Ongoing progress

Just ran a 1p solo playtest.  I was able to finish the game, including setup and put-away, in 45 minutes total.  I still think that 100 minutes for the 4p game is pretty realistic.  A few observations:

First, in the last couple of sessions, the temple has been a bit too easy, because the grail room happened to be in very close proximity to a font room.  I think that either the rooms all need to have the same back-printing, or the temple setup needs to be more scripted so feature rooms are further apart, or there need to be 5-6 features instead of 8, or some combination of these.  It's just a bit too easy to get lucky -- in this game, the player had good temple location and true grail knowledge, and no features knowledge, but the 2nd feature he tested was the grail and the third (right next door) was the font.  And of course, the grail he picked on a 50-50 shot was the true grail!  It's just more exciting when it's a bit more of a nailbiter.

The enemy progress track doesn't quite get all the way down in the 1p and 2p games, so it may be necessary to shorten that track a bit for those player counts, which is easy enough.

There still isn't quite as much globe-hopping as I'd like; it's usually easiest to just visit cities more or less in order.  The removal of the "relics" from the game, and the mini-race element they brought, is probably most to blame for this.  To be sure, the possibility of cards disappearing due to the action of operatives creates some urgency that motivates movement, but still, it's rare that you revisit a city you've previously visited, and it's rare you go screaming across the globe to get to a theme card ASAP, because chances are it will still be there by the time you get there.

It may be advantageous to split "receive a reward" and "visit a theme card"; maybe receiving a reward can simply be an action unto itself, so it still has a cost.

The enemy operatives, who go around removing stuff from the board, don't exactly work in the 1p game, because they're always chasing the players around, so chances are they removed a reward token or theme card that you've already used.  Not sure how to make them move ahead of you, but it may just be that we need to add a reason for you to want to go back to visit a theme card a second time.

One simple way would be this:  most theme cards give you bonus check marks if you discard the correct Item card, but if you don't have it, you can't get the check marks.  If this changed to "the bonus check marks are only available the SECOND time you visit the card, but you don't have to pass a challenge when you do it", then this would give you a reason to move around more, particularly if you're limited to only carrying one item card at a time.  I don't really like this rule, it's kind of fiddly and annoying.  But something like it might be a good idea.

Another mechanism we can use is Event cards; these can be thematic, and they don't add extra rules.  What triggers an event?  Probably drawing an "event chip" from the cup, or maybe certain spaces on the progress track.  Maybe the events just move the operatives around a bit to shake things up, but maybe other things can happen as well, like moving theme cards around, although it's a short enough game that you don't want the route planning to become too chaotic.

Failing a challenge -- what happens?

What happens when a player fails a challenge?

 

Outside the temple, the solution is simple:  the player loses one white chip (ie, one action), and if an enemy operative is active in that city, the operative executes its power (problem alert:  if there are multiple operatives in the city, do they ALL execute their powers?  Maybe it's just "the leftmost in the row" of operative cards, since he's the "senior" operative).

 

Inside the temple, to keep the action brisk, you face challenges at the end of your turn, if you draw a "trap" chip from the cup (which are added to the cup when you pass through a room having a "trap" icon).  So you can't lose a white chip -- you have already spent all of those.  And you can't just lose some adventure cards, since you don't have any, or else you'd have spent them on the challenge. 

 

Possible answers could include:

 

- Lose an artifact (if you're carrying one)

- Return to the entrance

- Lose a turn

 

Sending you back to the entrance isn't always punitive, and if it doesn't entail loss of the artifact, it can actually be helpful -- it gets you away from all of the other player and operative pawns that may have been hounding you. 

 

Lose a turn may be too punitive, but it's thematically appropriate.  The only problem is, what if everyone fails a challenge?  Then everyone loses a turn and there's no net effect.  And especially in a 1p game, who cares about missing a turn?  So a better punishment may be "draw no white chips during the resupply phase next turn".  That way the enemy clock continues ticking, but you can still spend white chips off of your item cards, so you may still be able to take a turn, albeit an abbreviated one, and at a cost (my thought was that white chips on item cards are worth VP at game end).

