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!

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.   

Mostly for Seth, a v7/v15 hybrid

Seth expressed in a tweet that he was nostalgic for v7.  Naturally this got me to thinking, what would v7 looked like informed by the sensibilities of v15?  In some ways this was what v13 was trying to be, but it didn't work because, at that time, the encounter system was open-ended: encounters continued until you reached either a positive or negative resolution, so they could keep going for sometimes 6 or 7 die rolls each before the player learned whether they succeeded or failed.  

This led to enormous latency, to which the shared encounters of v14 were the solution.  But in v15, I'm imposing a fixed length on each encounter: four resolution card flips.  Could it work to have individual turns with individual encounters, each with, say, three resolution flips?  Maybe, although I think there will still be latency issues.  But here's how I think it would work.

First, the turn mechanic in v7 was a Tikal-like action point allowance system.  Scrap that. Information is the point of the map phase, build the game around that.  Time is a resource.  On your turn, you can burn time to draw cards, and to travel to any city.  Once there, add a black cube to that city, and reveal the top encounter card from that city type.  It has a challenge category.  Set the "enemy investment track" at the # of cubes in the city.  Pay cards to get adventure points (cards matching challenge category worth more adv. points), set the "player investment track" at this number.  Then, flip three resolution cards.  For each "X" at or below the enemy investment, move enemy closer to your city.  For each "check" at or below your investment, advance the success track.

If the enemy reaches your city, the encounter ends.  You can look up information or get a card, but not both.  Otherwise, encounter ends after the third resolution card.  Then, you get to look at temple cards that match the theme card for the city you're in.  The solution track tells the total value of cards you get to look at -- the further you've gotten, the more total value of cards you get to examine.  A temple card's value is the number of green cubes on that card; several were placed on each card during setup.  After you view a card, you can remove one green cube, making it easier for everyone else to see that card but helping you in the hubris challenge later on.

After you look at temple cards, you get to take one adventure card from the face-up display, presumably based on information you have about the temple. 

Then, the temple would still be essentially the v15 version -- a map track to see who is furthest along, and players incur a series of five auctions.  In each, you are bidding for how much of a penalty you're willing to take in exchange for moving further along the map track, but your bid can be offset if you have adventure cards that match the current temple card's peril.  So advance knowledge, and advance preparation, both help.  The encounter system above seems compatible with this:  you want to progress as far as you can in each encounter so as to get max info and thus be able to draw cards wisely.

Now, in looking at this ... actually it's not too shabby.  It captures some of the nice things about v7 but in different ways -- cubes added to cities to make challenges more difficult, possibility of 'sharing' information but now handled abstractly. 

There's an interesting trade-off, though.  The v15 encounter phase has shared encounters, which need quite a few extra rules to make them interesting, but there are fewer encounters in total so there's a big savings in time.  I can't see the map phase in this hybrid version taking less than an hour, whereas in v15 it could seat 5 players and still clock in under 40 minutes, I suspect. 

Now the map phase in v7 wasn't exactly quick either, because all of that sliding clues into sleeves and complying with the cube and track manipulation bureacracy ate up a fair bit of time too.  So it may be that front-loading all of the turn time in the encounter resolution might not be that bad.  Really now it's just the equivalent of "roll some dice three times", it's just that the dice take the form of cards.  And the encounter setup is fairly automatic.  Maybe that's not so bad.

But it's not just that it's an hour, it's that 28 encounters is just a lot to sit through:  they're all a bit samey.  But more variety would add more rules and thus more time to comply with them.

I think it still has some of the players-acting-in-isolation issue of v7 but with the enemy pawn moving around, there's an effect sort of reminiscent of Hansa, i.e. where you leave the enemy pawn influences where the next player is likely to want to go. 

I'm not sure yet where hubris fits into this, but maybe I can find a couple of little ways for players to get a shortcut here or there in exchange for hubris, and of course you pick up some hubris in the temple.  We could of course get rid of hubris entirely but it's grown on me so I hate to see it go. 

