I've been solo testing the ideas discussed in the previous post and actually I think they move the game in quite a good direction. It's a lot simpler (as a way of thinking about this, the rules have gone from 19 pages to 12 pages) but many of the same considerations in playing the game still come through.
I was hoping we could get this version down to mass-market weight. The component manifest is almost exactly the same as the recent Disney Jungle Cruise game: 20 x 20" board, 4 pawns, 4 dice, ~100 cards, 2-3 sheets of tokens. Yes, it has two phases, but so do the Jaws and Top Gun games. Yes it has tableau-building, but I think there are other mass market games with this. So there's a case to be made; but I think it's a bit borderline.
The issue, as I've mentioned a few times, is still about counteracting "the trivial strategy": a player who doesn't actively pursue information, instead just puts adventure cards into their tableau in an attempt to cover their bases in all of the peril categories.
In v17, each player has a personal set of 10 adventure cards, and your tableau can hold 5 cards, which makes this strategy even stronger. What difference does it make whether you know what perils you'll face, just prepare for all possibilities! And so, instead of putting challenge symbols in your tableau to help get info in the map phase, just put peril symbols in your tableau and prepare for the temple.
There are three twists I've introduced to 'fix' this.
The first is "gates". As you move across the temple track, if you have passed one of the "gates" by a certain point, you get to add an additional card to your tableau.
The second is "boosts". Outside the temple, if you have a cube of a particular color on a particular turn (signifying that you looked at info and took a cube from the card you looked at), you get to add an additional card to your tableau.
These are supposed to blunt the effect of broad-based preparation, by giving players who have more information more opportunities to add cards to their tableau, thereby getting relatively more preparation.
The third pertains to the perils. You face five perils in the temple, split into two groups, "outside the temple" and "in the temple". I've been playing that the fifth peril is a repeat of one of the previous four perils, so the "clue" for that peril is just "To exit the temple you must again face peril C".
This has the effect that a player with broad-based preparation will likely have prepared "too broadly", enabling a player with more targeted preparation to do just as well in terms of having the right peril symbols. Preparation + knowledge is certainly better than preparation alone because you can bid more intelligently.
I worry that collectively, these three slightly fiddly rules may make the game just a bit too fiddly for a mass market audience, but I do think it's certainly a family weight game. I can play a 4p game solo in under an hour, which means that with actual players it should be a 50-60 minute game, and one that gives a good dramatic arc. There is some randomness but I think it fits well enough with what the game is trying to do. Hard core strategy gamers might not like this one but gamers who want a fun ride should.
So, pending a few more tests, I'm tentatively inclined to call v17 the working version of the game; it's simpler than v7, but it keeps some of the fun decision points that I've liked about v16 with the bid in the temple.
