Integrating visual elements with gameplay

Another idea that could add some immersive quality could be to try to have visual information from the cards play a game-relevant role. In other words, the illustrations on the cards aren't just artwork to look at -- there could be in-game effects or systems that cause you to scrutinize the cards and activate certain game systems depending on what you find. I don't know if I've ever seen another game that does this, and it makes sense why. In most games, especially Euros, cards have icons, numbers, text, etc, to specify exactly what a card's function is, and it's always the same, every time. But the idea of cards having variable effects, depending on the players' attentiveness, seems to fit well with the theme of this game.

Nevertheless, this idea isn't completely new. In a pretty early version of the game, the lost temple was actually a series of cards, each of which showed a room of the temple from the adventurer's perspective, and each of which had several "features" that the players could test, like ropes, levers, and exits; and a solution table would tell you the result of testing each feature. Several images and icons were present on each of the cards, and the clues would correlate to these. For example, a clue might tell you to look for "baboon" symbols to help you find your way to the grail, and so if you saw a baboon symbol on the wall of a room you were in, you might conclude you needed to test the feature on that wall to see what it does. This was all kind of cool, but horribly cumbersome in practice. And we've since abandoned a fully-constructed temple anyway, in favor of a randomly assembled temple, for ease of setup and playability.

But the idea could still fit. My most recent thought sprung from looking for ways to boost the sense of the enemy pursuing you, beyond the timing track. One neat effect would be if you could realize that a certain enemy operative was following you. And I realized that a way to enable this could be to incorporate this effect into the illustrations on the encounter cards; some of them could include, lurking in the background somewhere, various shady characters; perhaps if you happen to notice the same shady character on multiple encounter cards, you can announce that you've discovered that an enemy operative is following you, and then weaken the enemy in some way. Or maybe it's that there are several "enemy operative" cards, showing their image, and when you see that operative on an encounter card, you get to take some special action or whatever.

Separately, I thought a fun way to integrate ideas like Indy's fear of snakes is to give each player-character a "phobia", and if another player spots your phobia on an encounter card that you face, perhaps you automatically fail the challenge. Maybe this could add some fun, as well as some incentive for you to pay attention during other players' turns (and the clue system amplifies this).

This is different than the way most games work, and I suspect it hasn't been tried because it opens the door to the rules lawyers to come in and suffocate the fun of the idea. Specific considerations like "how long are you allowed to look at the card to search for an enemy operative?", "does the active player have to pass the card around for all of the other players to scrutinize?", etc will invariably pop up. And that also doesn't take into account the consideration of memorization; once you've played the game enough times, you may start to memorize the various encounter cards and know which operative is shown on which, or which phobia is present on which.

[Incidentally, coming back to the "enemy operative" idea -- this could instead be a different way to actuate the "ambiguous character" lever. In Last Crusade, you see these guys with fezes pursuing Indy and Elsa but you don't really know who they are; come to find out they're actually good guys (more or less). We could achieve this by dealing out, say, 3 "ambiguous character" cards face-up, each with a picture of that character, and dealing each a "true identity" card face-down next to each. During the course of facing encounters, if you spot one of the ambiguous characters on an encounter card, you can undergo a mini-challenge to confront that character and reveal its true identity, which then has some effect on the game. Of course, this doesn't really work for major-character ambiguous characters like Elsa, the Maharajah, or Mac, but only for minor-character "people who are pursuing Indy" ambiguous characters. Presumably having two tiers of ambiguous characters in the game is putting too much game-mechanical weight behind a system that isn't the main focus of the game. But again, it's simply something that this idea could accommodate seamlessly.]

So there are practical issues with implementing an idea like this, and making it even more challenging, it so strongly depends on the quality of the artwork that it will be nearly impossible to playtest without first commissioning the game art. But I like the potential of the idea, and it could find its way into other games as well.

Thinking way too far ahead

One possible advantage of the "relevance" system I proposed (whereby each theme card has three "subjects that he/she/it knows about", rather than 1-3 "icons corresponding to clue categories that the card will definitely give you a clue about") is that it could enhance the flexibility of a given deck; specifically, it could enable creation of multiple adventures using the same deck of theme cards.