One of the strong points of v7 was that it was pretty intuitive.  Players taking individual turns makes sense to players, since most games work this way.  It's less easy when it's "here are the rules that govern these shared encounters"; people have less of an intuition about what a shared encounter entails. 

Anyway, this idea is actually pretty easy to solo test using most of the same components as v15 so I'll at least give it a go and see how it plays.  It might just be that a return to v7, at least some aspects of it, are what's needed to really push things forward.

Is variety essential to immersion?

This is (now) supposed to be a cinematic game.  Does it feel cinematic?  Should it feel cinematic?  I think the encounter system is converging on feeling nicely suspenseful, which is almost the same thing.  The enemy pawn is creeping closer to the city, the ambiguous character might switch teams, the extra might bail out of the challenge entirely, someone might blow up the bridge -- there are lots of things that can happen (eh, maybe too many) with each card resolution card flip.  But are the encounters differentiated in a meaningful way?  If they all feel suspenseful, is it the same kind of suspense in each encounter, and if so, is that ok, or should you really feel differently when experiencing a brawl in a seedy dive in Nepal as opposed to a frantic rescue attempt in a bustling Cairo market?

One of the weak points all along has been that we have these action categories (luck, wits, fight, escape) that don't have any gameplay differences.  All along we've settled mostly for connecting these to city types, such that each city type has two challenge categories.  I've tried to differentiate the city types further by making triangles more "difficult" than pentagons are more difficult than circles.  But I'm not sure that makes sense in the new version where your destination is chosen for you each turn -- there's no need to motivate a risk/reward location selection decision if you don't select your location!  Still they could feel different if, say, triangles yield more clues but also tend to deal out more damage, whereas circles are safer but not as productive.  This could influence your investment in a given location, coupled with the relative stage of the game and how much info you possess vs. how much you need.

But is it important, then, that, say, pentagons feature luck and wits challenges, or can every city have every kind of challenge?  I don't think it makes that much difference either way, so I'm inclined to take the latter approach, for the simple reason that otherwise, it's something you have to tell the players but it really makes no impact on their decisions.

So you have cities that feel a bit different and in each you face a random challenge category.  The encounter card tells you about the scene you face, and the resolution cards, with their story-board flavor, will help sell the theming a bit.  But I also wonder if we shouldn't add in some kind of differentiation between the challenge categories to make them feel different as well.  I can see two ways of approaching this.

One, and probably the better of the two, is to impose a single rule on each challenge category.  It's simple, so it can be printed on the encounter card or the mat.  Perhaps these are so unobtrusive that it's an optional rule, in the form of a single info card, that you either use or leave out entirely.  But I tend to frown on optional rules like this generally.

Anyway, what could these simple rules be?  I don't know, but something like:

Fight:

- Only one side will view solution cards after the encounter

- Only one cube can occupy a space on the success track

Escape

- The challenge only lasts for 3 resolution cards instead of 4

- No player may bid more than 3 time in the investment stage

Luck

- When investing, adventure cards are chosen at random; any that is 'luck' is worth an investment of 4

Wits

- Pick investment cards secretly and simultaneously -- if you match another player's, you each get +1 investment

A second approach would be to harness the fact that each category has a dedicated set of resolution cards, and each encounter has a custom success track, and make these work together. 

So, for example, "escape" encounters could have on their success track several "stop" points, and the cube can't progress past this unless an "escape" icon shows up on the resolution card or someone pays an escape icon.

"Fight" encounters could have two tracks with a choke point, and only the first team to reach the choke point gets to progress past it.

"Wits" encounters could have a mini-maze:  spaces could blip you back and forth but symbols on the resolution cards would let you punch through the maze.

I think I like the first approach better because it means encounters are all basically the same with each having a single rules tweak.  In the second approach, really each category is a separate mini-game system.  That's potentially fun but it's maybe more complexity than the game needs.

