New new directions?

The latest new direction described in the previous post was to expand the role of the turn-end cube-pulling concepts more broadly into more aspects of the game.  The intent was to create a way to modulate the player's exposure to risk, by changing, based on various factors, the composition of black and white cubes in the cup.

Limitations of the old new system

Solo playtesting of the idea has gone ok, but live playtests of a couple of permutations of these concepts haven't been very successful.  The tests are showing that these cube-pulling concepts don't introduce as much tension or suspense as was hoped.  Part of the reason seems to be that players will generally suppress risk whenever possible, and will do so at the expense of efficiency; so, for example, they will "overpay" to put white cubes into the cup to reduce their risk of drawing black cubes.  This reduces the number of failures of challenges and things like that.

Second, the latest solution for exploring the temple as a 2D grid, similar in some ways to the version before that, just isn't succeeding.  Or rather, it's no more successful than the previous version, whether you draw cubes to resolve effects like noise and traps at the turn end (the way the previous approach worked) or during each action (the way the new version worked).  I think the turn end approach is superior, but still, the overall flow of the temple isn't communicating the experience that I think the game's interested publisher wants.

Third, the idea of enemy operatives chasing you around sort of works -- they do indeed chase you around increasingly aggressively as the game proceeds.  But it's not yet clear what they should do when they reach you.  My idea has been that they make the challenges harder, but if you don't attempt challenges and just draw cards, they are just kind of sitting there watching you; it's a bit weird.

A new new way forward?

So, what to do next?  As a result of discussions after the playtests, I'm considering trying some changes that seem a bit extreme but actually hearken back to some of the earliest ideas in the game.

The first is to abandon the 2D approach to the temple, and to replace it with a row of cards (or tiles or whatever) the represent your progress through the temple, possibly broken up into a couple of phases.  These abstractly represent the different layers to the temple.  So in the Raiders scenario, it would be "Locate Tanis", "Find the Well of Souls", "Retrieve the Ark", for example; and a row of cards would correspond to each of these layers.

I think the idea might be that each card has a couple of different parallel paths, going from left to right, and each card you choose which you want to be on and then reveal the next one.

The second is to replace the idea of adventure cards with a static hand of cards, from which you "equip" yourself with perhaps 3 prior to each temple phase.  So, your knowledge of the temple phases dictates which cards you'll bring along.  The "base" cards you start with will give some help, or there will be better cards that you can acquire that may be even more helpful, but more specialized/situational.

The third is to change the way challenges (outside) and temple moves (inside) are resolved, with (gulp) die-rolling.  The idea might be that you have a "good" die, and can add more through various means, and have a number of "bad" dice dependent on the enemy presence, and hope to roll the number of "good" results you need before you roll enough "bad" results to fail.

The fourth is to perhaps go back to the old cubes-in-cities way of representing enemy presence, but with a twist.  Give each player 15 cubes (or whatever), which represent "how many things you get to do before the enemy finds the artifact", so it's essentially four clocks running in parallel (assuming 4 players).  But when you take an action in a city, you place one of the cubes in that city.  And the number of "bad" dice you roll when you attempt to do something in a city is equal to that number of cubes.  So it's actually in some ways very much like the v7 system.

The fifth is the most extreme.  During setup, the temple phases are arranged by randomly drawing and constructing the indicated card rows from the corresponding decks (with some rules governing how to do this of course), and the cards are all placed face-down.  Visiting a theme card then entitles you to look at one or more face-down cards in a particular phase.  The temple cards will have on their backs one or more icons that authorize you to look at that card, and so if you visit a theme card having that icon, it could authorize you to look at that card.  (Keeping the idea from the old new version, it may be that each card look during a visit requires a certain number of "good" results on the dice, so there could still be a press-your-luck thing -- you can keep looking at temple cards as long as your luck holds).

Thoughts

This still retains some of the thematic ideas we've wanted to include, e.g. "digging on partial info".  Maybe you've seen two of the four cards leading from the start city to the temple entrance, and you know that (a) on card two, you'll pass through jungle terrain, so better bring a machete, and (b) on card four, the south path leads to a trap so don't end up on that one if you can avoid it!  You don't have knowledge about cards one and three, so you'll have to do your best with those once they're revealed.

Exploration of the temple would be, I suppose, simultaneous -- everyone pick a path and move onto the next card, then reveal the card and each player resolves in turn order -- and the enemy's location in the temple would be abstract and represented by which card the enemy is on, or something like that.