 

A related question that came up has been, what do you do when a "noise" chip is drawn?  I have it that ALL enemy pawns move one space closer to you, and (i) any pawns in a room with a feature, instead of moving, test it for the grail room or a font, and (ii) any pawn in the same room as you steals whatever you're carrying.  In practice, (ii) was too brutal, so I changed it to "you must pay a certain number of fist icons to avoid having something stolen", and if you can't, or won't, the enemy steals an artifact, or if you don't have one, an item, or if you don't have one, an ally card.  Then that enemy carries the artifact around and you can initiate a fist-icon challenge against the enemy to take it back (or anyone else can).

 

It might also work better if it's that the first chip drawn moves the closest enemy (you generated a little noise), second "noise" chip moves the next-closest enemy (you generated a lot of noise), and so on; maybe it's cumulative, so second chip moves closest AND next-closest, etc.

 

 

It works! Now for the balancing...

Solo playtesting of the changes suggested in the previous post shows promise for the new system.  Without the cubes, the game is easier to set up and there are practically no fiddly things that you need to remember to do, which will make the game easier to teach, learn, and play.  But to really evaluate its effectiveness, it needs to be well-balanced.  To illustrate what a potentially daunting task this is, here are all of the different variables that can be independently adjusted:


- Number of cards drawn at start of turn
- Reduction in cards drawn if operatives present?
- # of spaces to advance progress track for the two operatives that have this power
- If an operative is required to execute his power but can't, advance progress track?
 - How much to advance progress if you read a clue in a city with an operative?
- If you pass an encounter, do you get the reward tile AND the theme card visit, or just one or the other?
- Can you draw a card as an action?
- How many fists must you pay to deactivate an operative?
- Must you discard an item card to receive bonus check marks?

But in practice, it's not so bleak, because the range of possible values for each of these is somewhat limited.

There are essentially two things we want to control for.  The first is that players can accumulate check marks at an acceptable rate; my goal is something like 7-8 turns per player outside the temple.   And the second is simply that the enemy track doesn't reach its end before the players have enough time to execute those 7-8 turns.

So, things like "# of cards drawn" and "how many rewards per encounter" affect how efficiently the players can acquire check marks (assuming a certain range of difficulties for the challenges).  And the answer seems to be that getting 3 cards per turn, less one for each operative in the city, and getting both a reward and a theme card visit from passing a challenge, get players to a high level of information, but not completely perfect information, within 7 turns each.

Then it's just a matter of tweaking the functionality of the operatives, and the length of the track overall, to ensure that those 7 turns occupy the full span of the progress track.  What's nice is that the operatives and their various powers, though simple, DO have the effect that v7 had, where the board is becoming a more difficult place late in the game, and you're eager to enter the temple, because your flexibility outside the temple is diminishing.  But it isn't that challenges become more difficult, but rather that rewards become less generous (because many cities have lost either their reward token or theme card), and enemy operatives are more plentiful (so getting clues will be more likely to lead to movement on the progress track).  I want to test this a few more times to confirm balance, but I'm close to being ready to call it successful from a desing standpoint, and then it's just a matter of tweaking.  And of course the temple phase still needs to be calibrated with a similar process, but I'm optimistic there because it worked so well at Spielbany.  The player who found the grail and font did so in about 4-5 turns, which is just about right.
 
Unrelated to this, I had a thought that probably doesn't really work, but I was mostly interested to see that it could work.  We played the other day that when the group enters the temple we wipe the board clean, remove it, and lay out the temple in its place.  But if instead the temple is built on the board, then there's room for a 5x5 grid of playing cards.  AND, it could work out that the entrance to the temple could be placed on the city that contains the temple, meaning that the entrance to the temple is in a different location relative to the rest of the temple every time.  For example, if it's in Cairo that's room (4,1), whereas in Constantinople it's (3,3).  I tried it out, and sure enough, every possible point on the grid has exactly one (or zero) cities, with the exception of Odessa/Bucharest.  In practice it's probably too swingy to let the entrance be in such different parts of the temple.  I mostly liked the idea because it would't force you to clear the whole table to make room for the temple (if you have an average sized table), and woud feel give the location at least some influence over the temple phase.
 

Possible further simplifications and removing enemy cubes (?)

I think I have a semi-coherent set of changes that further reduces complexity from the playtest version and follows through on the removal of the cubes in favor of the operatives.