Worth the wait (?)

In the last post I talked about which elements of the past couple of years' worth of activity I want to try to keep.  Now I need to think about how to fit it into an encounter system that works.

First, I think we need to put the challenge setup on rails.  You get a randomly chosen tile, which is placed in a randomly determined city.  The tile says which one, or two, solution categories are available this encounter.  Then reveal an encounter card, and read what it says.

Then comes the twist on previous versions.  The first shared-encounter version let players commit cubes, either to help the group or set themselves up individually for rewards.  Some playtesters felt this was broken (it may have been), so we split the players into teams.  Now it's more tense:  if you are too selfish your team will lose, but the other team will still get stuff.  But this resulted in a lot of extra rules:  first bid cubes, then choose teams, then decide how to split up the cubes between helping your team and rewards.  And I'm not sure "be selfish/be altruistic?" is super interesting or that it is that evocative of the theme.

An easier solution should have been obvious all along:  the cubes you bid are also the ones you use to claim rewards at the end of the encounter.  Also, put the team selection on rails:  there are four roles on the "good guys" team and one on the "bad guys" team.  You take the top-most card on the team you wish to join, in bid order.

But instead of a closed-fist bid, how about a Dutch auction?  This will reduce the problem of ties quite a bit, and I like the psychology of this style of bidding in another game I'm using it in.

So, bid for roles, committing some cubes.  Cubes you commit, you have to pay for, either with adventure cards or with moves on the time track.  Increase the 'investment track' for your team on the encounter mat.

Then, when resolution cards are revealed, compare the boxes on the encounter card to which boxes are filled on the investment track.  But there are some ways that you can lose cubes as the encounter proceeds.

Then, after the encounter ends, gain any bonus cubes specified by your role, and then in role order, claim rewards.  What are rewards?  Before it was the right to look at solution cards, or the equipment cards you need to traverse the temple's perils.  Now, it's just solution lookups.

Each solution card will get, during setup, a specified number of green cubes.  To look at a solution card, you have to 'pay' cubes equal to the number of green cubes on the card.  If you want to, you can keep one of those green cubes.  This helps you in the hubris challenge, but also means that anyone else wanting to look at that solution card will have an easier time.

There's a catch; actually two.  If the enemy pawn is further along the progress track on the encounter card than the "good guys" pawn, the good guys get nothing.  So this is one reason to maybe want to be on the enemy team for an encounter:  the potential that you can be the one to skunk your opponents.

In addition, however far back you are from the final space on the track, there's a hubris penalty.  This reflects that you didn't exactly reach the end of the encounter, and you're being hubristic (?) to push on when the forces guarding the information clearly have decreed that you should not have it!  This bit is fiddly so we'll see if it survives.



After the encounter, everyone gets a free turn.  Move to a different city, and in that city, either take two (face-down) adventure cards, take one (face-up) equipment card (for the temple), or if appropriate reveal a relic, which gives freebie cubes that help you get information from certain solution categories.
I think this basically works, and while it's not trivially simple, I think it's easy enough to internalize.  The limitation of this system may be that the encounters aren't all that well differentiated; it may not feel that much like you're in a Cairo market or an Austrian castle.  But I'm not sure the extra rules needed to achieve these kinds of differences are worth the trouble.  For now I think the main thing is getting in place a framework that works well, and then seeing how to embellish this if needed.


Taken collectively I'm not sure this is an earth-shatteringly brilliant new direction that really needed a six month delay to be realized, but I do think it achieves the qualities articulated in the previous post but is simpler and more compact than any of the other directions that I had tried up to that point, so if it sets us on a solid footing from which to begin tweaking, then certainly it will have been worth a delay.

Keepers and bleepers

So here's what happened.

