" becomes much better.  Thematically this fits: investing more 'wits' makes it more likely that you'll find the correct basket before the enemy, but not enough wits and you might not make it.


Or perhaps instead it's


Rule:  "If the black die exceeds 4, end the encounter"


Thematically, this means that a high roll for the enemy means they've found Marion before you.  Mechanically, the enemy ordinarily moves toward your city when their roll is lower than their presence (number of cubes) in the region.  Thus, ordinarily high black die rolls are good for you -- less likely the enemy will move toward you.  With this encounter, they're bad.  As a result, do you maybe want to invest more so as to get further along the success track before this happens?  Do you want to invest less but plan to use a dynamite card to cancel an unfavorable enemy roll?  Oops you rolled a 5, do you want to burn a 'script rewrite' card to re-roll, or have you gotten far enough along the track?


Simple rules like these are easy enough to use, but may be substantive enough to make the encounters each feel just a bit different. 


My concern is that without this, after playing a few times, you'll just gloss over the flavor text of the encounters.  "Yadda yadda, the basket game, got it".  Whereas with them, it might be "Oh, the basket game -- this one makes high investment especially valuable and low investment especially bad; how badly do I need this info again?"


Of course it could instead be that each encounter is an entirely distinct mini-game unto itself with particular rules for how it's resolved (e.g. "Choose a basket on the card, then roll both dice; if the white die matches your choice but the black die doesn't, get one success.  Repeat 3 times" or whatever), but I think I prefer a common framework to a mini-game approach in that it will tie in better with the rest of the game, and specifically the game's "penalty currencies" - time, hubris, curses, injuries.  There's another post on that subject, coming up next.

New nut, new shell

v16 is coming together.  It's a nice riff on the simple map phase of v7 with some tweaks for immersion, with the temple concepts that culminated in v15 welded onto the v7 map phase chassis.  Is this the final version?  Gosh I hope so; there are only so many different things to try and we've tried a lot of them.  Anyway, here's the gist:


High concept


Lost Adventures is an adventure archaeology movie game.  Players are screenwriters, trying to invest their favored characters with the most compelling narrative arc such that that character emerges as the film's protagonist in the editing room.  "Doing stuff" is monetized in screen time.  Endowing your character with some trait or piece of gear (a card) requires some screen time to explain how that came about; traveling from London to Ankarra requires the obligatory "red line map overlay" sequence, and so on.  You can make your character's life easier by letting them take on 'hubris', but the powers that be don't like hubris and the character will face a reckoning in the end.


Thematically, then, your characters are trying to find a lost temple and gain enough information about its perils and tests that they can pass through it expeditiously to retrieve the lost artifact hidden within.  So, there's a map phase in which information and gear are acquired, a temple phase in which players jockey to exploit this information so as to run furthest ahead of the pack, and a final challenge in which players must purge hubris or else have their face melt off. 
Here's what this looks like, mechanically-speaking:


Map Phase

Each player gets 7 turns.  On your turn, do four things: 

1.  Move:  Move to any city.  If you change regions, incur one time step.  Add a black cube to the region you arrive in.  Reveal a relic, if you know you're in the right city.

2.  Encounter:  Flip the top encounter from the deck matching your city's shape.  Read the flavor text aloud.  Take a white cube.  Buy one white cube for each adventure card you play or hubris you take, two cubes if your adventure card matches the encounter type.


Then, roll a white and black die together, three times.  If the white die is less than the number of white cubes you hold, advance the encounter card's success track by the die result.  If the black die is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn closer to your city by the die result.


If the enemy pawn reaches your city, encounter ends, and only do one of the following two steps.  Otherwise do both.

3.  Look at Cards:  Look at temple secrets cards from categories matching those on the city's theme tile; total value of temple secrets cards you view cannot exceed the final value of the success track.  A temple secrets card's value is the number of green cubes on that card.   For each card you view, take a green cube from that card, if you wish.

4.  Receive Adventure cards:  Each city shape has four face-up adventure cards.  Take 1/2/3/4 at a cost of 0/1/3/6 time steps.




Temple Phase

The temple is made of tarot-size 'map' cards, laid end-to-end in a row.  Each card has a movement track over which player pawns will move, and an action track with 1-3 spaces.  Thus, the row of cards comprise one long movement track and one long action track.  Action in the temple consists of moving a marker to the next space on the action track and everyone doing what it says.  There are three types of actions:
1.  Gates.  The last space on each card.  Any player whose pawn is to the left of the gate when the marker reaches the gate takes one curse.

2.  Tests.  These are things like the Grail Room or Map Room, or lesser tests like locked doors.  Each holds several temple secrets cards that give information about e.g. the characteristics of the true grail.  Players write down their answer to the prompt (which grail is the true grail?) and then reveal simultaneously.  Players who guessed right move their pawns by X, players who guessed wrong get a curse or two.

3.  Perils.  This is where most of the action happens.  On a peril, three things happen:

i.  All players select a number, representing their investment in this peril.
ii. The peril category is revealed by flipping the temple secrets card that goes with this action space, and a 'threat' card is drawn and revealed, which shows a type of penalty (time, hubris, or injury).
iii.  In order of investment, players first pay off their investment and then move on the temple movement track.  Paying your investment means incuring the penalty indicated on the threat card, but having adventure cards that match the current peril offsets the penalty you incur.  So if you chose an investment of 6 and the peril is "heat", and you have two "heat" icons on your adventure cards, you'd only incur 4 penalties.
Movement is given by a lookup table, corresponding to bid order.  High bid moves 4, low bid moves 0, or something like that.  Ties are unfriendly.  Enemy pawn moves in this step as well.


