Three question marks and one known issue

I'm going to be optimistic and posit that the latest design, v16.1, is testing well enough that it's going to emerge as the final version of the game, or at least, a final version.  But we'll certainly need a cycle of development to get all the way across the finish line, as there are still three things that need to be refined, and one issue to address.

First, the issue:  bad rolling can leave a player skunked, and this is unfun.  It should be rare to be skunked for the whole game, but it will happen.  How to address?  One option is giving out some reroll tokens during setup, or maybe "script rewrite" cards that have special effects to mitigate bad luck.  Another is to add a third die to the encounter, the green die.  You can subsitute the green die for the white die (or maybe, either die?) at the cost of taking one hubris.  This prompts players for more decisions, which I dislike, but it may be worth a try.

Now, the three questions.

First, what happens when the enemy reaches you in an encounter?  The first answer was "it ends the encounter, and you get info or cards, but not both".  This worked but was pretty punitive.  The latest answer is "they steal an adventure card from the display, and your next reroll is at -1".  This also works, but results in the enemy really piling up a lot of cards.

I'm really not sure what to do here that isn't fiddly.  Another idea is "they put a cube on a space on the temple track, and the enemy pawn can 'skip over' that space".  Some alternating between this and stealing cards would be nice, but how to govern which is the thing that happens?  Some clarity for what the enemy does is needed.

Second, how to balance cards and time?  Currently you spend time to get adventure cards, each of which are played twice, from hand to table and from table to discard.  This works well but does lead to some card-hoarding.  A hand limit would help this but is inelegant.  We might try something that emulates the previous system, which had a player mat.  Maybe it's that you can have, say, 3 cards on the table in front of you, and these are your "fixed" character attributes.  These can be freely used without discarding.  It costs one time to move a card to the table to make it a fixed attribute, and you must discard a card from the table if you already have three.  Any other card can be played once from your hand and discarded.

Thus you'll want to shift your display over time from challenge symbols (which help in the map phase) to peril symbols (which help in the temple phase). 

Third, how to resolve the temple perils?  I like the draft/bid mechanic previously proposed, but it has a seat order effect, whereby choosing first gives an advantage, in that you're less likely to get stuck with a penalty that you really don't want.  So, who gets to choose first?  First in line (runaway leader?) or last in line (too easy to catch up?)?  A different approach is the subject of a future post, in which you don't claim the penalty cards exclusively, so more than one person can go in on a particular penalty.  This could alleviate the seat order issue but also removes some of the fun of the draft:  it is pleasant to be able to stick someone with something that they don't want, it's just a question of whether it's the leader, or the trailing player, who should be getting stuck with that something.

I think these can also be solved, maybe easily, but I may be too close to the design at this point to be the one to solve them.  Luckily, I think they're all issues of balance and optimization for experience, and not so much core structural design considerations.  Some further testing might make some headway, but if not a developer should be able to resolve them.

A bid mechanic for another day

I thought of a tweak to the current draft/bid mechanic from the temple that probably would be too slow to work as a temple system, but it is potentially interesting.


The problem with the draft is the problem with every draft, the seat order problem: who gets to draft first, and in what order do we resolve?  If it's furthest forward in the temple, that could lead to a runaway leader problem; furthest back, inadequate incentive to bid aggressively.  And what about when players are on the same space?  All of these can be worked out, but I had a thought for a different but similar mechanic that sidesteps some of them.


Before each bid, several penalty cards are laid out, each specifying a particular type of penalty. 


Go around in clockwise order.  On your turn, either add a cube to a penalty card of your choice, or fold.  When you fold, claim any penalty card, and incur the penalty shown on the card in an amount equal to the cubes on the card.  The number of cubes on your card are your initial bid.  Continue until everyone folds.


This is then supplemented with cards in hand that match the current peril, in the usual way.  Highest total bid moves furthest, and then down the line, in the usual way.


I like the potential brinksmanship of this system.  You're sort of playing multiple games of chicken with the other players simultaneously.  In the current system, you're taking the card of those that are left that you can best tolerate, and are trying to stick the players after you with a card that's bad for them.  In this system you're trying to poison the penalty you can best tolerate for all players but yourself, and/or are trying to poison the suits they are going to pick so they don't get off scot-free, except doing so strengthens their bids, and also you don't want to poison your preferred suit too much, but oh by the way the more pain you take the higher your bid and you want to bid high.  I think it could be a fun challenge. 