In early 2016, a publisher that has previously shown interest in the game expressed interest in potentially licensing the game, but felt it needed a cycle of development.  The publisher sent it out to a developer, who felt that it needed a significant redesign, and wanted a design credit to undertake this effort.  The publisher agreed with the developer's assessment, but I decided to have a whack at the redesign myself.  This was made difficult by a lack of specificity from the publisher.  They wanted something different, but weren't sure and couldn't say exactly what they wanted.

2016 and 2017 were the result of this, and a flurry of frenetic design activity, as amply documented in this blog.  I tried a lot of different things, and came up with what I feel are some genuinely nice ideas and mechanics, and in addition "re-discovered" some things that we had previously done in v7 and before, that I think were worth preserving or reintroducing.  The problem is that it didn't all fit together, and after two years I was burning out and spinning my wheels.  Some of the pieces seemed right, but I couldn't make them fit together.

After six months away from the game, I wonder if maybe enough time has elapsed that I'm ready to jump back in and see if a fresh perspective and renewed energy can get this to completion (or at least, to the point where the systems are in place and it's just a matter of balancing).

Things that I like and that I think are keepers:

- Hubris.  This was the coolest new idea, because it works so well thematically.  Mechanically, it should in some ways mirror unrest in my other game, Sands of Time:  it's something you take on, usually voluntarily, as a way to get some benefit but it puts you at risk in the long run.

- Linear temple.  This is all the way back from v4, I believe, but at this point it's either this or a paragraph book.  The 2D temple crawl just has too many problems and needs too many rules.  A single temple, explored one card at a time, keeps the group all involved and engaged in the end game, and makes the action about how well we are prepared relative to each other.  There may be tweaks needed but the concept is correct.

- Time track.  A time track that represents your film's running time is thematically nice and makes a nice 'currency' that you can draw against.  It's a bit muddled that in the last few versions it also determined your score.  Probably need to get away from that.

- Adventure cards.  The last cycles have used more complex arrangements of adventure card effects, special effects, player mats, and special character roles.  I think the next version needs to go back to basics here and just have simple adventure cards, maybe with a twist.

- Shared semi-cooperative encounters.  Everyone likes the encounter cards, where you read a description of the scene you face and then some randomizers are used to resolve the encounter.  These are strictly better than the v7 method.  But too many of them drags things out.  So, shared encounters seem vital if this system is to be preserved.  Seven or eight max.

Maybe-keepers:

- Resolution cards not dice.  These have only seen a couple of run-outs and I think they basically work, in that they represent the "story-boarding" of the scene and are probably cheaper than dice as well.  Down side is a need for more decks, to reflect the different challenge categories.  So they're in the maybe category for now.

- Hubris challenge.  At the end of the game, face a final challenge to see whether you purge all your hubris.  Doing this with resolution cards hasn't been as much fun as it was with dice, and doing it simultaneously is efficient but isn't as much fun as watching each person attempt their hubris challenge while everyone else watches.  It might just be more fun to go one at a time, and the rest of the game's length will have to be built around this.


Bleepers:

- Player mats.  I think these are taking a leave of absence for now.  I like the thematic idea that you have a character mat that starts with some attributes, which you further populate with additional cards to flesh out more attributes.  But in practice this kind of asymmetry may not be something the game needs.  I'm not 100% sure but we'll see.

- Encounter penalties.  Previous versions had encounters be the way that you get information, but also they deal out penalties when the enemy catches you, thus heightening the suspense of the enemy arriving in your city.  Except, it's just one too many things that encounters can do.  I think encounters need to be about solution card lookups, and only that.


I think that this leaves us with a core set of ingredients, and the next post will talk about how to mix them together into something coherent.

Cube-pushing

Solo testing of the ideas of the previous posts has me feeling like I'm spinning my wheels and maybe struggling a bit to capture what exactly is the goal of this game.  It's odd, in that I thought that v14.4 was very close to done.  In a way it was, but the problem with v15.0 may in hindsight also have been an issue with v14.4 that merely went unnoticed.


