Still done

Lost Adventures is still done, as far as I know.  It's been with a publisher for a few months now and I've not touched it at all in the intervening time.  I think it's a bad idea generally to continue tinkering with a game when a publisher is looking at it.  If you come up with something great to change, they'll wonder why you submitted it to them before you had that great idea, or perhaps alternatively they'll want to take the game in a different direction that renders your great new idea obsolete.  There's just no upside to this.  I have a couple of ideas that I've jotted down, mostly for additional/expansion stuff, but nothing serious.

Here's a photo of most of the components.  It's clear I'm no artist but I'm actually happy with how everything looks, at least from a functional standpoint.  The main board is larger than it needs to be (I messed up the scaling on my printer) but it does give the game plenty of room to breathe without feeling cluttered.  In contrast, the temple, (the row of colored mats below the board), feels a little constrained for space.  Maybe those can be bigger.  Or maybe in the end a publisher would just make a standalone board for each temple so that the modularity of these cards wasn't needed.  That might be nice.

Anyway, here are a couple of videos I've made about the gameplay for anyone who is eager to learn how the latest (final?) version works but doesn't want to wait for the publisher to make their decision!

General overview (5 min):

Setup (pretty boring!  8 minutes):

Map phase rules explanation (9:30):

Temple phase rules explanation (8 minutes):

Done.

Basically.

We had a 3p test at Spielbany that was interesting.  With two new players and myself playing, the game took about 90 minutes.  The idea to front-load the decision about where you're going to go between turns so you can execute quickly when your turn comes up didn't really work; the new players still took some time and the decisions took a while.  Even so, the game took 90 minutes, and I think, were we to run it back, 75 minutes would have been easily achieved.  That's about right.

I won the game handily, which almost never happens in any game I design, ever.  It makes me think the game has a learning curve and that I've started to climb up it.  I don't think this is bad but it does show that players don't have a great sense for how much hubris to take, how many green cubes to need, etc.  There is a player aid that gives the math but the rules and the components need to do a better job providing this info and helping them to progress more quickly from figuring out what to do to preparing well for the temple.  We all had decent info and preparation, but the newer players didn't bid aggressively enough in some cases, but bidding/auction games always take some experience and maybe it's similar here.

Unfortunately, neither of the other two players liked the game very much.  They felt there was too much going on, but this may have been a matter of taste, and they said as much.  I think changes to simplify the game further are worth contemplating, but I don't think the game is that much more complicated than v7 was, and we never felt that was too complicated.  I think it would require a big redesign to simplify this to be a sub 60 minute game, and at this late stage I'm not inclined to embark on yet another major change like this.  I'm more inclined to see whether, in its present form, it can find an audience (and a publisher).  I just ran a 2p solo test today, and found once again that players in my solo tests are coming within a space of each other on the temple track, and are coming down to the final roll to see who wins.  I think the game is therefore fairly tight.

That said, it does still need a cycle of development.  I'm not sure the experience is uniform across player counts, or that there are enough cards.  I'm not sure whether it's too hard to survive the temple and whether this needs to be loosened up a bit.  I'm not sure the game couldn't still have a few rough edges sanded off.  But to me, those are development level changes.  From a design perspective, I am calling it done.  After 13 years, and almost 10 years since v7, that is a good feeling.  

New ideas, new decision points

A recent 3p playtest ran about 2.5 hours.  The good news is that the temple was about 20 minutes of that, worked well, and, came down to the final roll.  This is important. If the game is going to have a die-rolling final hubris challenge as a day-of-reckoning determination of who really wins, it had better deliver the right payoff, with the outcome uncertain until, ideally, the very last possible roll of the dice.  And for each individual player, it should be a closely run thing, such that in the hubris challenge they either purge their hubris, or die of a curse, within one roll of the other happening.  People who hate luck as a resolution system will hate this incarnation of the game, but if it continues to work this well the game will really deliver for the people inclined to like that sort of thing.  And, so far so good.


But there's that 2 hours of map phase length that present a concern.  I think the culprit is the four-phase turn, but we need all four of those things to happen (move, encounter, look at temple info, take adventure cards from a display).  But each phase prompts you for a few decisions and actions, and that seems to be slowing things down too much.


Luckily we can find some savings by cutting out some rules.  I like the "enemy gets stronger in the region you visit" effect and the "some randomizer determines what type of encounter you face when you decide where you're going" effects that we've had for a long time, but the fact is that the rules that police these do add some length as you comply with them.  Moreover, once you find the encounter details, then you have to prepare for the encounter by paying some cards, which is a decision that takes 30 seconds or so. 


