Let's stipulate to the previous post's framework as being, at least notionally, the path forward for the encounter system:
- Perform a Dutch auction to resolve investment, and assign roles
- Resolve the encounter and then give out rewards (temple card lookups) in role order
- Then, each player choose one equipment card, some of which match the temple perils.
So you're getting info about the temple's perils, and cards to help traverse those perils. What do you do with it? Actually, there are two possible answers:
Punitive temple
This is closest to the version we tried most recently. For each temple card, reveal the card, and then order the players based on how many of that card's peril symbol they have on their equipment cards. Then allocate penalties; the further you are from the most-prepared player, the larger your punishment.
This works well enough and it lets players' relative preparation matter, so it's nice. It's reasonably simple, and it's reasonably thematic. A downside is that it bears little mechanical similarity to the map phase, so it's like you've started a whole new game, albeit a quick one.
Poisonous temple
What if instead there's some sort of map or track with spaces that represent progress through the temple. We've had things like this before so it's not a full deparature. But for each temple card, now there would be a bid (closed fist, I suspect). Mirroring the map phase bid, you 'pay for' your bid by a combination of the matching peril symbols on your equipment cards, and some poison that you drink.
In the map phase, that poison is movement on the time track. Maybe here it's time, or hubris, or damage, or maybe it blips between these from card to card. The point being, if you have the highest bid, you have to have the right equipment cards or be willing to drink some poison.
But then the benefit is, we move our pawns across this temple mat in bid order, with the highest bid moving furthest. Maybe the lowest bid even has to move backward! Maybe there are spatial effects -- a bridge that leading players can "blow", forcing trailing players to take the long way, etc.
The temple cards progress from red ("approaching the temple"), to purple ("inside the temple"), to yellow ("the grail room"), to green ("hubris challenge"). Maybe the track or map mirrors this, such that if, when the temple card switches to the next color, if your piece isn't in the similarly-colored region on the track/map, you are eliminated or punished or whatever.
The nice thing is that it creates urgency asymmetrically. I may be poorly prepared for the next temple card but I still need to bid high because the downside is being left way behind.
Another advantage is that it has direct mechanical similarities to the map phase. On the other hand, it means the game is basically an auction game all the way through, but maybe that's ok.
What got me thinking about it in the first place was my endless concern about the "trivial strategy" -- i.e. is a player who does nothing in the information game still able to do well in the temple phase simply by randomly grabbing some equipment cards in the map phase? There are ways to counteract this in the punitive temple, i.e. by making the punishments more severe, but in the poison temple, maybe you handle it organically: the player, by being poorly prepared, will either consistently lose bids and thus be hopelessly far behind, OR will have to drink so much poison to be competitive that he effectively eliminates himself just in the very act of trying to keep up.
This still needs more thought but there are benefits to either approach. I would have thought before today that the punitive temple was the only way to go, but the poison temple may have some upsides as well.
Monday, June 25, 2018
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.
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.
Sunday, June 24, 2018
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
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 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...
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
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.
Monday, January 8, 2018
The rules, and musings on player count
As a follow up to the nutshell post, here's a link to the full rule set (v14.4): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UObIdfNkddg6VM1gSupXs3CSpH_t4CXP--cKG6NOQFU/edit?usp=sharing
The document is too long and too formatted to copy and paste it into a blog post, but hopefully the link works and everything in the rule set makes sense.
The rules state that the game now seats from 2-5, although I think with a small qualifier or two, 1-5 should be supportable.
We've always viewed 4p as the max, partly due to latency issues and partly due to timing problems associated with the turn-based mechanics of the game. There were a few systems that depended on which player did such-and-such first, and these kind of rules can leave the last player in turn order out of luck through no fault of his/her own.
With the new rules, simultaneity addresses the latency concern and the timing concern, to some extent -- there is still a 'choose rewards in order' effect but as it affects only those players who drop out of the encounter at the same time, and as the start player should change pretty frequently, this may not be too harmful for a later player.
It's not a certainty that there's enough information to go around in a 5p game. I think there are at least enough cards: each player has 7 slots on his mat, and the group as a whole will get to look at 36 cards over the game. Of these, for each of the six perils, there are 8 symbols in the deck, and typically there will be 4 unique perils in the temple (5 cards but statistically one peril will show up twice), so that's 32 relevant peril symbols, meaning that each player in a 5p game can get about 6, and cube allocation lets you extend the value of the symbols you've gotten.
What I worry about more is the encounter system. Players invest in the encounter, and so naturally when there are more players there is more total investment and so the encounter is 'easier'. But how do we quantify an encounter's ease? I think it's mostly about how close you can get to the enemy pawn and still have a chance of getting info before the pawn reaches your city. In a big group, you'll be able to skate closer to the enemy whereas in a smaller group you'll have to travel further away. This will cost more time in a small group than in a big group.
However, in a big group, you have more competition for the same number of rewards, which means (a) you won't always be able to get the adventure cards that you want, and (b) you'll often be looking at temple cards after other players have viewed them, meaning you have to take a time penalty.
My hope, then, is that the combination of these effects will actually make the different player counts feel qualitatively different. This is one of my favorite aspects of Knizia's Lord of the Rings, and it would be great to have it come through here as well. There may be some tweaks necessary to realize it, and of particular concern is whether certain character mats are too good or too weak at a given player count.
The document is too long and too formatted to copy and paste it into a blog post, but hopefully the link works and everything in the rule set makes sense.
The rules state that the game now seats from 2-5, although I think with a small qualifier or two, 1-5 should be supportable.
We've always viewed 4p as the max, partly due to latency issues and partly due to timing problems associated with the turn-based mechanics of the game. There were a few systems that depended on which player did such-and-such first, and these kind of rules can leave the last player in turn order out of luck through no fault of his/her own.
With the new rules, simultaneity addresses the latency concern and the timing concern, to some extent -- there is still a 'choose rewards in order' effect but as it affects only those players who drop out of the encounter at the same time, and as the start player should change pretty frequently, this may not be too harmful for a later player.
It's not a certainty that there's enough information to go around in a 5p game. I think there are at least enough cards: each player has 7 slots on his mat, and the group as a whole will get to look at 36 cards over the game. Of these, for each of the six perils, there are 8 symbols in the deck, and typically there will be 4 unique perils in the temple (5 cards but statistically one peril will show up twice), so that's 32 relevant peril symbols, meaning that each player in a 5p game can get about 6, and cube allocation lets you extend the value of the symbols you've gotten.
What I worry about more is the encounter system. Players invest in the encounter, and so naturally when there are more players there is more total investment and so the encounter is 'easier'. But how do we quantify an encounter's ease? I think it's mostly about how close you can get to the enemy pawn and still have a chance of getting info before the pawn reaches your city. In a big group, you'll be able to skate closer to the enemy whereas in a smaller group you'll have to travel further away. This will cost more time in a small group than in a big group.
However, in a big group, you have more competition for the same number of rewards, which means (a) you won't always be able to get the adventure cards that you want, and (b) you'll often be looking at temple cards after other players have viewed them, meaning you have to take a time penalty.
My hope, then, is that the combination of these effects will actually make the different player counts feel qualitatively different. This is one of my favorite aspects of Knizia's Lord of the Rings, and it would be great to have it come through here as well. There may be some tweaks necessary to realize it, and of particular concern is whether certain character mats are too good or too weak at a given player count.
Monday, December 11, 2017
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.
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.
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