I'm not sure these ideas collectively work.  I think they're a dramatic simplification but I wonder if that isn't what the game wants at this point; maybe it wants to be a 75 minute beer and pretzels "dice chucker".  I still like the Euro version of the game, but my latest attempts to make it more "thematic" with cube pulling ideas seem to not have given the desired results, so maybe going all the way to dice-based challenge resolution and theme cards letting you look physically at solution info will help give the right feel.  My hope is that the cube timer rules will impose the interesting decisions on you -- you're time-constrained overall so you have to strike the right balance between getting info and getting equipment.  Since you can only "activate" a few pieces of equipment at a time, there's no benefit to having a huge inventory of equipment, so efficiency is the name of the game.

Spielbany is a few weeks away; perhaps I'll have a proto with these ideas ready by then...

New ideas: post playtest thoughts and changes

We playtested the new ideas mentioned in the last post, and while the general reaction to having challenges outside the temple resolve with a cube-pulling system was favorable, some tweaking is needed.


The two biggest concerns were (a) it takes a little bit of time and effort to set up the encounters (putting all the right cubes in the cup), and (b) if the rules for the "outside" and "inside" phases are different, the game may be too complex.


Other comments were: (i) encounters should just be about getting check marks -- having rewards like adventure cards as part of the challenge system was a distraction;  (ii) instead of an enemy progress track there could be an enemy progress "pool" of black cubes, and this could be integrated with the cube-pulling tangibly; (iii) in some way enemy interest in you could build as the game goes on, making the game more difficult for you and maybe forcing you to take a turn to go to ground and lose some of the heat.


So, I have been tinkering with a system that pulls these together and integrates with the temple concepts.  At your turn start, you take a black cube from the pool and add it to an (empty) cup.  You're given 4 white cubes, which you can add to the cup at any time.  Then, you take actions, all of which involve pulling cubes for the cup.


If you choose move or "reward", you draw a cube.  Whether white or black, you complete the action, but if black, you add that cube to your personal enemy track, and, if there's an enemy operative that is as close to you as the number of cubes on your track, you move that enemy to your city. 


This mirrors the way movement in the temple works -- pull a cube and resolve -- and this idea of a "pull radius" mirrors the way that noise will work in the temple.  If you generate enough noise, the enemy comes looking for you; outside, if you generate enough "noise", that enemy informants can take notice of, they come after you.  I think this is a nicely thematic solution for how to get the enemy to seem like they're chasing after you.


When you face an encounter, add an extra black cube to the cup (from the pool) for each enemy operative in your city.  You can pay cards to add white cubes to the cup, then you start pulling cubes.  With each black cube that you draw, something bad happens, and the severity of the bad thing depends, I think, on your enemy track.   After 3 black cubes, you fail the encounter outright.  But if you get enough white cubes to pass the encounter, you get to visit the city's theme card.


After the encounter (I think), you empty the cup of white cubes, but not black.  So if you keep going in your turn, the enemy is still putting you at risk.  And with each move or each reward, there's the possibility that they'll follow you.  More actions in the same city just increases this risk.  Of course, you can use cards to try to mitigate your risk.  And the hope is that the tension will simply be between holding cards to help you in the temple, vs. needing to use them to get info about the temple.


Another suggested big chance was to not use a physical 2D temple, but instead represent the temple abstractly, with the temple rewarding you more for better info/guesses.  The way I suppose this could work is that each aspect of the temple (grail room location, true grail, etc), would have a solution card, and you'd enter your "guess" using the solution sleeve, then flip the card over.  It would then tell you how many cubes you need to pull from the cup and resolve.  The better your guess, the smaller this number will be. 


Maybe the temple is physically represented as a row of 4-6 cards with "gates" between them, and each gate is patrolled by one of the solution cards (each card could have more than one gate).  These gates are, of course, abstractions; one might represent "where is the temple?", one might represent a key puzzle, one might represent the search for the grail room, one might represent picking the true grail, etc.  The point is, it's a way of capturing what goes on in the temple without needing to balance a set of 2D movement rules. 


I think the 2D movement system will align more with the publisher's preferences, but it may be that this more abstract system combined with the cube-pulling might give the right effect where information is beneficial but there's still unpredictability as to the outcomes.  And since this is roughly how the very first temple worked (without the cube pulling), this is something of a full circle moment!


Another thought: if the temple itself is an abstraction, perhaps the need for a separate temple phase can also be abstracted away.  In other words, you have a "board pawn" and a "temple pawn"; certain actions you take, as you acquire more information, authorize you to advance your "temple pawn".  Not sure this is a good idea though.