The idea is that instead of the v7 approach of having a hand of action cards that you constantly spend and replenish, v13 and on have used a display of cards that you permanently keep; now they're on a mat, which represents your character's core attributes, and thematically it's great.  Then when you go into an encounter, you choose which of those things you want to use, and 'activate' them with cubes, but you can instead be selfish and allocate cubes to the 'rewards' area of your mat.  However, it's common that you only have one card that pertains to the current encounter, or maybe even 0.  It's not selfish to not contribute to a challenge if you're unable to, and it's not even that altruistic to contribute when you can.  This decision just isn't that suspenseful.


But that was ok when the encounter prompted players for a decision after each die roll/resolution card flip, because the real decisions were going to lie in the brinksmanship of the encounter resolution -- do I stay in or get out?  But if we're now putting the resolution on rails (mostly as a way to keep slow players from stalling out the game by peppering them for too many decisions), then the investment decisions have to carry the full freight, and so they may need to be beefed up a bit.


How to do this?  That's what I've been struggling with.  My current solution may hold some promise but it's a bit clunky.  First, you still have a mat, but you also have some cards that can correspond to different encounter attributes.  After the encounter details are revealed, everyone selects a number of cubes, and then those are revealed.  Then everyone picks a role -- you choose to be on the good guys or bad guys for the present encounter.


Then, everyone allocates the cubes they 'bid' to their mat AND to cards in hand.  Each cube you allocate costs one step on the time track, unless the associated card is already on your mat.  (Hubris factors into this as well but ignore that for now).  After the encounter, you can 'promote' a card that you used onto your mat; otherwise you must discard the card.  But keeping a card clogs up space on your mat that you might prefer to have open later for cards that interact with the temple perils.


In addition to activating cards, you can instead allocate cubes to a 'catch-all' box that can either be used to block you from harm during the encounter or to claim extra rewards after the encounter.  After all cubes are allocated, we add up the investment for each side, with each player contributing one point of investment to their side for each card they activated that pertains to the encounter (e.g. matches its challenge category or location or whatever).


Then, resolve the encounter, and winning side gets their rewards, AND gets to draw a new card each.  Losers are stuck with what they had going in, but they do get to choose the next encounter.


Now this has a fair number of steps to it in the setup, and I think that's a down side.  But I can make an argument for each one, and so it's not clear how to make it simpler. 


- The bidding cubes puts you in the driver's seat for the better roles (which carry more freebie rewards with them), but it may cost you more time. 


- Picking a side means you're judging which side seems potentially better positioned to do well based on the geography.  And picking earlier means to get a more lucrative role on the side you choose, but also that you have less info about which side seems stronger based on which side the players before you join.


- Allocating cubes is your chance to double-cross.  If your side has a couple of other players, you might allocate cubes to the shield/reward box to save your own skin as opposed to putting them on cards to strengthen your team.


If you lost any of these, your decisions would be based largely on guesswork.  For example, if I just picked roles without the cube bid, I'd be guessing about what everyone's likely to do.  If I first see, ah, you bid 6 cubes and joined the enemy this turn, he bid 3 cubes and joined the good guys, well, now I maybe have some basis for judging your relative intentions and who I want to side with.  Whereas if you just allocated your cubes to your mat in the first phase, the decisions would be much more deterministic and mathy, and there wouldn't be as much room for double-crossing.  We basically tried that live and it didn't work very well.  It should be quick -- "bid cubes, pick roles, then allocate your cubes, boom, done", but will it be?  I'm not sure.


I'm finding that it's very hard to solo test, and so it's hard to predict how it will go in live testing.  On the one hand I could see it leading to some nice decisions, but on the other I can see the three prompts leading to 20 minute encounters and another trip back to the drawing board...

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.  

No dice

In its present form (v14!), the game requires 12 dice — three white, used in encounters and in the hubris challenge, three red used just in encounters, and three green used in the temple.  They work fairly well apart from needing to hand the green dice around in the temple and the white dice around in the hubris challenge.

