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.

Frankly and accused

In the German games era of board gaming, German games were in German and English-speaking players had to rely on English translations to play these games.  These translations were evidently not always done by native English speakers, and one particularly memorable mis-translation that became part of our group's lingo was that cards held in the player's hand were "frankly" and cards played onto the table were "accused".  We started using these terms in pretty much every other game where the distinction between these two states was important, and were surprised at how completely indispensible they were.  How else do you describe cards in the hand vs. cards on the table?  "In the hand" and "on the table", I suppose, but "frankly" and "accused" are big wins both in terms of their economy as well as their slightly quirky English usage; these are odd choices, but they are oddly correct.  I'm glad to this day to have played whatever game it was that introduced us to this fun lingo.

I am thinking about this in the aftermath of a mostly successful solo test for v16.  I recently adopted a rule that lets you play each adventure card twice, once from the hand to the table and once from the table to the discard pile.  But in this last version, this rule only applied in the map phase; in the temple phase, everyone lays all of their adventure cards on the table and they stay there for the whole phase. You can play any adventure card in the map phase to  get a boost in an encounter you face, and so, for cards that you plan to use in the temple, there's no reason not to play them in the map phase.  Whether you play them in the map phase or not, as long as you don't use them more than once, they'll stay on the table and be useable for the whole temple phase.  Thus it's a no-brainer to use them once in the map phase, and no-brainers are rarely desirable. 

Hold that thought while we go into the temple for a moment.  In the temple, there are five perils and there’s what essentially amounts to a closed-fist bid on each, with higher bids earning the right to move furthest through the temple.  Your bid is paid in a currency revealed by the threat card, and it's something bad that you incur:  time, hubris, injuries (but having the right adventure cards for the peril in question reduces the penalty you incur).   While this works as a way of generating suspense in the bid, it's weird to not know with what currency you're bidding.  And closed-fist bids are always a little heavy on guessing, although I don't mind that too much.



But anyway, these considerations led me to think about a hybrid draft-bid.  We go around the table and each draft a card that shows the type of penalty we're willing to incur, and place some cubes on that card indicating how much of that penalty we'll take; each cube adds 1 to your bid.(*)  Then, reveal the peril and play cards matching the peril, with each match boosting your bid by 1.  Then, resolve movement in order of highest total bid.  



So, your ability to bid well is helped by knowing in advance what the peril is and having acquired the right cards that match that peril.  You wouldn't want to take a lot of penalties for a bid when you're already well prepared for that card's peril, so knowledge helps you.  Seeing how many cubes the other players are bidding is helpful as well, but it only tells you part of the story of what they're bidding.  This brings us back to the frankly/accused stuff.  Say you play a card with two "heat" symbols on it in the map phase to help you with some encounter.  But now, in the temple phase, that card is on the table, and so, if the next temple peril is "heat", anyone who knows that knows that your bid isn't just "3" from the 3 cubes you allocated to the penalty card you chose, it's (at least) 5, the sum of those cubes and the two heat symbols you have on display.     This adds an interplayer dimension to the information game that may make this two-step bid more exciting, because we're trying to bid based on what we think the opponents have and what we think they know.(**)


(*) Thematically this seems to work better in the conception of the players as screenwriters as opposed to adventurers.  We're having a writers' session, and declaring what our characters will endure -- "Oh yeah?  My character will take 3 hubris for this scene"; I mean that's not a conversation an actual screenwriter would have but the point is the mechanical aspect correlates to a real-world situation.  If we, the players, were also the characters, a system where we're jockeying for place would probably need to be much more about direct conflict, as in I push you off the bridge, I draw the luger and point it at you, etc.  The way we previously avoided direct conflict, keeping it to a secondary element, was by making the temple exploration-based.  But that had other problems.


(**) Technically you draft adventure cards from an open display so in theory if you're watching what other people draw you have accurate knowledge of what they have.  This gets to the perennial hidden-trackable-information debate.  My strong feeling is that this game, with its thematic trapping and dice-based resolution mechanics, won't appeal to the kind of people who claim to know players who can perfectly track everyone else's information, so I am honestly not planning to even worry about this concern at this point.  This game can be enjoyed perfectly well by we mere mortals!







There are some other little things that need to be looked at as a result of this session, but overall I'm optimistic that the core elements of the design are intact and that by a few cycles of shuffling little things around and fiddling with costs, this might converge to a game that's ready for a cycle of balancing and then call it done.  Maybe...

