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?
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