The End

 To tie this blog off completely: Lost Adventures successfully funded on Kickstarter in July 2023.  A few copies are/were available for purchase here.

And with that, this blog's tale has fully been told!

The circle is now complete

 I'm planning to publish Lost Adventures under my imprint, Belltower Games, and am tinkering with just a few small tweaks before it goes to press.

The first is mostly cosmetic, namely to rotate the board 45 degrees and play in a diamond orientation:

The second has been to tweak the temple perils.  The temple perils use a bid system, and the Enemy is also participating, with a set of bid tokens, numbered 2-6; reveal one each peril.  But, we're using the Encounter cards for the map phase (both "success" and "enemy" symbols matter) and for the final hubris challenge ("success" symbols matter); if we also used these in the perils, and let the enemy symbols set the enemy's bid, that would use the encounter cards in all three phases, with each symbol type mattering twice, which feels like it ties off a loose end.

Each encounter card has an average of 1 enemy symbol, and the average of 2-6 is 4, so, reveal 4 encounter cards to get the enemy's bid in each temple peril.  And since the symbols are on the back-printing of the encounter cards, you see the first card of the enemy's bid for each peril, so you can take that into account in your bidding.

Of course, there's variability from the cards.  With the bid tiles, you're guaranteed to get a total enemy bid of 2+3+4+5+6 = 20.  But with the cards, even though 20 is the average, you might get more or less.  There are two other new, little rules that I think play nicely with this change.  First is that if you are behind the enemy on the temple track, your bid costs 1 less hubris.  Second is that, after each peril, if a player is at the front of the line, put a cube on their space.  When the enemy reaches that space, they skip over it as though it weren't there.

These rules have a nice balancing effect but I think they also have a nice narrative effect.  In this playing, say that the way the cards fall out, the total enemy bid ends up being 23; that means the story is "we're chasing the enemy!", and our bids will frequently be at a discount.  Whereas, in a different playing, the total enemy bid ends up being 17, that means the story of that session is "the enemy is chasing us!", and we'll place a lot of cubes that the enemy will then skip over.  So, the rules coupled with the randomizer give rise to the story.

Not sure if this is the final brushstroke but it feels like it might be.  But, we'll see!

Done, again, except maybe not quite!

 I've sprinkled a few posts about ongoing progress with Lost Adventures into my BGG blog, but in the name of keeping this blog a comprehensive archive, an artifact to endure for all time as the definitive repository of the history of this game, I should post an update, after a 2.5 year delay.

Publishing news: a few nibbles but no bites with publishers, not even a playtest.  Whomp whomp.  But last year I self-published my game Evangelists, and the same processes I put in place to publish that game might also work for Lost Adventures.  Would it make sense to make this a Belltower Games release?  I'm not sure; I'm kicking it around and running the numbers.  The biggest thing Evangelists revealed is that I'm bad at marketing, which is not a great thing to be bad at if you're a publisher.  So we'll see.  

But game-wise, a few changes have helped to move things forward.

In the temple, the bid has altered slightly.  Now it's that, for each peril, bid a number, and move one space for each player with a lower bid (including the enemy).  But, the difference between your bid and the prep you have for the temple is the amount of hubris you must take.  

This has the effect of rewarding knowledge and preparation.  If the current peril is "fear", and you have 4 "fear" symbols in your tableau, but don't know that it's fear, you won't get much benefit from those symbols because you probably won't bid as aggressively as you would had you known you were well-prepared.

As the above image sort of shows, I've incorporated some effects onto existing components to get the overall component count down.  Namely, instead of hubris tokens, you track hubris on your player mat.  Instead of selector cards or a selector wheel, just write your bid on the notepad.  And, instead of dice, the effects of dice are encoded on the back-printing of encounter cards, which look like this:

This loses a bit of randomness but actually does a nice job simplifying encounters, since they're now entirely card-based.  And, it allows for little meta-narratives:  "Bad dates!  The enemy tried to poison you, and sent agents aggressively toward you (two black cubes), but with your luck (clover icons), and by strangling the monkey to get the antidote (hubris-check), you take some hubris but escape just in time!"  That sort of thing.  But, the details change each playing because you'll have a different card on the top of the deck, with different back-printing card, the next time "bad dates" comes up.  So the meta-story changes too.

There are a few other simplifications, but as they simplify things that weren't fully articulated in the previous post anyway, there isn't too much need to go into detail about those.

A few more little things are worth trying in the temple to see if we can make the enemy feel a bit more of a looming threat, a bit more like Donovan with a luger in your back.  These include:

- If you are behind the enemy in the temple, you pay one less hubris for your bid.  After all, you're trying to stop them for the good of humanity, right?  Of course you are.

- The leading player after each peril places a token on the temple track space they landed on.  The enemy automatically skips that space when they reach it.  A bit like Indy throwing dirt on the invisible bridge to help Donovan and Elsa.

- The enemy wins tie bids in the temple, i.e. they move for players with equal or lower bids.

I don't think we need all three of these, but they're worth a try, and hopefully will be quick to try.