Seth's thoughts on Leads...

The Comment system said this was too long, so I'll make it a blog post instead...

Aside from that random idea in the comments of that last post (which popped into my head while reading that post), I have stronger opinions on this which are as follows. Italics denote quoted text from Jeff's post.:

I first assert a well-worn design principle: rewards paid out by a game system should be commensurate with the opportunity cost paid to obtain those rewards. In this game, the reward is information, so the better the information you get, the more you should have to pay (or the harder it should be) to get it.

I do not disagree with that assertion.

In version 7, nine of the theme cards are out on the board at the start. All cards are equally good -- each gives a check mark which is worth one level of clue (although some have more categories than others).

... so they're NOT equally good. I do not think they're equally good, because even 2 cards that each give 1 check mark toward the location of the Manuscript (for example) give different additional check marks. That's a large fundamental difference, since even players looking for the Manuscript are not ONLY looking for the Manuscript.

The "problem" with this system is that it's a little boring, and that it doesn't differentiate between the cards. Yes, the Grail Diary has information about more subjects than Elsa Schneider, but if you're JUST interested in getting info about the Grail Room, they're equally good.

As I just mentioned, you're never JUST looking for information about the Grail Room. I also disagree that it's boring. However...

Increasing the number of check marks required to get a clue gives room for differentiation of the cards. Now, the Diary can know a lot about the Temple Challenges, by giving 4 check marks, whereas Henry Jones Sr, with his somewhat shaky memory, only provides 2.

I think this would improve things... Suppose each card had, for example, 4 icons... some had 2 or 3 of the same icon, while others had 4 different icons. This would definitely serve to differentiate the info obtained from Theme cards, even if only concerned with 1 category.

But adopting the same approach as v7, where all the cards are laid out from the start, would result in the opportunity cost being essentially the same for all of the cards, despite their unequal rewards.

I disagree with this assessment.

Yes, board geography and the game clock play into this somewhat -- it may be better, for example, to visit Jones Sr in a nearby city, accepting the lower payout, than to burn the time/resources to travel across the board to see that Diary.

Board geography, whatever challenge you face to get the check marks, and the opportunity cost of what other check marks you get (and what you DON'T get) when choosing one theme card over another. I think those are all significant costs, and not essentially the same.

But above and beyond this, it seems that the game has to "protect" the higher-valued information more aggressively. And leads are one way to do it.

This is a possibility, but I still don't think it's necessary - it still feels like additional hoop jumping for no good reason (because I think the cost of collecting info is already appropriately high and varied enough for the game as it was in v7).

In this way, the game can make the more difficult cards harder to acquire, but can do so in a completely organic way, as opposed to adding an additional cost or surcharge associated with accessing the better cards.

I think you don't necessarily want Theme cards that are "better" than other Theme cards - I think you want Theme cards that are better suited to one thing over another, but are less well suited for a different thing. The overall net quality of the theme cards should be more or less equal, I think, which allows for not having to specifically worry about "protecting" the "better" ones.

If theme cards have a hierarchy, then the game becomes about going for the best theme card you can get to. I assert that the game is more interesting if the theme cards you are interested in visiting depend on your strategy and course of action, not on the strict hierarchy of the cards (a hierarchy which would not change game-to-game or based on your situation).

I like the idea that all theme cards are functionally the same, and the game elements themselves differentiate between the various cards simply by the way their built, and not in a way that the players need to explicitly police. It keeps the bureaucratic overhead of playing the game minimal, and I think that's key to keeping the length and complexity down.

This sounds noble, and I like the idea of keeping down the bureaucracy and making the game easier to play for the players.

And I too like the mini-race element of the artifacts. As far as I'm concerned though, the Artifacts DID work the same way as the other theme cards, once you found them.

The info hunt to find the artifacts before you could look at them is similar to this leads idea you are proposing in that it adds additional hoops to jump through before you can access that information. I liked that that particular type of hoop jumping is the same type you're already doing in the game (to find the temple info), and I liked that you need not find those particular cards or that you could visit them once someone else did find them.

I do not think the game would work if every theme card required that type of hoop jumping - you need some place to get the initial info to find those other cards. And I think adding leads to each theme card (on top of, or in addition to) having to find the Artifacts is overloading the game with another system.