(A different take:  there could be a penalty card between each pair of players, and you can add to any card that touches you, so you're literally playing chicken against one specific player with each card; when you fold, the other player who shared that card with you has one less option).

My concern is that this would be too slow, but maybe it speeds up if each round of bidding you must place an additional cube.  (So one in the 1st round, 2 in the second, and so on).


I could see an entire game being built around this idea but I'm not sure what it should be about; key would be to have something interesting that you're bidding for, and some interesting but asymmetric penalty currencies.  Otherwise it's just resources you're losing, but if one currency was "how many cards you can hold" and another was "how many cubes you can play", and so on, losing different things would feel painful in different ways.  The penalty currencies in Lost Adventures have this, fortunately, and each penalty you take is fairly painful, or at least risky. 

Some feedback

Just for fun, I entered the game in the Board Game Workshop design contest this past month.  This one is a doozy:  the opening round was a 2 minute video pitch about the game.  This is definitely not my strong suit and I don't think I nailed it by any stretch!  I can teach the full game in about 10 minutes, but still, talking about the two phases in detail in just two minutes proved challenging, so I elected to just cover some of the key features, namely:  encounters, and how the enemy moving toward you creates suspense; temple, how we're clustered together and jockeying position using information from the map phase; hubris, how it makes some things easier but we have to reckon with it in the end.

Below I've posted what the judges thought (judges' names removed where they were provided).  Needless to say, as befits the contest there's plenty that's said about the video itself, which clearly has room for improvement, but I think some useful thoughts about the game come through as well.


To make this more interesting I'll respond/react to two of the comments in particular.


One judge mentioned a concern that this game could end up being too similar to Eldritch Horror.  I wasn't familiar with that game previously, but just had a look at its BGG entry, and it does sound like there is a lot of "move somewhere, roll some dice to resolve encounters, do what the cards say".  But it's clear to me that there are significant differences (which of course the judge couldn't have known).  As far as I can tell, EH is similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill is similar to Fortune and Glory is similar to Arabian Nights:  in all of these you face encounters that are atmospheric, but that put together assemble a hodge-podge mish-mash that doesn't create anything like a coherent story. 


Now I don't think the encounter cards in Lost Adventures self-assemble into a coherent story either, but nevertheless there's a high degree of coherency that comes from the temple itself.   Those other games feature encounters that are serial in nature, and so each should feel like it is the extension of the previous thing.  In contrast, in Lost Adventures, we have a hub-and-spokes model of coherency.  Maybe in Anakra you get "The graveyard is deserted; your contact isn't here as they said they would be" and then in Budapest it's "you are trapped in a room of the castle that overlooks a high cliff, can you find the secret exit?".  Taken serially, those aren't ipso facto part of the same story, but they nevertheless feel harmonious when you think of each encounter as a spoke that connects to the bigger hub of aggregate knowledge about the temple.  Thus each one is "I'm trying to locate this one person or item who can tell me something about the overall story".  They're parts of a bigger whole.  I don't think it gives anything like the feeling of random atmospheric stuff being thrown like "oh, some bats just flew by.  Now I discovered a strange symbol on the floor.  Now there's some howling.  Now the lights just went out" stuff that sets a mood but doesn't go anywhere. 


Another mentioned a concern that this subject is 'colonialist'.  I won't comment on the validity of this concern in general, but as pertains specifically to Lost Adventures, I'd say that making this a game about an archaeology movie actually sidesteps this concern nicely.  In movies of this type, the hero's quest is noble:  Indy is trying to stop the Nazis/rescue some kids/find his father;  Lara Croft (new movie, anyway) is trying to find her father;  the Goonies are trying to save their neighborhood.  Yes, pitching the game as competitive does make it a bit like a forturne-and-glory quest, but the inclusion of hubris, and the final hubris challenge, make it clear that impure motives are punished by the powers that be.