(Relatedly, encounters could work this way too, as we previously discussed; the encounter card could give you a row of options for how to attempt to resolve it, you pick which one you want to try, and then the encounter card tells you how many cubes you need to pull.  I like this idea but think it adds too much complexity to the encounter resolution)


Finally, the idea of using small cubes instead of check marks to represent info worked fine.  But I wondered if even better might be that the clue cubes could become clue chits, that are labeled with the clue that they give you, and you need maybe 2 of the same clue chit to get that clue -- two halves of the map, as it were.  I like this idea in principle -- encourages you to want to move around with bigger jumps, maybe motivates some trades -- but I worry that it might be too fiddly in practice.  But it helps answer the question, "why would I want to shoot across the globe to interview Sallah to get his yellow cubes, when there are yellow cubes right here in my city on the Grail Diary?"  If it's that I have a Yellow A clue chit and Sallah has one of those, whereas the Grail Diary has Yellow B, maybe that's an answer.  (Of course, I might want to get B before shooting over to try to get that second A!)

Three new ideas

The game is currently being evaluated by a publisher.  The publisher has called attention to a few areas that they feel could be improved, so I've been brainstorming possible solutions.






First, the publisher feels the challenges are insufficiently tense.  We could switch from the current "pay cards to resolve" system to a "press your luck" system.  When you face an encounter, you need a certain number of 'successes' to get a reward (some rewards have a few tiers or "stop points"), where a success means "you drew a white cube out of a cup containing white and black cubes" -- correspondingly, "failure" means "you drew a black cube". 






Before you start drawing, you have to add cubes to the cup, of course.  You add one black cube automatically, plus one for each Enemy Operative in the city.  Then you can pay adventure points to add white cubes.  However, the catch is that you don't get "extra" white cubes back even if you pass the challenge -- whatever you committed to the cup is lost.






This is part of an overall simplification of the outside-the-temple system, which used to have Enemy Operatives, Ally Cards, Item Cards, Reward Tiles, Theme Cards, and probably a few other things.  It wasn't unmanageable, but game length is a concern of the publisher's so streamlining will give the players less to do, which should make things quicker.






Second, the publisher wasn't happy with the temple; they felt that it wasn't tense enough.  Specifically, they would like something more interesting with the temple challenges.  The new idea changes the way the temple is navigated and the info about the temple that the game "knows".






To move through the temple, you'd now pull a cube from the cup for each move.  White means "safe move", black means "you hit a wall", which physically gets added to the board.  Brown means "you triggered a trap!": draw a trap tile, place it on the room and resolve.  Some of the traps could have special effects, like the boulder that continues to roll through all rooms in a row until it hits a wall, or poison gas that affects all adjacent rooms.  Resolving a trap, though, will be quick -- just pay a card in that challenge category, or else...not sure what, get sent back to the entrance, I guess.






So the topography of the temple -- its obstacles and routes -- will be assembled on the fly.  The location of important features in the temple, however, would now be contained on solution cards.  The cards will no longer know "the grail is revealed by pulling the Lever" and it's that you have to find the Lever; rather, it knows that the grail is in room D3, and you have to use the clues to navigate the temple to find that the grail room is D3.






Finally, though not directly in response to the publisher, I also had the thought that instead of giving clues in order, it could simply be that each card has 3 or 4 available clues and you can access any one you like.  I'm not sure if they're all equally good or perhaps some are slightly better (maybe it's known which is which and the better ones cost more?)  I like this idea because I think it will create more asymmetry between the players.  If there are 12 total clues in each game and a player typically accesses, maybe, 7 or 8 of those, then you know a lot but not everything, and what you know is different from the 7 or 8 things that other players know (although there's some overlap).  If Joe goes east in the temple when you went west, is it because he knows something you don't know, or are you equally clueless? 




There are two other ideas that I don't think are as game-changing but that I still think are worth trying.




The first is quite simple:  players can use Adventure cards twice.  The first time, you play from the hand to the table; second time you discard.  I think may make intermediate-range planning a little easier on you.  And, it might give you tougher decisions about possibly using a card "inefficiently"; you know you'll get to use the card again so maybe you're tempted to use it just for an AP instead of holding out for a challenge in its category.




The second is to allow player trades through a simple card-based mechanism.  Open negotiation is a time sink, but structured trades could work.  There would be three "trade cards", each of which shows two rewards, one on either end of the card.  To initiate a trade, you simply place the card between you and another player, with the reward that you want to get facing you.  The other player can accept, or counter by replacing the card with one of the others.  The trades would be to swap check marks (which represent information) or for adventure cards, mostly. 

Lost Adventures, in a nutshell

Taking a step back, here's a quick overview of how v10 of the game, the latest version, works.

Lost Adventures is an Indiana Jones-themed relic hunt, and like a good Indiana Jones movie, the action is divided into two principal phases.  In the first, the players traipse around the globe, trying to gain information about the whereabouts of a lost artifact, which is hidden in a lost temple somewhere.  In the second, the players discover and enter the temple, and try to be the first to traverse its twists and turns (and traps) to locate the lost artifact in the temple.