Although it's quite premature, I was thinking a bit about what would be included in a published version of the game, mostly to make sure the component requirements aren't completely off the deep end. I think they're certainly IN the deep end...

12 Theme Cards

24 Lead cards

24 Location clue/solution cards ("category A")

12 "Adventure 1, category B" clue/solution cards

12 "Adventure 1, category C" clue/solution cards

12 "Adventure 2, category B" clue/solution cards

12 "Adventure 2, category C" clue/solution cards

It's a total of 108 cards. This suggests a format for possible expansions. Each could include 108 cards: a new deck of theme cards, and two adventures that you can play with those theme cards, both of which share the same lead cards and location cards. (Of course, the adventure cards, encounter cards, and identity cards add another double-deck of 108 cards to the base game).

So for each theme deck, the game provides you with 2 separate adventures you can play, and because of the nature of the solution cards you should have nearly unlimited replayability from each adventure. (A different version of an expansion could use the same theme deck and just add 2 new adventures' worth of clue/solution cards, 48 total cards instead of 108). Granted, for a game that emulated the IJ films, the ability to play multiple adventures with the same theme cards may be somewhat beside the point -- presumably you want to choose between "The Last Crusade" and "The Temple of Doom", not "The Temple of Doom" and "Some Other Adventure That Involves All Of The Same Characters As The Temple Of Doom" -- but in the somewhat likely scenario where the game gets re-themed to a more generic setting, having the same theme cards participate in several adventures won't seem as problematic and may even seem like a feature.

Incidentally, the player who will say "I want an expansion that offers MORE theme cards in a given adventure (eg 18 instead of 12), to make the puzzle even MORE complicated" -- well, that person probably doesn't actually exist, but if he did, sadly this can't be accommodated in the way he wants, because we only (plan to) have 12 solution slots, so 12 is always the magic number. BUT, we could placate this person by allowing TWO adventures to be played concurrently, each with its own set of theme cards and solution cards (but presumably sharing the same lead cards and encounter cards).

The best way to do this, I think, would be to add another full-size, 12-city board, which features The Americas (the main board features Europe, Africa, and Asia), and to set up the boards on two separate tables. The players would play normally at one table or the other, but would also be allowed to switch to the other table, if their clues and information encourage them to do so. It would a be huge, time-consuming, and extremely difficult thing to play, but would require almost no additional effort on the design side other than coming up with an additional map (which we already have in the works). Realistically, adding an Americas board and the associated theme, lead, and solution cards, probably requires adding a separate stand-alone game (with identical rules), and you can combine the two games for a mega-adventure.

Obviously, that's way downstream from where things stand at the moment! But I'm at least thinking even at this early time about how to make the game compatible with such an approach.

"I'm sorry...but, you should have listened to your father..."

The last few posts have talked through some possible ways to enhance the cinematic or narrative feel of the information hunt aspects of the game, but I've said little about "the enemy" or "the temple", or even "the enemy in the temple", which are also opportunity areas for thematic enhancement. In the game as presently conceived, the enemy functions mostly as a game clock, that ticks with accelerating speed as the game progresses, and in practice, it does a pretty good job of communicating the feeling of time running out. But there isn't a strong sense of interacting directly with the enemy, and this seems like an especially egregious omission inside the temple -- did we really not notice that big group of Nazis that are digging for the artifact right next to us?

[An interesting side note is that in the IJ films, Indy actually doesn't always beat the enemy to the artifact (or he doesn't hang onto it for long even when he does) -- the enemy is beaten not by Indy outpacing them, but ultimately by their own arrogance.]

Anyway, I have at least one idea for the temple that I rather like. A previous post talked about ambiguous characters, and one of the great dramatic highlights of the films is when there's a big Double-Cross. It seems like the game could potentially capture this in a simple way: when the enemy "catches up to you" in the temple (whatever that means), any ambiguous characters that you've taken as an ally are revealed as either loyal allies, or traitors. And then...something happens to you (?)...you lose the artifact if you're carrying it, or some cards, or something like that.