Game: Lost Adventures
Your theme is interesting, and some of the decision making looks interesting as well. However, I don't really know how it plays from the video, I just know a little bit about a few mechanics. 
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Game: Lost Adventures
The theme of the game sounds not exactly like other games but similar. Based off the theme I am not entirely excited by the game. I am excited by the idea of trying to be the first, but your character won't retain the artifact in the end so you have hubris as a resource. I found that to be pretty interesting. I worry about replayability and how much variety this game will offer players if each game ends the same way, but I think I need to see and know more about the game to make that judgement. So far it sounds interesting! Best of luck. 
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Game: Lost Adventures
The meta theme of making a movie about an adventure is a really compelling idea to me.

I love the way that you distilled ideas down & your explanation of your design decisions was fantastic!

I really want to give this one a try!
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Game: Lost Adventures
Love the idea of the game, but I'm not quite sure how distinct it'll be from a "go to place, have encounter, roll dice" game like Eldritch Horror (among others). Hubris is a great mechanism, but I worry that most of the game will be determined by a "go to place, roll dice" pattern. Interested to see how much the bidding plays a part.
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Game: Lost Adventures
Lost Adventures seems like a fun, fast playing game. I'm especially intrigued by the framing of 'who gets to be the protagonist' I think that's a very creative solution to a very old problem. My main questions are how individual turns play out, the specific nature of threats, and other minutiae that i understand you didn't have time to cover in the pitch.

The main thing though is that I feel like the adventure archaeology thing is perhaps a little too colonialist for me. seeking lost temples and acquiring artifacts seems harmless in the context of our favorite childhood action films and video games but I think perpetuates a line of thought that says ancient peoples and their culture are simply for fun and plunder. A bank heist theme a la Ocean's 11 or an action hero movie in the vein of Mad Max Fury Road or Terminator might preserve the format and structure of the game while avoiding harmful tropes.

Nevertheless I wish Lost Adventures all the best and I hope to see more!

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Game: Lost Adventures
I really like the concept of the game, particularly how a player can build hubris doing move powerful effects but must remove it to not lose to their own hubris. The description and video did little to inform me how the game actually played, though.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I love the idea of basically making this meta-narrative around an Indiana Jones move as a game, but what I found lacking is what we as players actually do in a turn. I hear talk of phases and hubris tokens, but not what I actually do in a phase or what the hubris tokens actually affect. In other words: I still have no idea what kind of game I am looking at! It seems like a really cool and engaging concept, but as I am lacking context in terms of the actual game, all of it falls very flat.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I liked your initial description of the theme, but then your description of the gameplay didn't seem to fit with that theme. It sounds like players are really acting as the characters fighting the bad guy, not screenwriters. Gameplay seems to be all about how successful individual characters are in their goals, not things like how much screen time the characters get. (Not to mention that screenplays aren't written character by character, with different writers jockeying for different characters to do better.) Do you really *need* the screenwriting part? Wouldn't it be more compelling and immersive to say that players are each taking on the role of a character in an archaeology adventure movie? I'm intrigued by the hubris mechanic and would like to hear more about that.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I like the theme. It is an underdeveloped area of design I think. Is the game semi co-op or competitive? What advantage is there to taking on hubris? How does the risk vs reward play out in that area?
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Game: Lost Adventures
I like the 'push your luck' element, both in the bad guy approaching in the over-world, and needing to shed hubris in the temple.  The main thing I would like to know more about is the overall groove of the game. Is it a race game? Where we are judging how ready we are to enter the temple? Or do we have a set amount of time to collect sets (for example) to prep for the temple phase. And our ability there sets us up to do well or not in the temple phase?
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Game: Lost Adventures
I genuinely appreciate that the game starts with research, its a fun addition to the story. You mention action movies, but I'm not quite sure if that's the meta of the game or just the way you've described it. Good luck! 
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Game: Lost Adventures
I don't think I got a really good sense of the flow of the game. When you're pitching, at least for me, I want to know how a turn works and how that turn is a larger part of the overall game. I appreciate the end-to-end description of it, but I think I got too much of a high-level look at the encounters / hubris / the enemy without a sense of how it all fits together. That said, I do love the theme (and your spin on it), so I'd be interested in finding out more about it down the line.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I appreciate that the theme and mechanics go hand-in-hand -- what happens during each player's turn seems very intuitive. The pitch video was great and I hope to learn more about the game in the next round.