Nevertheless I had a different idea for using cards resolving encounters that might be worth considering.  During the prep phase of the encounter, players ‘contribute’, which advances the market on the ‘investment’ track.  Ordinarily you get white dice equal to the value on that track divided by two.  But instead there could be, on each ‘resolution card’, a row of boxes that line up with the spaces on that track, and some of those boxes are filled with check marks.  For each check mark that’s in a box that is below the position of the marker on the investment track, you increment the success track, just as you would have done had you gotten ‘hits’ on the dice.  So for example, say a card has check marks at box 1, 3, 7 and 8.  If we as a group invested enough that we’re at 7 on the investment track, then we’d get 3 successes, whereas if we were at 8 or above then we’d get 4.  And the red dice could be handled similarly, and on the same card actually.

I think it’s possible this could speed up resolution a bit although it’s probably less intuitive and so might create some confusion or at least a learning curve.   But I think it has a few upsides.  The biggest is that these resolution cards could help sell the movie-making theme.  The idea of rolling dice to resolve encounters is a bit vague in terms of what it represents thematically.  These cards could be ‘storyboard’ cards, with storyboard art, and the idea could be that each flip of a card could be the screenplay saying what happens next.  (In a world where money was no object you’d have a separate resolution deck for each challenge type or city shape but I doubt we live in that world).  But viewing it this way, each player can also have a hand of a few of these cards, and they can be thought of as ‘script rewrites’ — you can play them to get a better outcome than what you just flipped, or to give the other players a worse outcome if you’re not currently in the encounter.

Another advantage is that it allows the investment to be more fine grained.  Currently every step of investment is worth half a die.  I don’t mind effects like this, but with these cards you could have 5 be better than 4 as opposed to being equal.  In fact you could still have effects like 5 is a little better than 4 but 6 is significantly better, and similar for 7, 6, and 8.  But that might be counter intuitive.

It turns out that the temple can be resolved with the same system and it’s actually much faster.  For each temple card, we find the number of peril symbols we have that match the temple card’s peril, then put ourselves on a track.  Then we each roll dice equal to the delta between our individual position on that track and that of the player who had the most matching symbols.  This requires handing dice around and is a bit slow.  But the resolution card approach could be quick.  Same as the encounter approach, there are a row of boxes with symbols and you line that card up with the track.  Just apply the symbols that appear between your marker and that of the highest player.

And the hubris challenge can be done similarly as well — look at the number of green cubes you hold, and apply all successes lower than that, each one eliminating a hubris.  In some ways this is a big improvement.  The hubris challenge can be really swingy.  I’ve seen times when on a given roll one player, rolling two dice, eliminated 4 hubris and another rolling three dice eliminated none.  This should even out but there may not be enough rolls for that to happen.  I can’t think of a way to do a shared dice pool if we’re all rolling different numbers of dice (roll one a t a time I guess but that’s slow) so this could really help making things fair.  There’s still luck but at least it’s not different luck for everyone.  Although perhaps in a way this is bad, as there’s no come from behind win; if you have 5 cubes and I have 4, you’re sure to get rid of as many hubris as I do.  Although we may not have the same number going in of course.

I see two downsides.  The first is that the number of cards needed to get a truly statistically ‘correct’ distribution may be impractical and we may simply have to settle for ‘the statistics are basically correct but we won’t see all possibilities that could theoretically have happened were we to have used dice’.  Maybe that’s ok.  And whether a particular card is good or bad depends on the circumstances.

The other is simply that rolling dice is fun and gives the ‘a-ha!’ moment of excitement.  I don’t know if these cards will still deliver that.

So this system offers a framework that can maybe enhance the theming, can give us more control over the statistics of outcomes, and can speed up some of the resolutions.  Possible downsides are inability to sample all of probability space and the loss of the tactile aspect of die rolling.