But wait, who said anything about theme cards being taken as allies? Well, one thought that emerged in the last version was that theme cards, instead of staying put, could be picked up by the players and carried around, as allies. The intended effect was mostly related to the information hunt -- to get higher level clues, you had to have multiple cards with the same symbol all in the same place at the same time. But maybe if theme cards provide boosts to your stats, then an incentive is created for you to want to take ambiguous characters as allies, particularly if the stat boost they provide significantly exceeds that of other theme cards.

But wait, who said anything about stats? Well, one of the suggestions that emerged during playtesting was to give each player a concrete identity in the game world, and some stats and perhaps a special power or two. Certainly this will help communicate the theme if you have a well-defined persona, and the stats could also help with the strategic layer: since challenge categories are correlated with different location types, your starting stats might lead you to emphasize visits to one type of location over another, and correspondingly to build your information hunt around the theme cards that are also associated with those locations.

Local rumors

Although the game has done a pretty good job capturing the idea of interviewing experts to accumulate information about the nature and whereabouts of the Lost Temple and the artifact therein, it never had an element of going to a locale about which you have a hunch, and investigating the situation to see if there are rumors about the temple being in that city.

I think there's a perfectly easy way to achieve this, mechanically. Just like there's a 12-element (3x4) solution grid on each card that lets you test a location to see whether the temple is there or not, we could equally well put a second solution grid on the opposite end of the card, to check for local rumors. The key question is what form that information would take; space in the grid is tight and it would be limited to a several-letter clue at most, or more likely, an abbreviation.

This scheme would integrate well with the "climbing" approach to giving location clues. In such a scheme, the several levels of clues about the temple's location would track the progress of the artifact that rests in the temple, from its origin at some location through several additional cities (or not, keeping in mind that sometimes, the clues don't "climb" at all, and Level 1 or Level 2 knowledge is the end of the line...) If there's an additional guideline imposed that prevents the artifact from "jumping" more than two cities away between links in the chain from clue to clue, then local rumors could say simply whether the artifact passed through that particular city or not. Based on your other knowledge, you could judge where such a result points to the temple potentially being located; maybe additionally, digging in a city that does test favorably for local rumors, even if the temple isn't there, at least authorizes you to look at a clue, so you at least get something for the knowledge.

Like so many other things, this feels a bit like one thing too many, but at the same time, I like the idea of letting players assemble information in different ways and from different sources. It's probably important not to have the "temple location" category work in this same way in every scenario, lest it get stale, but it may have some potential. (Actually, the bigger concern I have is just with the physical component itself -- will a player inadvertently put the wrong end of the card into the board, thinking he's checking local rumors but in fact checking for the temple?

New directions: ambiguous characters

At all points during development, each theme card has fallen into a category: "Relic", "Protagonist", "Item", etc. One of those categories has always been "Ambiguous Character" -- people like Walter Donovan, the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword, Satipo, etc, that you aren't really sure whether you can trust or not. Up to now, these categories haven't really had any game-meaningful effect, and that's not too big a source of disappointment -- except for the ambiguous characters. To achieve a truly "cinematic" feel, it really seems like at some point, you should find out whether the ambiguous characters are good guys or bad guys. But even if you do get this "reveal", what does it mean in game terms and how does it impact the game?

The new "hub" card system would offer a way, but it's not terribly pretty. Basically, it would be built around the idea that since ambiguous characters that turn out to be evil are evil, any information they've given you becomes suspect. In game terms, this could be achieved by having each clue card give out 4 clues instead of 3, and instead of ordering the clues sequentially (3 is better than 2 is better than 1), they're all independent (it would be the composite clues approach, most likely). Here's the trick: one of the clues is wrong -- it does NOT lead to the correct solution, and when you visit the ambiguous character who is secretly in league with the enemy, he feeds you that false clue. But of course, you don't realize it's false unless you subsequently force the reveal and determine that he's really evil.

Now I kind of like the idea of having some clues potentially end up being false, but I strongly suspect that it would be too much for players to wrap their heads around. And even if they did learn that a card was evil after a reveal, it would be hard to go back through and remember which clue came from which card, and what the implications of the "false" clue are for the tentative solution you've been working to assemble.

So I don't think this will actually work, but with the hub card system, it at least could be implemented. And of course, that system could still enable the reveal, it's just that the implications of a card being "evil" would have to be something else -- like a player in the same city as that card has to immediately face a challenge, or something like that.