We could reduce this if your cards instead lived in a permanent display.  My latest thought is that you can have six cards on the table, with new cards added, once per turn, to the right end (removing a card from the display if necessary or desired). 


At the start of each round, a die roll determines which challenge category will apply for each city type for this round.  When you face an encounter, the leftmost three adventure cards in your row add 2 to your investment for each that matches the challenge category, and the next three cards, one each.  You can further invest by taking hubris, but the reaction to which category you face, and the associated decision about which cards to 'play' have mostly been made between turns.  This helps speed things up.  I like it so far.


But there's a neat consideration that it reveals, that I don't think the game has previously had.  Adventure cards all have two symbols, some combination of challenge symbols (luck, fights, escape, wits, needed for the encounters outside the temple), peril symbols (heat, fear, obstruction, climb, react, and puzzle), and effect symbols (bomb, secret door).  The goal in the map phase is to know what perils await you so you can have cards in your display with those perils.


Mirroring the map phase, peril symbols in your three leftmost cards of your display count double.  But, you only add one card per turn in the map phase, and always to the right end.  This presents a timing issue.  You have to make the decision of when to start introducing those peril cards so as to give them time to 'float' to the left of the row so they can count double in the temple, but this may mean discarding, or at the least not introducing, cards with challenge symbols, and/or discarding cards with peril symbols that you're not yet sure about.  It also means putting information out publicly about what you think the temple contains; people can cue off of that.  Sure, you can bluff but the game is pretty short for that kind of thing.  You can hold cards back, but the hand limit will be brutally small (1-2 cards max), really limiting your ability to be covert, and again you don't have time to wait forever to put cards into play, even if you don't want others to know what you know.


Thus there's this whole new problem of symbol management and getting ready to go into the temple vs. continuing to get information.  This transition between phases has been present in the game obliquely all the way back to v7, but with this new system it's achieved in a nice way.  I like that, even in a game that's in a late stage, we're still discovering new ideas that emerge from the systems.  Originally the game was about giving players the tools to parse an information puzzle.  It was simple and straightforward.  Now I think it's emerging as still pretty simple, possibly even simpler than it was, yet also offering some subtle considerations and genuinely new ideas in the form of this card display and in the penalty draft-bid in the temple.  We'll see if these come through for the players.
The previous post also mentioned the order problem in the temple.  In the live test the other day, we played that last-in-line chooses penalty cards first, and actually this works very nicely.  The player who's trailing gets first choice of what penalty to incur, the person who is leading gets to see what everyone else has bid before committing a bid.  With the added change that all of your adventure cards are on the table in front of you, this means that if the leading player has seen the peril card, then they have essentially perfect information on which to base their bid decision.  (I'm toying with the idea of whether players should be allowed to drop a card into the row from their hands; I'm not sure there's a non-fiddly way to implement this though).  Thus, each position has its own advantages and disadvantages, an inverse correlation between the amount of choice and knowledge that the player has.  I think this is balanced nicely.


But!  What I'm finding is that in many cases, you simply cannot choose to invest on any of the remaining penalty cards, however much you might wish to, because you already have too much hubris, or too few green cubes, or whatever.  Yes, yes, you could have prepared better for the temple, but still, this nice bidding system is only nice if you can actually take advantage of it.  The best solution I've come up with is to add some extra spaces onto the temple track where you can go off the main track to get a green cube (helps purge hubris) or purge a curse or whatever.  These come at the expense of forward movement in the temple, which you need to make to be able to win, but they help you to not die, which you also need to do to be able to win, and it may be that by having more ways to avoid death, players will be freed to be a bit more aggressive in the bidding.  Of course just making it harder to die is also an option, but currently it seems to be that about 1/3 of players die each game, which feels about right.  Any less and the game would feel too easy; any more and it will feel like just surviving is more important than making forward progress. 

Three question marks and one known issue

I'm going to be optimistic and posit that the latest design, v16.1, is testing well enough that it's going to emerge as the final version of the game, or at least, a final version.  But we'll certainly need a cycle of development to get all the way across the finish line, as there are still three things that need to be refined, and one issue to address.

First, the issue:  bad rolling can leave a player skunked, and this is unfun.  It should be rare to be skunked for the whole game, but it will happen.  How to address?  One option is giving out some reroll tokens during setup, or maybe "script rewrite" cards that have special effects to mitigate bad luck.  Another is to add a third die to the encounter, the green die.  You can subsitute the green die for the white die (or maybe, either die?) at the cost of taking one hubris.  This prompts players for more decisions, which I dislike, but it may be worth a try.