I liked the amount of info hunting that was in the game before, and I think making the icon system more fine grained will help. What I think you ought to be more worried about changing is the feeling of deduction - you wanted players to be able to deduce information based on player action, and I've never really seen that come through. I did have 1 player who actively tried to use that type of information, but it never amounted to much if anything.

Check marks and leads go together

I am increasingly thinking that, in the possible scheme where multiple check marks are required to get a clue, check marks and leads go together. I first assert a well-worn design principle: rewards paid out by a game system should be commensurate with the opportunity cost paid to obtain those rewards. In this game, the reward is information, so the better the information you get, the more you should have to pay (or the harder it should be) to get it.

In the most recent version, we had leads but no check marks -- every card gives a clue. Since it was hard to know in advance how good of a clue a given card would provide, it was correspondingly hard to know which card to go for. The lead system therefore put a barrier in front of acquiring information, but the barrier was the same height regardless of the quality of the information.

In version 7, nine of the theme cards are out on the board at the start. All cards are equally good -- each gives a check mark which is worth one level of clue (although some have more categories than others). Since you had to visit multiple cards to get multiple check marks, there was an acceptable balance between opportunity cost (more trips to visit more cards) and rewards (more check marks).

The "problem" with this system is that it's a little boring, and that it doesn't differentiate between the cards. Yes, the Grail Diary has information about more subjects than Elsa Schneider, but if you're JUST interested in getting info about the Grail Room, they're equally good. It was not a bad abstraction by any means, but as this blog demonstrates, I'm always inclined to ask whether there's a better way.

Increasing the number of check marks required to get a clue gives room for differentiation of the cards. Now, the Diary can know a lot about the Temple Challenges, by giving 4 check marks, whereas Henry Jones Sr, with his somewhat shaky memory, only provides 2. But adopting the same approach as v7, where all the cards are laid out from the start, would result in the opportunity cost being essentially the same for all of the cards, despite their unequal rewards. Yes, board geography and the game clock play into this somewhat -- it may be better, for example, to visit Jones Sr in a nearby city, accepting the lower payout, than to burn the time/resources to travel across the board to see that Diary. But above and beyond this, it seems that the game has to "protect" the higher-valued information more aggressively. And leads are one way to do it.

A possible approach could be to have the lead system be city shape specific. Again, each theme card has an associated city shape, and you go to a city of that shape to get a lead to that theme card. We could have the lower-valued theme cards take leads that send the players to less-dangerous locations, whereas the leads to the higher-valued cards require you to travel to locales where you'll have to face a challenge. For example, a typical lead to a card like "Sallah", with minimal info, may send you to a major city, whereas a typical lead to a card like the Grail Tablet, with strong information may send you to an Enemy Stronghold.

In this way, the game can make the more difficult cards harder to acquire, but can do so in a completely organic way, as opposed to adding an additional cost or surcharge associated with accessing the better cards. And again, it continues to treat the "relics" as ordinary theme cards, instead of special theme cards with special rules. I think I like this; although I did like the mini-race element that the relics added, in practice I like the idea that all theme cards are functionally the same, and the game elements themselves differentiate between the various cards simply by the way their built, and not in a way that the players need to explicitly police. It keeps the bureaucratic overhead of playing the game minimal, and I think that's key to keeping the length and complexity down.

Enemy agents, encounters, and mounting tension

Yet another thought, about enemy integration and game pacing.

As I discussed, it's somewhat nice to have the possibility of a "safe but boring" outcome on each challenge card. This is particularly attractive early in the game, when bad consequences feel more punitive than a justified consequence. But you don't want that to last forever. Perhaps, as I said, each encounter card is fundamentally "safe", BUT, when the enemy is sufficiently "energized" -- ie, their presence in a particular city exceeds a threshold or the enemy track reaches a certain point -- this changes (either locally or globally, depending on which we settle on). The easiest way would be to have a separate deck of "enemy encounter cards", and when the enemy is energized, you face one of these cards instead of a standard card. And that could work well, but adds more components (and with all these illustrations, these encounter cards will be expensive components).

A different idea occurred to me; Lord of the Rings uses a masterful approach, whereby it's iconography is highly flexible, in that expansions simply change the meaning of icons. In the base game, "rectangle" means "discard a card", in Friends and Foes it takes on a new meaning "add a Foe card." The same principle could apply here, and it could be connected with the Agent cards.

