Frankly and accused

In the German games era of board gaming, German games were in German and English-speaking players had to rely on English translations to play these games.  These translations were evidently not always done by native English speakers, and one particularly memorable mis-translation that became part of our group's lingo was that cards held in the player's hand were "frankly" and cards played onto the table were "accused".  We started using these terms in pretty much every other game where the distinction between these two states was important, and were surprised at how completely indispensible they were.  How else do you describe cards in the hand vs. cards on the table?  "In the hand" and "on the table", I suppose, but "frankly" and "accused" are big wins both in terms of their economy as well as their slightly quirky English usage; these are odd choices, but they are oddly correct.  I'm glad to this day to have played whatever game it was that introduced us to this fun lingo.

I am thinking about this in the aftermath of a mostly successful solo test for v16.  I recently adopted a rule that lets you play each adventure card twice, once from the hand to the table and once from the table to the discard pile.  But in this last version, this rule only applied in the map phase; in the temple phase, everyone lays all of their adventure cards on the table and they stay there for the whole phase. You can play any adventure card in the map phase to  get a boost in an encounter you face, and so, for cards that you plan to use in the temple, there's no reason not to play them in the map phase.  Whether you play them in the map phase or not, as long as you don't use them more than once, they'll stay on the table and be useable for the whole temple phase.  Thus it's a no-brainer to use them once in the map phase, and no-brainers are rarely desirable. 

Hold that thought while we go into the temple for a moment.  In the temple, there are five perils and there’s what essentially amounts to a closed-fist bid on each, with higher bids earning the right to move furthest through the temple.  Your bid is paid in a currency revealed by the threat card, and it's something bad that you incur:  time, hubris, injuries (but having the right adventure cards for the peril in question reduces the penalty you incur).   While this works as a way of generating suspense in the bid, it's weird to not know with what currency you're bidding.  And closed-fist bids are always a little heavy on guessing, although I don't mind that too much.



But anyway, these considerations led me to think about a hybrid draft-bid.  We go around the table and each draft a card that shows the type of penalty we're willing to incur, and place some cubes on that card indicating how much of that penalty we'll take; each cube adds 1 to your bid.(*)  Then, reveal the peril and play cards matching the peril, with each match boosting your bid by 1.  Then, resolve movement in order of highest total bid.  



So, your ability to bid well is helped by knowing in advance what the peril is and having acquired the right cards that match that peril.  You wouldn't want to take a lot of penalties for a bid when you're already well prepared for that card's peril, so knowledge helps you.  Seeing how many cubes the other players are bidding is helpful as well, but it only tells you part of the story of what they're bidding.  This brings us back to the frankly/accused stuff.  Say you play a card with two "heat" symbols on it in the map phase to help you with some encounter.  But now, in the temple phase, that card is on the table, and so, if the next temple peril is "heat", anyone who knows that knows that your bid isn't just "3" from the 3 cubes you allocated to the penalty card you chose, it's (at least) 5, the sum of those cubes and the two heat symbols you have on display.     This adds an interplayer dimension to the information game that may make this two-step bid more exciting, because we're trying to bid based on what we think the opponents have and what we think they know.(**)


(*) Thematically this seems to work better in the conception of the players as screenwriters as opposed to adventurers.  We're having a writers' session, and declaring what our characters will endure -- "Oh yeah?  My character will take 3 hubris for this scene"; I mean that's not a conversation an actual screenwriter would have but the point is the mechanical aspect correlates to a real-world situation.  If we, the players, were also the characters, a system where we're jockeying for place would probably need to be much more about direct conflict, as in I push you off the bridge, I draw the luger and point it at you, etc.  The way we previously avoided direct conflict, keeping it to a secondary element, was by making the temple exploration-based.  But that had other problems.


(**) Technically you draft adventure cards from an open display so in theory if you're watching what other people draw you have accurate knowledge of what they have.  This gets to the perennial hidden-trackable-information debate.  My strong feeling is that this game, with its thematic trapping and dice-based resolution mechanics, won't appeal to the kind of people who claim to know players who can perfectly track everyone else's information, so I am honestly not planning to even worry about this concern at this point.  This game can be enjoyed perfectly well by we mere mortals!







There are some other little things that need to be looked at as a result of this session, but overall I'm optimistic that the core elements of the design are intact and that by a few cycles of shuffling little things around and fiddling with costs, this might converge to a game that's ready for a cycle of balancing and then call it done.  Maybe...