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?
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.
(*) 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.
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