So, when an enemy agent card is activated, it shows that a particular outcome symbol has taken on a new (or additional) meaning on the encounter cards. So, for example, your encounter outcome is "receive a check mark in the 'yellow' category", but you look at the row of Enemy Agents, and Agent Z is active; her effect is "receiving a check mark in the yellow category also results in the enemy progress advancing by 3".

This sounds a little convoluted, I know, but it allows some nice flexibility -- it makes some cities more dangerous than others, but the level of "dangerousness" is entirely dependent on how many Enemy Agents are active, which forces the players to have to worry about the enemy agents.

It would of course be simpler to say that when you face a challenge in an "enemy-controlled city", the full menu of bad consequences are on the table. But that would also effectively lock up whole cities, whereas in this scheme, only certain sub-locations become "dangerous" -- eg if you were going to go to the Ruin to get a check mark in the temple location category, better think twice about doing that if Agent Y is active (or at least take it into account). And of course, the purpose of the mechanic should be to nibble away at the "safe" outcomes, so that the game board gets more dangerous as the game progresses, without necessarily getting harder.

Integrating encounters and information

I think Seth's comment in the previous post was spot-on; at this point, finding ways to integrate systems is important, and connecting encounters and check marks could be a great -- and satisfyingly thematic -- way to do just that.

I'm also mindful of Steve's concern; sometimes, you want to stop in a city that you're "just passing through", and don't want to be encumbered by needing to pay out cards (or else you'd just pay them to get to your destination), but it would still nice to be able to do something beyond simply passing your turn.

I think I have an idea that might address both of these. We know that there are four city types (circle, pentagon, square, and triangle). Assume there are (say) 6 different "sub-location" types -- eg a library, a museum, a hotel, a tomb, etc -- and each city type has 2 or 3 associated sub-locations (eg "circle cities" all have libraries and museums, etc) Each sub-location has an associated deck of encounter cards. AND, each encounter has one or perhaps two different associated "characteristic outcomes", such that if you "pass" the encounter, you will get one of those two things. For example, maybe a "library" gives a check mark; a "hotel" gives a lead to a theme card; a market gives you an ally card, etc. So when you're in a city, even if it's just to kill time, you can still do something potentially productive, but you can also choose what potentially productive thing you want to try to accomplish. And, this could also aid route planning -- if you know you need a clue to the temple location, you might visit a city with a tomb. Etc.

This addresses half of Steve's concern; the other half of it was not needing to pay any adventure cards. Two possible approaches for that; there could be a "do nothing" option that's always available in every city (maybe it's thematically dressed up to be "go to the marketplace" or "go to the consulate", so that your action selection on your turn is always structured as "go to a city and pick a sub-location to visit") -- which could perhaps let you draw a card or look at a lead or something like that.

Another, not necessarily mutually exclusive approach, could be simply that ALL of the encounter cards provide safe passage at the lowest adventure payout, but the "safe passage" will be boring. For example, say you have a stat of 3 in Luck, so you select "Luck 3" for an encounter in which you face an Arab swordsman. Maybe the outcome is that you simply survive the encounter, but you don't get anything interesting for it, either.

A totally different, and again, not necessarily mutually exclusive, option is to have each player have a particular "skill" that connects to the visuals on the cards. I had originally thought this would be a special power, but maybe it's instead that when you see your "trigger" on a card, you get a check mark -- eg, your skill is "languages", so when you see a "book" on an encounter card, you get a check mark in a particular solution category. So this gives you something else interesting to be looking for when you have nothing you especially want to do; you can face an encounter and go fishing for a trigger to your skill.

(Incidentally, another thought -- can check marks be lost?)

Check marks revisited?

As I discussed in the last post, we had a pretty informative playtest at Spielbany, and while there are a number of areas for possible improvement, I think Steve and I were separately dissatisfied with two things that I claim are two sides of the same coin.

Steve opined that there doesn't seem to be enough to do -- you go to a location, you look for a theme card and find it, or not, but then your turn ends; shouldn't you be able to ask around for info, look for helpers, get some supplies, fight some Nazis, etc?