Modular construction

For most of the game's development the setting has been the quest for the holy grail, but we always thought of this as one scenario among (possibly) many.  For the last year or so I've wondered whether the game strictly needed different scenarios, or whether it couldn't just be thought of as a generic standalone game that encompasses all films in this genre.


I still mostly think this; at least I think we may not gain much by changing the basic layout and logic of the temple, and of the theme cards, from scenario to scenario.  It doesn't matter whether it's "Liesl von Osterreich" who gives info about the true grail or "Mathilda Cottonwood" who gives info about the headpiece location.  These are all just chrome.  For the temple, changing the structure too much might result in a whole lot of rules to support variation without necessarily making the game more interesting to play.


I do still think we could have different map boards and different encounter cards and such for some fun variety, but I don't think these are strictly necessary either.


However, that's not to say we couldn't add just a bit of variety to the temple.  Take it as a given that the temple includes five peril cards, two red (the approach to the temple) and three purple (inside the temple).  Take it as a given that the temple will always feature one big knowledge check: the true grail, the staff length, the idol's weight, whatever.


Within this framework, we can shake things up just a bit.  For example, we can add a "gate" or two, as described in the previous post, which presents a knowledge check or a test of some sort.  Which stones are safe to step on, which key opens the big door, which chords must you play on the instrument to reveal the hidden passage, etc.  These are similar to the 'big knowledge check' but maybe the stakes are lower -- a minor bonus for passing, as opposed to a steep penalty for NOT passing.


And, it's fairly straightforward to vary where in the temple these knowledge checks occur.  The grail room comes at the end, the map room (staff length) comes between the red and purple perils, the idol room is after the purple perils but you must then go BACK through the purple perils, and so on.  And correspondingly the gates can be placed in a couple of different spots in similar fashion.


As a result you can create temples that feel slightly different.  They aren't a ton different from a mechanical or strategic standpoint, but they change things up just a bit to offer some variety from game to game.


There are two challenges to implementing this vision.


The first is the player notepad.  If we want a single notepad that can be used in any scenario (I think we do), how do we capture all of this variety?  I think something like, have a separate area for each module on the sheet, and during setup just physically scribble out on your sheet the modules you're not using, or something like that.


The second is, how do you instruct the players how they ought to set up the game, i.e. how to select modules and where to put them?  Is it done randomly, or are there a couple of prescribed setups, or do players get to choose, or what?  Probably there must be at least one "default" setup for first time players, but allowing for modularity without leaving players feeling overwhelmed by the options may be challenging. 

No, dice!

I've talked at length about mechanics I've come up with to evoke a movie-making theme, and the one I'm proudest of is the resolution cards.  Previously I was resolving encounters with custom dice, with the number of dice you rolled for yourself and the enemy commensurate with the 'investment' of each in the encounter.  I realized that you could encode the same information onto cards, albeit at a slight loss of randomness, but with the benefit that we could add other stuff to these cards.  Specifically, we could include storyboard art and a description of what has happened -- "Protagonist throws punch"/"Operative draws a pistol" etc.  So in resolving the challenge it's as if you're story-boarding the scene, and the cards match the challenge category you face so it's thematically appropriate.  I love this idea and would hate to let it go. 

But it's not without a few drawbacks.  First, it's extra steps in encounter prep: "Grab the encounter deck for the appropriate challenge category, put a marker on the enemy track, put a marker on your investment".  It adds some minor fiddliness: shuffle the deck you just used after the encounter.  The randomness is bounded (this I consider very minor).  It's another component (48 cards) that eats up some table space (4 decks).  And it requires a mat for the encounter resolution, with tracks for your investment and the enemy investment.  And possibly the worst part -- when you flip a resolution card, you have to place it very precisely so that the tracks on the card line up with the tracks on the mat, so you can compare your investment and the enemy's to the results indicated on the card.

Now none of these are that big a deal and the pros, to me, outweigh the cons.  But it does take time, and those extra 48 cards and the mat are not insignificant in a game with a lot of parts.  Compared to 10 custom dice, maybe it's a wash, but what if we could do this with standard dice?  What if we can do it with just two standard dice?  Unfortunately for my beloved resolution system, I think we can.