Now, the three questions.

First, what happens when the enemy reaches you in an encounter?  The first answer was "it ends the encounter, and you get info or cards, but not both".  This worked but was pretty punitive.  The latest answer is "they steal an adventure card from the display, and your next reroll is at -1".  This also works, but results in the enemy really piling up a lot of cards.

I'm really not sure what to do here that isn't fiddly.  Another idea is "they put a cube on a space on the temple track, and the enemy pawn can 'skip over' that space".  Some alternating between this and stealing cards would be nice, but how to govern which is the thing that happens?  Some clarity for what the enemy does is needed.

Second, how to balance cards and time?  Currently you spend time to get adventure cards, each of which are played twice, from hand to table and from table to discard.  This works well but does lead to some card-hoarding.  A hand limit would help this but is inelegant.  We might try something that emulates the previous system, which had a player mat.  Maybe it's that you can have, say, 3 cards on the table in front of you, and these are your "fixed" character attributes.  These can be freely used without discarding.  It costs one time to move a card to the table to make it a fixed attribute, and you must discard a card from the table if you already have three.  Any other card can be played once from your hand and discarded.

Thus you'll want to shift your display over time from challenge symbols (which help in the map phase) to peril symbols (which help in the temple phase). 

Third, how to resolve the temple perils?  I like the draft/bid mechanic previously proposed, but it has a seat order effect, whereby choosing first gives an advantage, in that you're less likely to get stuck with a penalty that you really don't want.  So, who gets to choose first?  First in line (runaway leader?) or last in line (too easy to catch up?)?  A different approach is the subject of a future post, in which you don't claim the penalty cards exclusively, so more than one person can go in on a particular penalty.  This could alleviate the seat order issue but also removes some of the fun of the draft:  it is pleasant to be able to stick someone with something that they don't want, it's just a question of whether it's the leader, or the trailing player, who should be getting stuck with that something.

I think these can also be solved, maybe easily, but I may be too close to the design at this point to be the one to solve them.  Luckily, I think they're all issues of balance and optimization for experience, and not so much core structural design considerations.  Some further testing might make some headway, but if not a developer should be able to resolve them.

A bid mechanic for another day

I thought of a tweak to the current draft/bid mechanic from the temple that probably would be too slow to work as a temple system, but it is potentially interesting.


The problem with the draft is the problem with every draft, the seat order problem: who gets to draft first, and in what order do we resolve?  If it's furthest forward in the temple, that could lead to a runaway leader problem; furthest back, inadequate incentive to bid aggressively.  And what about when players are on the same space?  All of these can be worked out, but I had a thought for a different but similar mechanic that sidesteps some of them.


Before each bid, several penalty cards are laid out, each specifying a particular type of penalty. 


Go around in clockwise order.  On your turn, either add a cube to a penalty card of your choice, or fold.  When you fold, claim any penalty card, and incur the penalty shown on the card in an amount equal to the cubes on the card.  The number of cubes on your card are your initial bid.  Continue until everyone folds.


This is then supplemented with cards in hand that match the current peril, in the usual way.  Highest total bid moves furthest, and then down the line, in the usual way.


I like the potential brinksmanship of this system.  You're sort of playing multiple games of chicken with the other players simultaneously.  In the current system, you're taking the card of those that are left that you can best tolerate, and are trying to stick the players after you with a card that's bad for them.  In this system you're trying to poison the penalty you can best tolerate for all players but yourself, and/or are trying to poison the suits they are going to pick so they don't get off scot-free, except doing so strengthens their bids, and also you don't want to poison your preferred suit too much, but oh by the way the more pain you take the higher your bid and you want to bid high.  I think it could be a fun challenge. 


(A different take:  there could be a penalty card between each pair of players, and you can add to any card that touches you, so you're literally playing chicken against one specific player with each card; when you fold, the other player who shared that card with you has one less option).

My concern is that this would be too slow, but maybe it speeds up if each round of bidding you must place an additional cube.  (So one in the 1st round, 2 in the second, and so on).


I could see an entire game being built around this idea but I'm not sure what it should be about; key would be to have something interesting that you're bidding for, and some interesting but asymmetric penalty currencies.  Otherwise it's just resources you're losing, but if one currency was "how many cards you can hold" and another was "how many cubes you can play", and so on, losing different things would feel painful in different ways.  The penalty currencies in Lost Adventures have this, fortunately, and each penalty you take is fairly painful, or at least risky. 