Separately, I liked the idea that each theme card gives you a clue, but in practice I thought it fell a little flat -- once you know that card X gives the Level 3 Location Clue, there's really no reason to go visit any other card than Card X, and everyone goes straight to that card. This does one of the things I want -- create "convergences", where all players (and by extension the enemy) all rush to the same place, but it would probably need some sort of time based trigger to create tension around this, otherwise it's just too obviously the "correct" thing to do.

Now these are actually parts of the same problem, which I alluded to in the last post, which is this: because the crux of the game is supposed to be the information hunt, all of the interesting mechanisms in the game should be built around the information hunt, and everything that doesn't contribute to that is probably extraneous. So to Steve's concern, yes we could add more action, but if it isn't related to the information hunt, it may not be constructive. But on the flip side, if the information hunt is trivial, and is easy for everyone to participate in to the same degree and in the same way, then the hunt won't result in the asymmetry between player knowledge that makes the game interesting.

I've previously discussed the "check marks" system, and while it was abstract, it did a great job of making the information hunt a structured endeavor -- you absolutely can't get a level 3 clue until you've gotten those 3 check marks. I think I like that better than letting you just happen upon a level 3 clue -- I think a level 3 clue should be harder to get, not just more rare. BUT, I still don't like the abstraction of the check marks; it just seems weird that you go and ask a guy what he knows, and he gives you check marks, and also a clue, if you ask him for one. The check marks seems like a bizarre middle-man to the info hunt.

I tried to address this in the "wrong turn" version 8 of the game, by forcing players to go to a "clue space" to get a clue, and the level of clue you get is given by the number of symbols of that category you have in your entourage (ie, you have theme cards traveling with you). It didn't work well, but it at least divorced "authorization to read a clue of a particular level" from "the actual act of reading the clue that you're authorized to read".

However, there might be a cleaner way, and of course, it involves check marks. And it's simply this: originally, the check marks had a 1-to-1 correspondence with clues. Each check mark equated to one level's worth of a clue, so 1 check mark = level 1 clue, 2 check marks = level 2 clue, etc. What if, instead, each clue level is equivalent to 3 check marks each, but there are more ways to get check marks, which have different payouts? For example, a theme card might provide 1-3 check marks, whereas some of the "adventuring" actions that Steve suggests could each pay out 1-2 check marks, and maybe the type of adventure you face determines the category of check mark you get (or maybe it varies from scenario to scenario?).

I like that this could potentially fit nicely in the context of encounters. Visiting the scriptorium in an abbey may bring you in contact with an ancient tome, which could conceivably bring you in contact with some information about the temple whereabouts, or digging around in a tomb could show you an inscription with info about the temple's contents -- but how would those be incorporated into the game under the previous system? But if each of those could provide, say, 1 or 2 check marks in their respective category, then they contribute positively to the player's progress towards information, but still must be combined with other information sources to get over those thresholds. And it also leads automatically to player differentiation. If I'm at 4 check marks in "temple location" and you're at 3 check marks, a 3-check-mark theme card is very valuable to you, as it will get you to 6 total (and the level 2 clue), but it's no more valuable than a 2-check-mark card to me, so our interest in that card will be different.

This could provide a good framework to permit some variety in the stuff that players do each turn, while still fitting everything together into progress towards the actual solution.

Note that an alternative approach could be to simply have 9 pieces of actual information that you have to accumulate before you know the full solution in each category. But I think that would just be too hard to write, and too difficult to play. The check marks may once again be an appropriate abstraction.

Playtest at Spielbany

Steve and I had a chance to playtest the newest version of the game at Spielbany on Saturday. It was a stripped-down prototype with hand-written cards, me acting as a "GM", etc, but the players graciously overlooked the shortcomings of the prototype, and I think we got a pretty fair evaluation of the underlying ideas. The game played through to completion, which surprised me -- I hadn't expected we would even make it to the temple, and didn't come up with much of an AI for the enemy in the temple. We collectively came up with an ad hoc solution that worked, but that would need some tweaking. Overall the game was definitely shorter -- with 4 new players it took about 2 hours.

I don't think any of the new ideas completely flopped, but not all of them may end up as keepers either. Here's my sense of what worked and what didn't work as well.