It's so simple I wonder why I didn't think of it before.  When you face an encounter, roll two dice, one red, one white.  For the red die, if the number is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn that many spaces closer to your city.  For the white die, if the number is less than the amount that you invested in the encounter (adventure cards, basically), advance that number on the success track.  Repeat this three times.

That's it.  There are other bells and whistles about ways to use adventure cards to get out early, block bad results, and some things like that, but then there were some bells and whistles with the resolution card version too.  The statistics are different.  In the resolution card version the expected number of successes scaled linearly with investment, but here it grows with investment.  But on the whole it captures some of the same suspense but with zero overhead, fewer rules and fewer components. 

Ah, but there's another problem; the hubris challenge also used resolution cards, and these had two effects.  First, they ate hubris, their main function.  Second, they deal out penalties for curses you've acquired, e.g. if you drank from the wrong grail.  Can we capture this with dice as well?  Here again, two dice to the rescue.  White die is for cancelling hubris, red die checks against curses.  If you roll less than the number of curse tokens you have, you lose life equal to your die roll.  

There are a couple of things to think through, most notably that, assuming we use a d6, there's no difference in your performance in the hubris challenge if you have more than 6 green cubes.  If there are ways to lose green cubes during the challenge, then having more cubes is better.  On the other hand maybe it's ok for the game to be saying that if you have more than 6, you've been inefficient, and could have played it closer to the bone.  Or we could just use a d8 or d10 in the hubris challenge, although that may be swingy.
I've rolled through a few challenges this way just to try it out, and I like how quickly it sets up and resolves.  Yes, you have to use your imagination a bit as to what the dice represent, but that's true of every dice-based resolution system.  The biggest drawback may be that over three rolls (six dice total), the statistics just won't even out very well.  Sometimes the enemy will scream to your location, sometimes they won't move at all.  Sometimes you'll fly up the success track, sometimes you'll be sucking pond water.  In previous versions players had "script rewrite" cards that changed an outcome in some way.  We could reintroduce that concept here, maybe just in the form of a few tokens that everyone gets that you can spend for force another player, or allow yourself, to reroll a die.  A different thought was to roll two dice for one or both effects and keep the ... lower? higher?  That's the problem, it's not easy to define what you want!  You ideally, for the white die, want the highest die that's lower than your number of white cubes.  Neither "keep the lower" or "keep the higher" quite capture what you want here. 
So I'm potentially very upbeat about this change, particularly since it seems to move us closer to the simplicity of the v7 system but with more substance and suspense, but will just have to see how much of a concern random swings of luck are and whether they balance out over the course of the game.   

Bidding screenwriters

I think I’ve convinced myself that the “poison” version of the temple is the way to go.  I think the symmetry with the map phase is a compelling argument in its favor.  In both phases you’re bidding damage but this can be offset by preparation.  The details of the auctions and the stakes of the auction change so it still feels like there’s a transition, but it still feels like it’s the same game.

I think there’s also a good thematic justification for this.  Let’s say that the game’s premise is that we are screenwriters trying to promote our own character such that in the editing room that character will emerge as the protagonist.(*).  The punitive temple didn’t make much sense — who is it that is punishing our characters?  I like the poison temple better — we, the screenwriters, are punishing our own characters, creating interesting drama by being willing to subject our favorite to a greater level of struggle.

This calls for caution, though.  Upon hearing that we players are screenwriters, playtesters generate a ton of suggestions about how to introduce screenwriting theming and conventions and concepts.  So this theme may create expectations in people that the game doesn’t fully deliver on — i.e. in some ways you’re the character and in some ways the writer and we have to be careful about this.  But I think at least most of the systems are justifiable:

- Adventure cards represent gear and traits you’re investing your character with to enable them to succeed.  That one is easy.

- Encounters are scenes we’re writing together to show how our characters acquire knowledge about the temple.  Also easy.  Except...

- ...it makes sense that info about the temple (the peril cards) is hidden from the characters, but why is it hidden from us?  I guess my hand-wave at this is that the film is already in production when we’re hired to work on it, and so the props department is already at work building sets for the temple.  Getting a sneak peak at those tells us about what kinds of things we should be writing into our characters (i.e. cards we should get) to prepare for that.  That doesn’t completely answer why we have to do encounters to see the temple phase sets, but I guess it will have to do.