New directions: the return of relevance

In the original version of the game, the "solution" was contained in a clue table, and each theme card (I think there were 18 originally) provided exactly one clue. There were only perhaps 6 "real" clues that added up to the solution, and the rest were fillers or dead ends. But reading all 18 clues to get those 6 actual clues would take a long time; how could a player more efficiently parse the clue table to get the genuinely useful info fastest? The system we came up with was called "relevance". Each theme card had 3 "subjects", which represented "things that this person or item has knowledge or information about" -- things like "iconography", or "maps", etc -- each of which was shared by multiple cards. Each card also had, in a separate column of the clue table, a "relevance number" between 0 and 3, representing how many of its categories were "relevant" to the solution. The idea here was that a card with a high relevance had an uber-clue, and you could infer from that card which other cards might also be relevant -- but you didn't know exactly which of the 3 categories were the "relevant" ones (unless you happened upon a card with a relevance of 3). You had to physically be in the same location as a card to get its clue, but could look up its relevance from anywhere.

So if you looked up "Henry Jones" and found he had a relevance of "2", you might conclude that (a) it's worth visiting him to get his clue, and (b) you might want to look at the clues, or relevance, of the other theme cards that share some of the same categories.

We abandoned this system quite a while ago for reasons I can't entirely recall, but one of the big ones must have been that it's just visually much easier to look at and evaluate an array of 12 cards that each have 1-3 icons than it is to look at and evaluate 12 cards that each have 3 text fields. But what it did do, and what no version has done since, is communicate a sense of following a hunch by utilizing info about cards that may be "connected" to each other. It did this in an abstract way, but it still was a good first attempt in this direction.

Again, although complexity is the last thing the game needs at this point, I've been thinking again about something like a "relevance" system. Picture this: instead of each theme card having 1-3 clue category symbols (which authorizes the player to look at clues or get check marks in those categories), each card has 1-3 "areas of information", which represent "things this card might have knowledge about." Also imagine that each clue category gets a "hub" card associated with it, and when you want to ask a theme card about a clue category, you slide the hub card into the solution frame for that card's number, and it tells you what you get -- ie, the level of the clue you're authorized to look at, or perhaps nothing. And then from there, if you're authorized by the hub card, you get to look at the actual clue on the back of the solution card. (This two-step process is one of the main things I dislike about this approach)

Since the hub card "knows" which theme card is which, it also "knows" which categories are present on each card, and thus, cards that share a category could similarly provide access to clues. So if you determine that Marcus Brody authorizes you to look at a Level 1 Location clue, and he has knowledge about "Egyptology" and "Languages", you might look for another theme card with one of these same categories in the hopes that it will provide a clue.

But wait, there's more -- imagine that the hub card is physically hard-wired into the solution card in the same category. Then, the categories themselves can be connected to the solution. For instance, if Marcus' knowledge about Egyptology or Languages are "relevant" to the solution, maybe it's because the lost temple is (or was) in Egypt, or maybe it's because the "Coptic Manuscript" is important.

Such a scheme could do two neat things. First, it could enable a somewhat more comprehensive "solution", where different pieces of information can all talk to each other to assemble a more robust solution for each clue category (but yes, each clue category is still orthogonal to every other category). Second, each card could be less formulaic and more free-flowing. Sometimes, the association between the categories on a theme card and the element of the solution will be overt, sometimes it will be highly indirect, and the player's creativity and intuition may be required to connect the dots. The "brute force" approach of acquiring every clue will still be available, but a savvy player may be able to get to the solution more efficiently by relying on some guesswork, hunch-following, and utilizing the local rumors (to be discussed in another post).

Now there's still the potential for information overload, but perhaps it's not as bad if not every card has 3 categories, and/or not every card is out and available all at once. If the board starts empty, and theme cards are added as players chase down "lead cards", then you'll only be adding a few "categories" at a time, so it shouldn't feel as unmanageable.

Basically, it transfers the "problem" of finding out which theme cards are germane to the system from something that the game automates for the players, into one that the players must actively determine for themselves. It's probably too much complexity, of course.