Enemy in the temple: No one liked this very much. The AI we came up with was clearly rough, but it was more the idea of having to have an AI was unpopular -- you want players focusing on how to plan their own best route through the temple, not having to worry about policing the rules by which the enemy explores. In a game with no GM, enemy movement just didn't seem to fit, and everyone agreed the time track was an appropriate abstraction.

Enemy outside the temple: I liked this quite a bit more. We played that you add an enemy when you move into a city; you reduce the enemy progress track by the number of enemy in the city at the end of your turn; and when there are 5 enemy or more in a city, you roll a d6 and the enemy either digs for the temple (1-2), kidnaps the theme card in the city (3-4), or activates an "agent" (5-6) (which simply controls the speed at which the enemy explores the temple). I think it worked pretty well -- you were worried about the enemy becoming too big in a particular city, but it didn't lock the game board down like the old system.

Lead cards: Neutral to negative. I don't think there was any specific excitement about this system, whereby you're told where you can find someone. But the implementation was at least part of the problem -- it was sometimes the case that you'd draw a lead to the same city you were in. And they weren't easy to get; facing a challenge to get a lead, or asking a theme card for a lead, were useful but not heavily used by the players. So as a result, it felt like you were just supposed to chase down whatever lead you were initially dealt, which lost some of the route planning that originally made the game fun. Maybe if, instead, every theme card has an associated whereabouts, and you need to get a lead to be authorized to look at it, this could be an acceptable compromise between the previous version, where all cards are always available, and the new system, where no cards are out at the start.

Encounter cards: Neutral to postive. These had descriptions of a scene, rather than an actual image, so players had to use their imagination, but they were all good sports about this, and most everyone saw some potential in the system. Concerns about knowing the "right" way to beat each card emerged, and the observation was made that there's no difference between the various skills -- they're just different numbers, but there's no difference between a "fight", an "escape", etc. A very interesting suggestion emerged to switch this to a group vote dynamic, a la Dixit, whereby you'd all look at the card, the active player would select his "response", and the inactive players would select what they think the solution ought to be, and if they match, the player passes -- or some permutation of that idea. There are some issues to be thought through but I think it could work, the question is simply whether there's enough to make it interesting.

Clues instead of check marks: Neutral. I think it was nice to be able to get a concrete clue from everyone you interview, but on the other hand, once you reveal that card X gives a level 3 clue, everyone else pretty much just wants to go visit that card to get a level 3 clue. This does what I wanted -- it creates convergence at a particular location, which boosts the enemy's strength by giving the enemy die rolls and progress track movement; but that doesn't create a disincentive to the other players to go there to get the best clue (*). The previous version made it harder to get better clues, this version makes it more statisically unlikely, and I think I like the previous version better, because it introduces more challenge to the decision of how much effort to expend to get the better clues?

(*) A couple of players suggested that a city that is full of enemy is locked down, and can't be entered by the players, period. And probably, that players have some ability to pull enemy out of the location they're in.

Theme cards as allies: Neutral to positive. Most players liked this thematically; Steve suggested separating the theme cards, which give info, from a separate category of ally cards, which give boosts to your stats.

Turn structure: Neutral. Turns were pretty quick, but on the other hand, there wasn't quite enough for the players to do; I think we'd like to see a little more action. Steve specifically suggested wanting there to be things you could be doing even in a turn where you won't going for information. I think this is a fruitful direction for further thought. But there are two important considerations that have to guide such thinking. The first is that the game can't tolerate much more complexity, and the second is that any system in the game should ultimately relate back to the information hunt in some way.

With respect to the last point, I think the "problem" is that there just isn't that much information in the game -- 3 clues with 3 levels each = 9 pieces of information, and you can possibly skip over the lower ones if you luck out or pay attention. I don't think we can add much more information than this, though -- breaking a clue into more than 3 levels would be difficult and/or would render the lower-level clues nearly worthless. So, the action in the game is really about adding obstacles to make the info hunt more challenging or time-consuming or interesting. The variable difficulty of visiting each location used to be the way that we did this, the current version makes it hard to find the people that give clues, but maybe there are additional ways to achieve this that we haven't considered yet.

Overall, it was an informative session that I hope will lead to some promising next steps for the design.

The Enemy

So, the “Enemy” – who is he and what does he do?