 

First, no more sub-locations.  Each encounter deck has different illustrations, but the cards are functionally identical within each deck.  Instead, there are 12 "reward tokens" -- 2 for each solution category, 3 "allies", and 3 "items".  One is randomly placed in each city.  Additionally, the 12 theme cards are randomly placed in cities, with each card indicated a type of city in which it can be placed.  When you pass an encounter, you get to either receive the reward from that city's "reward token", OR visit the theme card in that city (or maybe it's both).

 

When you face an encounter, everyone gets to look at the card, but there's no Where's Waldo aspect, there are just icons, and here's what they do:

- Phobia:  Active player faces the challenge at +2 difficulty.

- Item:  Anyone with that same item card gets a white token on the card.

- Operative:  Move that operative to the current player's city, IF the operative is activated.

 

No more enemy cubes; instead, the progress track is divided into 5 sections; at the end of the turn, the number of chips you pull from the cup is based on the section of the track the marker is on.  (Chips either advance the progress track or let an operative execute his power). 

 

There are several marked spaces on the progress track, at which something happens.  One is "activate an operative" -- flip over the card from the card row.  Another is "enemy attempts to dig for the temple"; but not sure where.  Maybe another is "remove captured theme cards from the board" -- e.g. if the Grail Diary has previously been captured, on this space it has been burned.

 

So going back to the encounter cards, when you see an operative, if that operative is activated but not yet on the board, you pull him onto the board now, to your city, and you put his chip into the cup.  If his chip gets pulled from the cup, or if you fail a challenge in the city he occupies, the special power indicated on his card is executed.  When you are in a city containing an operative, something happens; maybe it's (a) you add a black chip or (b) if you visit a theme card or get to read a clue, the enemy progress advances by 1.  Or maybe it's both of those.  And maybe, as before, you can initiate a fight challenge against the operative to knock him off the board (but he never deactivates once activated?)

 

The operative powers include "advance enemy progress by 3", "capture a theme card and bring it to the nearest stronghold", "remove the reward chip from the city".  Other possibilities include "move the PLAYER to the nearest stronghold", "deactivate a theme card's 'bonus knowledge'" (but this one may be too fiddly).

 

There are a few nice things that this does.  First, it keeps the operatives moving around, keeps them showing up at a somewhat unpredictable but basically controlled rate, and most importantly, gives a completely scripted way for bad things to happen to the players, without the players needing to remember or police any special rules.  The bad stuff that happens is /entirely/ contained on the operative cards, and the occasions on which the operatives get to execute those powers are fully specified; there's nothing to remember.  So it's a big win in terms of reducing the number of rules the players must internalize to be able to play.  The removal of the sub-location system (which I liked) also helps with this.  Now, you face an encounter, and you either get a reward or get to visit a theme card.  (If you want to do both, simply face another encounter).  And if there's an operative there, do this if you pass, do this if you fail.

 

I really, really liked the system where the operatives are connected to encounter outcomes -- ie if you pass/fail an encounter that gives reward X, and the operative that matches X is active, then that operative gets to do something.  But even with me not playing and simply policing the game's bureaucracy, we forgot to do this constantly.  I think it's just too hard to remember, and it's highly preferrable if it's simply that the operative gets to do something if he's in your city, otherwise don't worry about it.

 

The other thing that's nice is that it should still organically create "convergence" at certain locations.  A city that contains the more important theme cards is likely to be visited more by the players, which is likely to result in more operatives being drawn there, which makes it more likely that, e.g., that theme card will be kidnapped or the enemy progress will advance.  Maybe if a city has multiple operatives in it, those operatives dig for the temple there? 

 

 

Spielbany session recap

Saturday's session at Spielbany went reasonably well.  Four players, three of whom were completely new to the game, were able to understand the rules, acquire information, enter the temple and find the artifact before the enemy track ran out.  Unfortunately, the game took quite a long time, and I had to give out some free check marks several times to speed the game up, but I know why that happened and will come back to it.  First, the positive notes:

- The temple works pretty well.  The turns are quick and you can move through the temple quickly, but it's big enough that there's some time required to explore.  And the rooms having mostly three exits each means that you can get almost anywhere, but the route you have to take may be slightly more roundabout than you had hoped.  And of course, the temple's enabling "technology"...