Final hubris challenge

Each player rolls both dice.  If the white die is less than the number of green cubes you hold, purge hubris equal to the die result.  If the black die is less than the number of curses you hold, take injuries equal to the die result.  Repeat this five times.

If you hit the end of the time track or the end of the injury track, or if you didn't purge all of your hubris, you are eliminated.  Of the remaining players, player furthest to the right on the temple track wins, UNLESS the enemy pawn is further still. 


Some comments


1.  The map phase is similar in conception and execution to the v7 map phase.  There's the growing enemy presence, the time cost of movement, the ability to help other players and be rewarded in the process, the acquisition of knowledge.  Differences (improvements?) are (i) scripted sequence instead of free-form, (ii) encounters have a bit more substance and suspense, (iii) information isn't all equivalent in cost/value, (iv) ability to use time and hubris as resources to improve your efficiency, but with possible ramifications later on.


2.  Some tweaks for balance may be needed.  A specific concern is that late in the game, there may be no city the enemy can't reach in three rolls.  There are cards to mitigate this, but may need to go to a custom d6 for the black die.

3.  Luck.  Each player will roll each die 26 times, which should be enough for statistics to even out, but you'll have turns where there's no suspense and turns where you fail spectacularly due to poor rolling.  May reintroduce "script rewrite" cards to allow you to buy, or impose on other players, re-rolls, to smooth out these swings of luck.  I'm not even sure luck is a problem, per se, but it may mean the game won't appeal to certain players -- certainly the "no output randomness!" crowd will hate this game.  I think it's ok if the game doesn't appeal to everyone.


4. The mechanics for the two phases are quite different  That's how v7 worked so it's no worse, and the temple phase should be much faster than the v7 temple.  A couple of attempts (v11, v15) to make the mechanics symmetric across phases didn't pan out, so here we are. 


5. Encounters may be a bit samey now, but that might be strictly better than the extra rules that would be needed to make each play out differently/"thematically".  The current approach appears to take the view that the flavor text that sets the stage, and the suspense of rolling the dice, are sufficient to convey the right feeling of encounters vis a vis the old system which was just a barrier you had to pay cards to surmount.


6. The game should be fairly tight, which I like.  We can adjust the tightness/looseness by adjusting the length of the time track and injury track, and the number of rolls you get in the hubris challenge. 




7.  Nice (to me) that there's some flow to the things that you're worried about -- you're able to kick the can down the road on some things at each point, which is tempting.  In the map phase, you mostly care about time and hubris, curses a bit and injuries not at all.  Then in the temple time becomes a peak concern, hubris and curses are worrisome and injuries, somewhat of a concern.  Then in the hubris challenge, time isn't a concern but now you're very worried about the dance between curses, hubris, and injuries -- it's the day of reckoning where you learn whether you took on too much hubris or too many curses for the number of injuries you took in the temple.


8.  Corollary of this, may need to provide some first-time guidance, or an 'easy mode' setting (e.g. adjusting tracks in step 5), so first time players don't crash and burn too spectacularly first time through. 


Some testing is certainly going to be required to balance everything, but from a design perspective I think it's complete and coherent with few rough edges.  Is the end in sight at long last?

Modular construction

For most of the game's development the setting has been the quest for the holy grail, but we always thought of this as one scenario among (possibly) many.  For the last year or so I've wondered whether the game strictly needed different scenarios, or whether it couldn't just be thought of as a generic standalone game that encompasses all films in this genre.


I still mostly think this; at least I think we may not gain much by changing the basic layout and logic of the temple, and of the theme cards, from scenario to scenario.  It doesn't matter whether it's "Liesl von Osterreich" who gives info about the true grail or "Mathilda Cottonwood" who gives info about the headpiece location.  These are all just chrome.  For the temple, changing the structure too much might result in a whole lot of rules to support variation without necessarily making the game more interesting to play.


I do still think we could have different map boards and different encounter cards and such for some fun variety, but I don't think these are strictly necessary either.


However, that's not to say we couldn't add just a bit of variety to the temple.  Take it as a given that the temple includes five peril cards, two red (the approach to the temple) and three purple (inside the temple).  Take it as a given that the temple will always feature one big knowledge check: the true grail, the staff length, the idol's weight, whatever.


Within this framework, we can shake things up just a bit.  For example, we can add a "gate" or two, as described in the previous post, which presents a knowledge check or a test of some sort.  Which stones are safe to step on, which key opens the big door, which chords must you play on the instrument to reveal the hidden passage, etc.  These are similar to the 'big knowledge check' but maybe the stakes are lower -- a minor bonus for passing, as opposed to a steep penalty for NOT passing.


And, it's fairly straightforward to vary where in the temple these knowledge checks occur.  The grail room comes at the end, the map room (staff length) comes between the red and purple perils, the idol room is after the purple perils but you must then go BACK through the purple perils, and so on.  And correspondingly the gates can be placed in a couple of different spots in similar fashion.


As a result you can create temples that feel slightly different.  They aren't a ton different from a mechanical or strategic standpoint, but they change things up just a bit to offer some variety from game to game.


There are two challenges to implementing this vision.


The first is the player notepad.  If we want a single notepad that can be used in any scenario (I think we do), how do we capture all of this variety?  I think something like, have a separate area for each module on the sheet, and during setup just physically scribble out on your sheet the modules you're not using, or something like that.


The second is, how do you instruct the players how they ought to set up the game, i.e. how to select modules and where to put them?  Is it done randomly, or are there a couple of prescribed setups, or do players get to choose, or what?  Probably there must be at least one "default" setup for first time players, but allowing for modularity without leaving players feeling overwhelmed by the options may be challenging.