As previously posted, though, there’s an open question as to what winning represents.  In v14 it was “furthest back on the time track”, which worked but had weird thematic implications.  With the temple track, “furthest along the track without dying” seems ok enough.  Except, if we’re rival screenwriters, is it possible that there are other ways to win?  For example, sometimes a scenery-chewing villain or a character’s heroic sacrifice or redemption arc end up being the thing you remember most about a movie, and sometimes the best or most famous actor or actress is cast in one of those supporting roles.  Surely if you could choose between being the writer who created Vader or the one who created Luke you’d choose the former.

The way I want to have a whack at this is to have the spaces of the temple track numbered such that at game’s end, the space you’re on gives your score, unless you die before the end, in which case your score is zero.  Except, if you die due to hubris, or accumulated injuries, or after purging a lot of hubris, you can claim the corresponding scoring card, and if no one exceeds that score on the track you win.  So if no other players progress too far into the temple, the editor doesn’t have much to work with and cuts things in such a way that your compelling but doomed villain or heroic sidekick gets the most favorable treatment in the final edit.

We must be careful here not to encourage players to deliberately spike their hubris or injuries just to try to win in this alternate way.  The best way to win is still to move along the track.  But death should always be a possibility and if your character dies, it might be fun to nevertheless be able to win the game, if all the other players did was just hang back and not accomplish very much.




(*) Another possible premise is that whichever of us emerges with the strongest character arc will have the best actor/actress cast as our chracter.  I think it has to be one or the other of these but it probably doesn’t matter much which.

The finish line recedes once more

We had the game's first 5p session on Saturday, and it went rather poorly.  It's tempting to just write it off as a consequence of the player count and/or just a bad test, but there were a few concerns that are worth contemplating.

First, the encounters and their in-or-out decisions prompt the players for a lot of decisions in rapid succession.  For slow players, these decisions, though simple, come at a faster pace than they can keep up with.  We had progressed through 6 encounters in about 90 minutes, way too slow.

But second, one player expressed the view that the in/out decision is, game-theoretically speaking, easy and therefore uninteresting.  If you had only set aside one cube for a reward, get out early; if you have multiple cubes in for rewards, stay as long as you can.  But chances are the players with low rewards had high investment, and when they leave, everyone else wants to leave too.  Now I think there's a bit more to the decision space than this, chiefly that, if the group always leaves encounters early and with few rewards, the temple is going to eat them alive.  But if it takes a full play through to see this, maybe that's not going to give a good first player experience.

So, what to do?  A suggestion was discussed, which I think has promise.  In each encounter, there would be two teams (good guys/bad guys), and each player drafts a particular role -- the protagonist, the love interest, the antagonist, maybe even an extra, etc -- which is affiliated with one team or the other.  Then, players 'invest' by allocating cubes to the cards they have that match the encounter, and your investment goes to the team you've chosen for this encounter.  Then resolve the encounter in the usual way, but it's on rails -- no one exits until one side or the other wins, and only the players on that side get rewards.

The nice thing is that, since you choose roles before you invest, there's some speculation, but there's still the ability to double-cross.  Someone joined your team thinking you were going to make a big investment, but in reality you held back so as to benefit yourself.  But importantly, the tragedy of the commons concern, of players trying to freeload, is broken.  If I hold back so as to be selfish, it doesn't hurt all of us -- it only hurts my team.  The other team gets the reward.  

In what way can I be 'selfish' and hold back?  I'm not 100% sure but I think there might be two ways. The simpler is that the other team can deal you damage during an encounter, and so cubes you don't allocate to boost the encounter can be used to block this.

The other would lead to bigger changes.  I've said before that your mat represents your character and the cards you add to it represent attributes of your character.  What if these were arranged in a pyramid such that at the top of the pyramid is your most 'iconic' attribute -- the thing that viewers most associate with that character.  But in game terms, maybe there's some way in which this slot is also more powerful, i.e. it gets a multiplier?

Ok, so far so good.  What if also, each time a card is activated, that's you saying "this is a key attribute of this character!", and so the card moves toward the top of the pyramid (switching places with the card ahead of it?)   The thing is, cards that are useful outside the temple are only useful outside the temple, and cards useful in the temple are only useful inside.  So it might be that you'd sometimes want to select the cards that you know will be useful in the temple, so that they can start to float to the top of the pyramid and become more powerful.  Of course, allocating cubes to such cards does you no good in the encounter, but it may help you long-term.  

