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.

On to v17

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.

Lost Adventures sells out!

There hasn't been too much to say about Lost Adventures recently.  I've reached out to a number of publishers about the game, and haven't gotten even a "no thanks" email in response from many of them, which has been discouraging of course.  One said "this is a nice pitch but we're not accepting submissions, but reach out next year".  That's potential, at least.

Unrelated to LA, I've just had a chance to check out The Jungle Cruise by the Forrest-Pruzen design studio, which has been hitting IP mass market games out of the park lately.   Designers tend to look down on the mass market, but seeing good games on the shelves of Target is encouraging to those who hope to see their games do well but also to preserve some artistic integrity.

The Jungle Cruise does a couple of things that v16 of LA also does.  Instead of the (admittedly cool) solution cards with the clue sleeves and red masking, v16 has cards, face-down, that contain the temple info and you are trying to get permission to look at those cards.  JC has an element like this: you have passengers from 4 families, one family is the most valuable at game end, and along the voyage you can look at a 'clue tile' which basically says 'family X is NOT the valuable one'.  This is not a very complicated bit of deduction but it's simple and effective and still guides your decisions, particularly in the sense that you must pay attention to what others are doing.  If someone is tossing DeNyle family members overboard, maybe they know that family isn't the lucrative one.


From my perusal of the Prospero Hall games, it seems they understand a few important things about mass market games that designers aiming for mass market success would do well to keep in mind:

 The turn structure MUST be rigid. It can have a few steps, but they must always be the same steps, and there can't be many of them. Something like Acquire or Carcassonne is ok, something like action point allowance or worker placement is not.

 Moving on a track is a familiar concept and is encouraged. Moving around a map is familiar enough that it's an acceptable alternative. Moving around on hexes or a grid are more abstract and probably not as desirable.

 Rolling for movement or for resolution are familiar and therefore highly desirable

 Players don't want to be ultra-competitive. All this stuff we talk about like friction and opportunity cost mostly go out the window; players just want to kick back and have fun. Trying to win is a given but having to exert tremendous effort to win is unrealistic.





It wouldn't take too massive of a streamlining of v16 of LA to make a mass market-weight version of the game, maybe. I think it would work something like this:

Basics:

 The map is made up of fewer (9?) cities, still of three types (signified by a city shape). Each has an icon corresponding to one type of temple information (location, perils, artifact) (instead of tiles; this is now hard-coded onto the board)

 There's a display along the bottom of the board into which temple information cards are placed

 Players have an identical set of “adventure cards” which each have two icons. There are 4 icons that help in the map phase, 6 that help face temple perils. You can have up to 4 cards in a tableau, representing your character. Everyone also has four “selection” cards in their hand.

Map Phase
In the map phase, on your turn you:

 Move to another city, and flip an “encounter card” for that city type. It shows the type of challenge you face (luck, wits, fight, escape) (and some artwork, presumably) 

 Count up the number of that challenge category's symbols you have in your tableau. Roll that many (custom) dice. Count up your hits.

 You may peek at temple cards whose “value” adds up to the number of hits you rolled. (The board says how many hits are required to look at each temple card in the display). The temple cards you can look at must match the icon in the city you're in. i.e. one city has info about the temple location, another about perils, etc.

 Then, you can add one adventure card from your hand to your tableau, and remove one if you want.

The map phase lasts for 5 (?) turns. After that, the temple location is revealed, and we begin the temple phase. Everyone place your marker on the “temple track”. 

Temple Phase

In the temple phase, most of the action happens on the temple perils:

 For each peril, at the same time, everyone places a selection card face down, reveal together. The card you've chosen adds 0, 1, 2, or 3 to your bid; you must take that many hubris tokens. 

 Reveal the temple peril. Count the number of icons in your tableau matching the peril (e.g. “blades”, “asps”, etc), add that to your bid. Highest total bid advances on the temple track the most, lowest bid advances the least. 

Final Hubris Challenge

After we've resolved all the temple perils, then there's the “final hubris challenge”.  

 Roll all of the dice 5 times, and for each hit, remove one hubris. If you don't remove all of your hubris, your face melts off and you are eliminated. 

 Whoever is not eliminated, and is the furthest along the temple track, wins!



Now, that already feels maybe a little bit heavy for mass market weight; probably it's at least a 10+ game. And yet there are two other things that it would feel painful not to include:

 In the map phase, once per turn, after you look at a temple card, you can remove a token from the board next to that card, which means that anyone else wanting to view that card needs one less “hit” to view it. That token makes the final hubris challenge easier for you in some way.

This is the interactive piece to the map phase: I can help myself in the long run by helping my opponents get info.

/ The role of the Nazis. In the map phase, maybe the dice you roll have an “enemy” symbol, such that if you get that result the enemy pawn moves toward you, and if it catches you you must [dump a card or get one less hit or something]

In the temple, the enemy is also a bidder, and they have a flat bid, indicated on the board, that increases the further into the temple you go. This means it's more important to be well-prepared for those later perils (but the info for those is probably also harder to get).



Is there a mass market version of LA in store, maybe a v17 of the game?  Eh I maybe somewhat doubt it, but it's not obvious to me that these ideas are strictly worse than the more involved v16, so maybe that's worth contemplating.