- ... The chips-in-the-cup system is very successful.  It keeps the turns inside the temple short, and allows for a range of possible bad things to happen randomly, but in a mostly-predictable way, and all within the same framework.  This prevents needing a different "trigger" for every bad thing.

- The enemy operatives system worked well as a way to let the enemy's presence grow, and to give players something concrete to struggle against.  

There were a few things that didn't work due to balance, but that should be easy to adjust.

- The operatives were a little too easy to de-activate.  The rule is that if anyone sees an operative on someone's encounter card, they can fight that operative, (difficulty = number of operatives) and deactivate it.  This happened too frequently so by the time they entered the temple, all operatives were deactivated.

- Check marks were too hard to get.  Unfortunately, this really smothered the game, but at its core it's a simple problem:  most of the theme cards give 1-3 check marks, PLUS some "bonus" check marks, if you discard a specific item card.  In practice, although players did acquire some item cards, only once did a player have the right item card to discard when visiting a theme card that called for it.  The solution is probably as simple as either letting you discard ANY item to get the bonus check marks, or to make item cards easier to get.

And, there were a few things that players felt need to be adjusted.  

- The enemy operatives should do something bad to the player in the temple when they "catch you".

- The theme cards should start on the board, instead of being pulled onto the board after successfully passing an encounter.  But they should also be able to move around, or perhaps be moved around by the enemy.

- The need to go to a specific sub-location to visit a theme card was somewhat confusing, but would perhaps be easier if the theme cards all start on the board.

- The idea of a "where's Waldo" mini-game may not fit here; maybe, just make the actionable elements overt on the cards.

- The cube system may be superfluous.

It's this last point that I'd like to consider more fully.  I wrote in a previous post about how the intent with the current system is that the cubes represent the enemy's reach on the board, with the operatives being a shadowy and gathering menace.  But it's possible that the game could be simpler with a single enemy system, instead of two interlocking enemy systems.  The argument in favor of this simplification would be that the functions that the cubes perform could be achieved another way, and that the cubes add fiddliness.

The rules for how cubes are added definitely due suggest some complexity:  You add a cube to a city (a) when you arrive there, (b) when you add a theme card to the city, or (c) when you read a clue in a city.  The number of cubes in the city determines the number of chips you pull out of the cup, and when a city reaches 5 cubes, you (i) replace the cubes with a big cube (locking the city at 5 cubes), and (ii) activate a new operative, and (iii) henceforth, whenever you're required to add cubes to the city you instead add black chips to the cup.

That's not an absurd number of rules to remember, and players didn't have a big problem keeping it straight, but it is a lot of bureaucracy to patrol, and the functions the cubes perform,  activating operatives and controlling the number of chips pulled, can be achieved in different, simpler ways.  For example, the number of chips pulled could simply be given by the position on the progress track.  It could be split into five sections; in the first section you pull one chip per turn, in the second two, and so on.  This could persist through the temple as well.  This is not as variable as the current system but it's not obviously worse, and it's certainly simpler.  And something similar could trigger the operatives being placed on the board.

In this scheme, the operatives are the enemy's entire presence on the board, both inside and outside the temple.  That is, as the previous post discussed, more symmetric.  And it could make the theme more concrete:  when Operative X is in Cairo, he may be able to capture Sallah; when he's in Ankarra, he may be able to dig for the temple there.  Connecting specific locations to the enemy's actions makes more sense if it's a specific "person" that's executing the actions.  But it may also be more attractive from a playability standpoint.  The cubes don't exactly act as a deterrent to actions -- if you need to visit Alexandretta to get the Grail Diary, you're going to go whether there are 3 cubes there or 5 or 0.  But if there's an operative there, you may hasten your trip there (if you're afraid of the theme card being kidnapped) or delay it (if you're worried the operative will cause you some harm, whatever that might be).  These considerations come more easily to the forefront of your mind if the operative is a pawn on the board, and the powers they possess may be easier to incorporate into your plans if you see explicitly where it can be executed.

I'd like to think more about this possibility; it's a bit of a departure but it's not completely different.  It's simply a way to execute some of the same functionality we've always had, but in a different way.  And most of the other changes are minor and will be easy enough to try.

I doubt we'll play the game again at today's Spielbany, but hopefully I'll get a chance to solo test some options for these systems soon, and will report back on how they go!