Relatedly, what if you also have a couple of core abilities that aren't promotable in this way, but they can help with encounters or perhaps convey special powers.  So now you must decide, where those are concerned, do I activate them now for their benefit, or do I instead activate something to promote it to a higher level so it will be more useful long-term?

And then add in to this a possible role for hubris, to promote a card before the encounter resolution rather than after, and/or just to fast-forward or short-circuit the promotion process.

Not sure about this but it might be worth thinking about at least a bit.  It might replace or supplement the idea of placing cubes in the temple to boost cards.  Instead, you're rewarded for knowing early on what cards to get and boost, and to actually spend the time boosting them.

One issue that has come up is with victory.  What does it mean?  Before, it was, thematically, "person who made the shortest movie", but that makes less sense if each encounter we're divvying up roles.  If I was the protagonist the most times, then it would seem silly that a player who was always the extra would be the winner.  Screen time should relate to victory.  There's a bit more to it than that, though -- I think the idea is that the game is about the raw material you're giving to the film's editor, and in the end the winner is the player who emerged from the editing process as the protagonist.  So it could be that a minimal contributor could be edited to be the protagonist, if the more invested character's arc results in his death.  And so maybe that's the tension -- players who acquire more screen time acquire more rewards, but are also more of a target for damage, and so maybe it all balances out.

There's the added complication that not all screen time is equal.  Screen time that you eat up being on camera is good, screen time for exposition is less good, but the combination of the two is your film's length and if it's too long you've bored everyone.  So do we also need to track "good time" and "bad time" for each character?  But this too is a bit strange, since the roles that you draft are what give you your "good time" points.  Thus maybe it's just that total running time is a guard rail you have to avoid crashing into.  That's acceptable but it means we're back to needing a concept of victory.  Maybe back to achievements that pay out VPs a la v7?

Maybe it's just as simple as you "win" each of the cards of the temple:  start city, five 'peril' cards, grail room, five hubris cards.  Winner is the person who survives to the end and possesses the most cards of the survivors.  Or shift it around such that grail room is worth 2 VP and each hubris card is worth 1/2 VP, or whatever.   This at least gives you something tangible to shoot for, and it's the thing the game seems to be telling you to shoot for anyway -- 'prepare for the temple!'  So it may not actually change the player behavior that much, and may even motivate more logical behavior.  No one has enough experience with the game to have reached this level, but you could sort of see skilled players gaming the time system in odd ways, since time ultimately equals score.  If time is instead just a finite currency you have to spend, then the winning behavior is much more straightforward and much less gamey.

Same nut, different shell

The latest flurry of posts have reflected a flurry of activity in the last several months, but as the snows have stopped and the shovels have been put down, I think a new 'state of the game' has emerged, and so it might be good to write out a new 'nutshell' post to summarize what that means.

Lost Adventures is (now) a game about the creation of an adventure archaeology movie.  Each player is a screenwriter, guiding the fortunes of their preferred character through the film.  The player whose character emerges from the screenwriting process (a) alive (i.e. not killed by the plot of the movie) and (b) with the film of the shortest total running time, has earned the right to have that character be the protagonist of the film.  The player is given a mat with 7 slots for 'adventure cards', four of which begin filled (but which can be overwritten) -- these represent the iconic attributes that the player's character will be remembered for in the film.

An adventure archaeology film has three key elements (not counting the in media res opening sequence):  a lost artifact is hidden somewhere, and the protagonist(s) must acquire information to locate it; (b) the protagonist(s) enter a lost temple and pass through its perils to acquire that artifact, and (c) a vigorous Enemy is pursuing him/them every step of the way.

The information-gathering happens in the "map phase", a series of nine shared encounters.  Each turn, an active player (furthest back on time track) selects a city to travel to, and flips over an encounter card, which sets the scene.  First that player, and then all other players simultaneously, allocate 3-4 cubes to their player mat, representing their investment in the encounter.  They can play cubes so as to boost the group's chances in the encounter (mostly through the use of adventure cards that match the encounter in some way), or to their 'rewards' box, or they can elect to forego the encounter entirely.  (Joining the encounter incurs a jump on the time track, plus a second if the player must change regions to reach the encounter -- so sometimes you want to sit out).