Along the way, the players will be harried by the Enemy, who seek the artifact for their own nefarious purposes.  In the first phase, as players travel around the board, Enemy Operatives (pawns) will chase them from city to city, disrupting the players' ability to acquire information.  Inside the temple, the Operatives race the players to the artifact, or try to steal it from the players if possible.  The enemy's overall progress is measured on a track, and when it reaches the end, the game ends and all players lose.

The main "innovation" in the game is its information system.  Simply put, the game "knows" what city the temple is in, and it "knows" where in the temple the artifact is hidden.  There are three solution categories that contain hidden solution information, and each has a corresponding deck of solution cards, one of which is chosen from each category at the start of the game.  There are three levels of clues for each, and players gain access to these by visiting "theme cards", representing people and items that provide information.  So, for example, you go see Henry Jones if you want information about the temple's traps; you seek the Knight's Shield if you want to know where to find the temple, etc.

To access a theme card, you have to go to the city it resides in and face an Encounter card, which includes a challenge and, possibly, moves an enemy Operative to the city as well.  If you fail the challenge, the Operative gets to use his special ability, but if you pass you get to interview the theme card, which consists of checking off boxes on your notepad.  Every 3 boxes you check in a category unlocks the next level of clue in that category.

The turn mechanic is simple and clean.  You resupply (draw action cards), take up to 4 actions, and then draw event chips from a cup and resolve them.  This turn structure persists across both phases, but the details of the available actions change a bit inside or outside the temple.

Re-purposing the idea about visual encounters

The idea I previously discussed about having encounters work "visually" (ie, the illustration shows a scene, and you pick a "response" -- the category you think will enable you to pass the challenge based on the illustration) didn't make a big splash with a certain influential playtester, and I think the most recent version will work fine with the simpler approach to challenges that we settled on.  (The game is currently with that influential playtester, and we'll see what feedback his sessions produce).

However, in brainstorming this week, I had a thought for a micro-game concept with a Sherlock Holmes theme that could use this idea in a slightly different way.   There would be three "decks" of cards (~4 cards in each), which show illustrations of three aspects of a crime -- e.g. the victim, the scene, and some locale that is in some way connected with the crime.  To set up the game, you'd select one card from each deck.  There are 8 "suspect" cards, and the game consists of examining the illustrations on the three "scene" cards, and deducing which of the suspects is responsible for the crime, what was his/her motive, and what weapon was used.  This is done by identifying a common visual element that the three cards share, and connecting it to some aspect of one of the suspects.  For example, maybe the three "scene" cards show fingerprints of soot, and upon examining one of the suspect cards, you see that he has soot on his hands, pinpointing him as the culprit.

The trick is that there's one and only common element for any three cards, so there's always a unique solution.  And, the solution wouldn't always have to be as direct as having the same element on all three cards; there could be more difficult cases, perhaps, e.g. one card shows a train ticket, another shows a train schedule, and a third shows the train station, and you have to infer that these are all connected in a single chain.

To aid the investigation, something like "the interrogator" from this game would be used:  it would be a "sleeve" (really two cards connected at their bottom edge), with an image of a magnifying glass on the top card with a hole in it; you place the magnifying glass over the item you want to examine, close the back card to make a "sandwich", then flip the whole thing over, and, through a hole in the back card of the sleeve, you get to read some text from the scene card describing in more detail what you see; e.g. it tells you the fingerprint that you're examining is made of soot, possibly suggesting the "chimney sweep" might be the suspect to focus on.

The game wouldn't need many rules, and probably would be reasonably quick to play, depending on the difficulty of the case.

Another idea that springboards off of this could be an actual Indy-themed microgame that's sort of a temple run, with the cards depicting obstacles in a lost temple.  Maybe there are different pieces of equipment you can carry or acquire -- a pistol, a rope, a whip, etc -- and each has a sleeve.  To attempt to solve a card, you select the equipment you want to use, take the corresponding sleeve, place the opening over the element on the card you want to target, then flip the whole thing over and the card tells you what happens.  For example, targeting the sinister street tough with the pistol may work better than with the whip, whereas trying to cross the chasm by targeting the low-hanging branch with your whip will work better than the pistol.  (And based on the construction of the sleeves, you could target the same feature with different cards and each can have a different effect).  

I think microgames built around this visual mechanism may make more sense than trying to include them as an element of a bigger, more complex game.  I think the latter would be easier for a non-artist like me to develop than the former, since the Holmes game depends so heavily on the artwork on the cards, and on the player being able to scrutinize it to solve the mystery.   But I think that both could provide fun and unique gameplay experiences.

Ongoing progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failing a challenge -- what happens?

What happens when a player fails a challenge?

 

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

 

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

 

Possible answers could include:

 

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

- Return to the entrance

- Lose a turn

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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