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