Once everyone has committed, the 'investment track' is adjusted and we begin flipping 'resolution cards', which represent the storyboarding of the scene.  Each has some check marks and some X's.  X's move the enemy closer to the active city.  Check marks increase the success track.  After each resolution card, players decide whether to stay in or get out and claim rewards.  If you get out, you receive rewards equal to the current number on the success track, but only as many as the number of cubes you allocated to rewards.  And when you exit, you take your investment with you.

Rewards are either the ability to look at temple cards, or the right to receive (draft) adventure cards.

Commentary:  Thus, in the map phase, we have two sources of interplayer tension -- you want to commit enough that the group will be successful, but you also want to entitle yourself to receive rewards, as well.  And, you want to stay in long enough to claim rewards, but get out before bad stuff happens and/or before other players take the rewards you had wanted.

After the nine encounters, players enter the temple.  The temple consists (in the grail scenario) of two rows of cards, each of which has a single peril.  Players will have acquired adventure cards that have icons corresponding to these perils.  Prior to each temple card's revelation, each player may allocate cubes to adventure cards on his player mat, which adds 2 to each peril symbol, should it match the temple card.  Then the card and the player cubes are revealed, and players place their pawns on the temple analogue of the investment track'.  Then we also reveal a resolution card, but this time, all spaces on its track are filled with negative things -- 'traps', 'noise', or 'enemy' -- and the things you incur are those located between your position and that of the player with the highest number of matching peril symbols.  So if the current temple card has 'fear' as the peril, you have 3 'fear' symbols and the player with the most has 6, then you incur the penalties on the resolution card at spaces 3, 4, 5, and 6.  The card lines up with the track nicely so this is all very intuitive.

Commentary:  Thus, in the temple phase, we have interplayer tension of a different sort, but it's specifically related to the cube allocation phase.  You know what cards everyone has, but you don't know (or maybe you don't remember) what information they have -- so do you place a cube to boost your preparation for this next peril, possibly putting you on top?  Or, if you think it's likely another player will also boost their prep for this card, perhaps you're better saving that cube when it can have a bigger relative impact.  Plenty of doublethink happens in this phase, amplified by cubes being a limited resource.

After the temple perils, we reach (grail scenario) the grail room, which contains 10 grails to choose from.  Each has 3 characteristics and cards representing the three characteristics of the true grail were viewable as rewards during the map phase.  Each player picks a grail; those who choose wisely get a small reward, but those who choose poorly take on a curse, which affects them in the final phase.

Throughout the game, you can get better actions, or more of them, by taking on hubris.  Of course, in an adventure archaeology movie, the enemy is undone by its hubris in the end, causing the bad guy's face to melt off.  In this game, this happens via the 'hubris challenge'.  This also uses 'resolution cards', and there's a corresponding investment track.  Your position on that track is given by (a) green cubes you managed to acquire during the map phase, for things like staying in an encounter to the bitter end or revealing the whereabouts of a relic, and (b) cubes in your own color that you didn't allocate to boost your peril symbols in the previous phase.  Resolution cards here are similar to the encounters -- flip a card and all checks below your 'investment level' purge one hubris token each.  If after five cards you're out of hubris, you've passed the challenge.  But it's not so simple, because each card causes some pain, particularly if you took on a curse at some point.

This all sounds like a lot, and maybe it is, but because every player is involved in every action of the game, the latency is quite low, and the total game length shouldn't be too bad.  I think that each encounter should be able to play out in about 5-6 minutes, and the temple, maybe 3 minutes per temple card and 1 per hubris card, so with 5 perils, the grail room, and then 5 hubris cards, that's another 20-25 minutes.  So 75-90 minutes seems realistic.  There are definitely some resolution luck elements, and I don't think it is, or intends to be, a deep 90 minute strategy game like Puerto Rico or Goa.  But, there are a lot of interplayer effects and meaningful decisions, nearly 100% uptime, and abundant thematic immersion, so I hope on balance it's an experience players will enjoy.