In the last version of the game, the enemy had two main functions. First, they provided a game clock. If, on your turn, you had the “enemy pawn”, you advanced the “Enemy Progress” track by the current position of the “Enemy Zeal” track, and if it reached its end, the Enemy had found the temple ahead of you (and then you passed the pawn to your right, so it counter-rotates relative to the player turns). The “Enemy Zeal” track started at 1, but advanced by 1 every time someone attempted a dig for the temple or a relic, so it organically accelerated the movement of the Progress track and gave a sense that time was running out, which was cool. Second, there were “enemy cubes” placed in the cities on the board, and these represented the difficulty of the challenge you faced upon arriving in a city. This was very clean and simple, but perhaps a bit too abstract, and worse, they slowed the game down as it progressed – more enemies to beat means more cards to acquire means more turns drawing cards means less turns drawing stuff. Again, this was somewhat desirable – on the one hand, you feel time is running out, and on the other, your ability to efficiently collect information is decreasing, so you feel like the best bet is to go into the temple, perfect info or not.

There was really nothing wrong with this scheme, but I still question whether it was as good as it could have been; there was little correlation between the enemy cubes and the enemy progress, and as mentioned, facing cubes for challenges felt dry and mathematical.

I’ve previously talked about a newer and better (?) system for handling the encounters, but the board topography introduced by the enemy cubes was nice. A simple way to integrate that with the enemy progress is to have the movement amount on the Progress track correspond to the number of cubes in the player’s current city. And, have the movement happen on every turn. Taken together these get rid of the counter-rotating enemy pawn, and the enemy zeal track, so it’s an overall reduction in complexity.

Now comes the part where I add some complexity back in. Sort of. The previous system had a “trigger” mechanism, whereby if there were too many enemy cubes in a city, the enemy attempts to dig for the temple in that city. Again, clean and efficient. I think we can preserve that but broaden the scope a bit, with a deck of “event” cards – whenever a city overfills, an event card is revealed, and it could do one of a couple of things – kidnap a theme card in that city (if there is one), attempt a dig, etc. But one effect I’m particularly interested in considering is “reveal an Enemy Agent”.

I may have mentioned previously the idea that we could perhaps add several “Enemy Agents” into the game, each represented by a card. These start face down in a row. Whenever an “activate Enemy Agent” event occurs (however that comes about), one of them is flipped over, indicating that that Agent is now known to be “active”. As I had said, these agents can be incorporated visually into the encounter cards, so if you see an Agent that has been activated, you can attempt to fight him (and “deactivate” him, I guess?).

But what happens to agents that aren’t deactivated? I want to integrate the enemy presence more strongly into the temple, and I feel like the number of active agents should be a serious consideration for the players – the more agents are active, the more difficult it will be for a player to win in the temple. So I came up with three schemes.

1. The simplest: the enemy progress track continues to click down when players are in the temple, and the amount it clicks down by is determined by the number of active Enemy agents. So, the fewer Agents are out, the more time the players have. This is simple and functional, but only abstractly conveys the sense that the Enemy is competing against the players to race through the temple.

2. The number of active agents represent the level of knowledge the enemy has, “1”, “2”, or “3+”. In the temple, the enemy is assumed to be “right on your heels”, and every time you enter a room, you check the solution card to see whether the enemy acts in that room or not – BUT, the sleeve you slide the card into is “1”, “2”, or “3+”, depending on the enemy’s knowledge. So a more informed enemy will make more intelligent choices. This adds some cool AI to the game, but it’s a minor headache to introduce component-wise, and it may be a pain from a playability standpoint.

3. Once players enter the temple, take the active agent cards and place one between each pair of players. Before play passes to your left after your turn, if there’s an Agent card between you and the next player, the Enemy first gets a turn. The enemy is a single pawn that moves through the temple with some simple AI, and he attempts to pass all challenges and tests any and all features he comes upon. When he faces a challenge, the difficulty is checked against the stats of the current Agent (or maybe all active Agents?), and if he fails, that Agent is deactivated and out of the game.

I like each of these for different reasons. 3 has the advantage that it really hurts to have multiple enemies active going into the temple – with, say, 4 enemies active, the enemy gets 4 turns for every one turn that you get! It would be hopelessly hard to beat an enemy that is so fast (but on the other hand, perhaps you were able to enter the temple before the enemy). I’d have to write a simple AI to govern enemy movement, but that shouldn’t be too bad.