The question really boils down to what the problem for the players ought to be with this aspect of the game. It seems there are four choices:

(a) You know what info the theme cards will provide and it's just a matter of finding where they are ("lead card" system only)

(b) You know where all the theme cards are, but have to figure out what info each will provide ("relevance" system only)

(c) You need to figure out BOTH where the theme cards are AND what information each will provide ("lead cards" and "relevance" added)

(d) You know where the theme cards are and what they provide, and must simply parse the information in the most efficient way (present system)

I'm inclined to consider systems like the lead cards and the relevance system because they feel to me like approaches that could add more cinematic scope to the experience of playing the game, that they'll make each playing feel unique, and that they could provide more variability to the different scenarios that the game could include.

Composite clues or climbing clues?

In the current version of the game, each clue really consists of three sub-clues, and the number of check marks you have in that clue category determines the level of the clue you're authorized to look at. The three clues each present a different piece of information which, when put together, add up to complete knowledge of the solution. For example, for the location of the temple, one card might have the following:

1. The temple is in a "white" city.

2. The temple is in the Near East.

3. The temple is in a "triangle" city.

Taken together, these point to Nepal. This scheme works well and permits a secondary mechanic whereby a player can reveal the clue he just read to the other players, in exchange for some action cards; but the structure of the clues is such that reading a given level doesn't give away complete information to the other players.

But in some cases, this composite construct seems forced. Consider how we would construct clues for the length of the Staff of Ra in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is crucial in determining where to dig for the Well of Souls. In the composite approach, it might look like this:

1. The staff is at least 4 feet tall.

2. The staff is at most 7 feet tall.

3. The staff is not 5 feet tall.

Again, this is functional, but it just doesn't ring true as the way information about the staff would really appear in the books, tomes, interviews, etc, that Indy would use to gather information -- it's rather forced and artificial. What if, instead, the clues "climbed"? Consider again the same clue, in a different scheme:

1. The staff is (at least) 4 feet tall.

2. The staff is (at least) 4 feel tall.

3. The staff is (at least) 6 feet tall.

The level 2 clue isn't a typo -- what this idea conveys is that instead of each clue giving partial information, each clue may have the full solution. You only know for sure if you go all the way to the level 3 clue, but you may not have to -- a level 1 clue may be sufficient.

Consider how this could enable a more story-like structure to the location clues:

1. The artifact was carried out of the Holy Land by a Franciscan monk to the desert north of Cairo...

2. ...whereupon it was carried across the desert to Marrakech...

3. ...and there may it sit until our Lord returns.

To make this approach work, there would have to be some cards where the level 1 clue really does point directly to the solution, some where the level 2 clue does, and some where only reaching the level 3 clue leads to the solution. Maybe the distribution is roughly 33% of each, or maybe it's 25%/37.5%/37.5%, not sure.

Now the difference between these approaches is subtle but important; in the composite approach, the clues help the player to narrow down the possibilities, so if he acts on partial information, it is based on a guess, and the goal of the game is to maximize the odds that your guess will be accurate by accumulating as many clues as you can. In the climbing approach, the clues lead the player toward the solution step by step, and the guesswork comes more from how far up the clue chain you need to climb to have correct information. Because the game is a race, time spent chasing down "extra" clues is time wasted, but if you don't chase down those clues, you risk having incomplete information. I think the climbing approach is more thematically consonant -- you could end up digging in the wrong place, but not because you guessed wrong on a 50/50 guess -- rather, because there was more information out there than you realized.

Again, this difference is subtle, but I also think the latter approach is more amenable to enabling the players to get additional information from hunches via "relevance" (see the next post), or from "local rumors" (maybe the next post after that...). By piecing together the clues and little pieces of additional information, players may be able to develop a good feel for whether a given level is the final clue or if there are others that follow it.

Gameplay-wise, I especially like the way this potentially focuses importance on the level 1 clues, which are mostly useless at present.

Of course, it could be possible to use both approaches, and letting the situation dictate which is appropriate. For numeric values (the height of the staff of Ra, the weight of the idol in the Chachopoyan Warriors temple), climbing clues make the most sense; for other categories (challenges in the temple), composite clues may be more appropriate.