And taking a step back (maybe this will be the subject of a future post), I think it's actually a nice mixture of previous versions' ideas, albeit after running them through the blender on 'high' for a while.  It has the linear temple and temple perils of v1, the add-cubes-to-the-board-as-you-travel of v4-7, the enemy-chases-you of v10, the suspenseful encounters and persistent adventure card effects of v11, the jockeying for position of v12, and of course lots of stuff from v13.  I might not go so far as to say this is what the game has been trying to become all along, because I still think v7 really embodied all of our original design goals.  But I would say this version is the culmination of everything that came before v7 and everything that we've tried since; and I think it's still true to the original vision, even as it has shifted in player experience from a tense efficiency puzzle to a tense interplayer scramble.  

Simpler cards and complex characters

We had a three-player playtest of the full game with fully-simultaneous shared turns in the map phase.  There were some fun filigrees.  Each encounter requires two points of 'investment' for each white die the group will roll.  Players contribute in order and then, when a player cashes out of the encounter, they take their investment out as well.  So there were times when a player would decline to join in or would pull out at an inopportune time so as to leave the other players high and dry.  I think this is important and offers something different from Diamant-esque doublethink.

I don't think the game was much shorter.  To be sure, it was a learning game, but we did try to play quickly and still it took maybe 90 minutes of playing time.  There was generally a preference for cards over information as rewards; the game still seems to reward having lots of cards as a way to navigate the temple vis a vis having lots of info and just the right cards.  It may be that too few cards are available per encounter.  Currently it's just two and they're so precious that they're scooped up quickly.  Perhaps with more cards available, it's possible for all of the encounter participants to get one and so it's more about who chose the right cards. 

The encounter has two parts, the 'investment' part in which everyone decides to be in or out, and the resolution part, where we roll dice.  The latter requires a few too many rolls but that can be sped up by tweaking the dice.  But the investment is also slower than it should be, and if I had to guess, I think it's that there's a bit too much that each player can do and so reminding yourself of all of your options is still eating up too much game time.  I think the cards can be simplified further such that each card does exactly one thing, ideally a thing that can be represented by an icon.  If we look back at version 7, it's incredibly streamlined; all of the equipment cards have one challenge category, and all of the theme cards have 1-3 icons for their clue categories.  The amount of information conveyed by v7 of the game was really quite minimal.  I think we probably need to get back to this.

On the other hand, a suggestion was made to diversify what some of the cards do, in particular the starting cards you're given.  If we're all Indy and we all have a Whip, Pistol, Satchel, and Fedora, then we're all the same; some asymmetry might be more interesting.  That might not be so hard to do.  Perhaps one character has a pistol (good at fight encounters) whereas another has something that makes them good in circle cities and another still good in the Middle East.  These might all benefit an encounter in Cairo (say) but won't all be as effective in different places.


One consequence of simplifying to one-effect-per-card is that you presumably need more cards in the game to get the same net number of effects, and this could mean that everyone will acquire many cards over the game.  A glut of cards, though, adds to the decision space. One simple counter is to impose a hand limit, which will force you to keep the cards you especially plan to use, and in particular to transition from cards that are map-useful to cards that are temple-useful.  (I guess each card could have a map phase effect and a temple phase effect, but again, that's getting away from the simplicity that I think the game probably really needs.  One effect per card!!!!)

But, this led me to ask, what does the hand limit represent?  In an adventure game, the obvious thing is your 'carrying capacity'.  But this is a game about an adventure movie, and is there a more cinematic option?  Perhaps the hand limit could represent the attributes that the audience will associate with the character -- a catch phrase, an accessory, an article of clothing, a weapon.  Trying to have too many things would lead to a confusingly articulated character, so the cap says how many things the audience can be expected to keep straight. 

This could be implemented in a way that allows for a secondary effect.  Specifically, the cards could be categorized in a way that's distinct from the effect they create.  Perhaps this is color-coded.  And you could have a player mat that has seven (say) colored boxes, indicating what categories of cards you can carry, but each player's mat could be different based on their archetypical character.  So for example "very strong person" may have three of their seven boxes be for 'equipment' cards (brown, let's say), whereas "slippery eel character" may have only a single box for equipment but two for 'alliances' (pink, let's say).  'Very strong person' can choose what equipment he's holding and 'slippery eel person' can choose which entities he'll ally with, as represented by the cards they each draft, but the competition for cards is informed in some ways by these considerations. 

I'm a bit worried about simplifying one thing only to add additional complexity somewhere else.  But, I'm intrigued by this idea as a way to shape player strategies while still allowing for flexibility.  I'm not sure I've seen this implemented previously, although I suppose that it must have been used somewhere.