Lost Adventures is still under evaluation but it's tough to spend many months not thinking about it at all, and this past week I inadvertently started giving it some thought which led to a need to try something and play it through.
Happily, the thing that needed thought was something I had already alerted the publisher to: though the mechanics seem to support 4 or 5 p as well as 2 or 3, in practice it seems that by about mid-game, there aren't really any cards left in the deck that you're interested in. Here we are talking about the "adventure cards", which represent your character's traits and which help you in the map phase to get info, and in the temple phase to pass perils without having to incur penalties in your bidding for position. There are 50 such cards but each player can have 6 in a display and keep 1 in hand, and then there are 9 in the public display, so that's 44 of the cards spoken for by the time everyone's display is full by mid-game.
The simplest solution seemed to be to make up more cards, but unable to resist tinkering, I came up with two additional concepts. Most of the cards have two adventure symbols, but I came up with two three-symbol concepts. The first has three of the same symbol, so this card is great if it matches one of the temple perils. But it also has a black symbol for a different peril, and if you face that peril while holding the card, it actually counts against you. The other has three different symbols, but they are "smoke" symbols, meaning that once they are used a single time they disappear from your display. Thus they help if you're lacking info to cover your bases, but they only help a little bit.
With 15 additional cards of these types thrown in, running out of cards was never an issue and you could almost always get something in the display that seemed useful. So, I think with this simple addition, the 5p game seems viable. It's possible there will be latency issues with specific groups but that's the nature of 5p games generally. I think the mechanics work well enough as long as these extra cards are included.
There were, however, one or two interesting things that emerged from this session.
First, recall that in the temple, there are five 'perils', and in each peril, players bid and then there's a lookup table that tells how much you move based on the relative rank of your bid. Ties are unfriendly. Recall also that your bid has two parts: the number of symbols on your adventure cards that match the peril category, and the number of cubes you place on a 'penalty card', indicating how much of that penalty you'll take.
For each peril, I kept track of the total bid for each player, and for the enemy, and then totaled these up in the end, and somewhat to my surprise, the player who won the game had the lowest total bid. Again, the connection between bids and movement is related but indirect, so it's not surprising that bidding the smartest can outdo bidding the highest. But it was interesting to see this confirmed. However, this player also won the very first bid, and it may be that this bid is disproportionately important; if so, we need to see whether this takes care of itself with more aggressive bidding by astute players.
The second issue was that during setup, each player gets three adventure cards, which have challenge symbols, ones that help during the map phase. The thing is, if you draw challenge symbols that match, you are very strong in the cit(ies) with that as their category, but on the other hand your movement is kind of scripted; you tend to just want to go to that type of city (although it shifts around as the game proceeds). One the other hand, if you have a mixture of symbols, you're more 'versatile', but really you're just less strong with respect to challenges.
I don't know what to do about this or whether it's even a problem, but it's just something I'm watching at this time.
The other thing that happened was that one player managed to get 'skunked' in the first three encounters, rolling poorly and getting no information. That player went on to get a lot of information later and finish in the middle of the pack so I don't think this is the end of the world, but it certainly would feel very frustrating to have half of your game amount to nothing due to bad rolls. But the solution is always to add rules, and the game can ill afford lots more rules at this point, so it needs some additional thought.
Anyway, it was an informative 5p session and I see a couple of little things I want to try that change the game only very slightly but perhaps in a way that tightens a few things up. But overall it's encouraging that the game can certainly support 2-5p, and even 6p might not be out of the question.