Thinking about expansions

I posted a thread on BGG about three philosophies of expansions.  Briefly, they are (a) the Carcassonne approach (add functionality and components), (b) the Ticket to Ride approach (change the setting but keep the player interface basically unchanged), and (c) the Lord of the Rings approach (repurpose functionality and components from earlier versions to keep the overall complexity increase down).  For LA, approach (b) seems most appropriate -- add scenarios, keeping the basic structure of the game intact, with essentially the same rules and components, and change only the details of the scenario (obviously adding solution cards for each new scenario).  Because of the versatility of the components, to some extent this can bleed into approach (c) -- eg the temple, built as it is from cards, can be laid out completely differently in scenario X vs. scenario Y.

So what constitutes a scenario?  Certainly, it's 12 theme cards and probably some cardboard components.  Assuming that the "temple location" solution cards can be the same for all scenarios, it would only be solution cards for two categories, so at 12 cards each, that's 36 total cards for a scenario.  Possibly each scenario could have its own notepads, although this isn't strictly necessary.   So the bare minimum componentry for a scenario is 36 cards and some cardboard pieces.  That means that you could provide three scenarios with a double deck (108) of cards, and maybe a single sheet of die cut cardboard components.

Currently the board covers only Europe and the Middle East.  It would be easy, and highly appropriate, to add a board for Asia and another for the Americas.  Assume these are separate expansions, and that each requires a deck of Location solution cards (24?); so with a board, 24 Location cards, and 36 scenario cards, you can package up an expansion that provides one new scenario.  

So, assuming the base game ships with one scenario, then with one "three-scenario" expansion and two "board" expansions, we'd have a total of six scenarios.  But actually, because the clue categories are orthogonal and because the same three solution symbols are always used, players can get additional variety simply by playing out a given scenario on a different board, or by playing out a given scenario with the theme cards from another scenario.  And as I've discussed previously, it might also be possible to combine the boards, or to play a "campaign" game that involves setting up one board at each of three tables, and requiring players to hop between boards.

There are two other expansions that don't extend replayability in quite the same way, but might still be useful.  The first would be to add more Encounter cards, to avoid the situation where players have memorized the elements of all of the encounters and the "where's Waldo" aspect isn't fun anymore.  The second would be to have three temple decks instead on one; each deck would be indexed to a particular city shape, and each could have a different flavor based on the city type -- eg if the temple is in a major city it could look more like a palace, whereas in a remote city it could be more like a catacomb or cave.  And/or, perhaps there could be a temple deck that is "harder" -- there are more triggers for traps and noise, or there are fewer exits in the room cards, making paths through the temple more tortuous.

So that is, conservatively, five expansions to the base game, two of which require only artwork.  With the base game and these expansions, I think the game would be truly infinetly replayable.

Prototype photos

The prototype for v10 is ready for Spielbany.  This one took a lot of time to assemble.  And as we all know, graphic design is not my forte.  Anyway, here it is:

 

Zoom in on the game board:

 

 

Some highlights:

 

The temple.  Currently made up of 25 rooms, although that's easy to change.  "Red" cards are those that contain a testable feature; "Black" cards, those that don't.  I didn't anticipate how the red/black would give a checkerboard appearance.  Oh well.  The player's perspective is from above the room looking down.  Most of the rooms have 3 exits (the little yellow things), so there's some route planning but little likelihood that a room will be completely unreachable.  The colored circles are "spawn points" for the Operatives, and there are icons for noise (lower left), traps (lower right), items (upper right) and phobias (upper left), but those are hard to see in this photo.

The enemy operatives.  I just picked photos from the films for these guys for now, but each has a special power and a sub-location type in which he is (potentially) active.  They're in a row of 6, and at any time some or all may be "activated" (face-up).

 The interrogator.  Not aesthetically pretty, but this little puppy will reduce the production costs dramatically compared to the (beautiful) board of the previous version.   It's shown with the "True Grail" card inserted to show "Grail 6" through the window.  You'd then flip the interrogator over, and through the little window on the back, you see whether it says "yes" or "no".  No need for red masking/rubylith (although it could still include that for added security).

It's big enough that we may need to physically remove the board from the table when the temple phase starts; maybe, though clumsy, the players who enter the temple first just wait and count the turns of the other players, then they get that many "free" turns once the temple phase starts, before resuming the normal turn sequence.