Some feedback

Just for fun, I entered the game in the Board Game Workshop design contest this past month.  This one is a doozy:  the opening round was a 2 minute video pitch about the game.  This is definitely not my strong suit and I don't think I nailed it by any stretch!  I can teach the full game in about 10 minutes, but still, talking about the two phases in detail in just two minutes proved challenging, so I elected to just cover some of the key features, namely:  encounters, and how the enemy moving toward you creates suspense; temple, how we're clustered together and jockeying position using information from the map phase; hubris, how it makes some things easier but we have to reckon with it in the end.

Below I've posted what the judges thought (judges' names removed where they were provided).  Needless to say, as befits the contest there's plenty that's said about the video itself, which clearly has room for improvement, but I think some useful thoughts about the game come through as well.


To make this more interesting I'll respond/react to two of the comments in particular.


One judge mentioned a concern that this game could end up being too similar to Eldritch Horror.  I wasn't familiar with that game previously, but just had a look at its BGG entry, and it does sound like there is a lot of "move somewhere, roll some dice to resolve encounters, do what the cards say".  But it's clear to me that there are significant differences (which of course the judge couldn't have known).  As far as I can tell, EH is similar to Betrayal at House on the Hill is similar to Fortune and Glory is similar to Arabian Nights:  in all of these you face encounters that are atmospheric, but that put together assemble a hodge-podge mish-mash that doesn't create anything like a coherent story. 


Now I don't think the encounter cards in Lost Adventures self-assemble into a coherent story either, but nevertheless there's a high degree of coherency that comes from the temple itself.   Those other games feature encounters that are serial in nature, and so each should feel like it is the extension of the previous thing.  In contrast, in Lost Adventures, we have a hub-and-spokes model of coherency.  Maybe in Anakra you get "The graveyard is deserted; your contact isn't here as they said they would be" and then in Budapest it's "you are trapped in a room of the castle that overlooks a high cliff, can you find the secret exit?".  Taken serially, those aren't ipso facto part of the same story, but they nevertheless feel harmonious when you think of each encounter as a spoke that connects to the bigger hub of aggregate knowledge about the temple.  Thus each one is "I'm trying to locate this one person or item who can tell me something about the overall story".  They're parts of a bigger whole.  I don't think it gives anything like the feeling of random atmospheric stuff being thrown like "oh, some bats just flew by.  Now I discovered a strange symbol on the floor.  Now there's some howling.  Now the lights just went out" stuff that sets a mood but doesn't go anywhere. 


Another mentioned a concern that this subject is 'colonialist'.  I won't comment on the validity of this concern in general, but as pertains specifically to Lost Adventures, I'd say that making this a game about an archaeology movie actually sidesteps this concern nicely.  In movies of this type, the hero's quest is noble:  Indy is trying to stop the Nazis/rescue some kids/find his father;  Lara Croft (new movie, anyway) is trying to find her father;  the Goonies are trying to save their neighborhood.  Yes, pitching the game as competitive does make it a bit like a forturne-and-glory quest, but the inclusion of hubris, and the final hubris challenge, make it clear that impure motives are punished by the powers that be.

Game: Lost Adventures
Your theme is interesting, and some of the decision making looks interesting as well. However, I don't really know how it plays from the video, I just know a little bit about a few mechanics. 
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Game: Lost Adventures
The theme of the game sounds not exactly like other games but similar. Based off the theme I am not entirely excited by the game. I am excited by the idea of trying to be the first, but your character won't retain the artifact in the end so you have hubris as a resource. I found that to be pretty interesting. I worry about replayability and how much variety this game will offer players if each game ends the same way, but I think I need to see and know more about the game to make that judgement. So far it sounds interesting! Best of luck. 
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Game: Lost Adventures
The meta theme of making a movie about an adventure is a really compelling idea to me.

I love the way that you distilled ideas down & your explanation of your design decisions was fantastic!

I really want to give this one a try!
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Game: Lost Adventures
Love the idea of the game, but I'm not quite sure how distinct it'll be from a "go to place, have encounter, roll dice" game like Eldritch Horror (among others). Hubris is a great mechanism, but I worry that most of the game will be determined by a "go to place, roll dice" pattern. Interested to see how much the bidding plays a part.
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Game: Lost Adventures
Lost Adventures seems like a fun, fast playing game. I'm especially intrigued by the framing of 'who gets to be the protagonist' I think that's a very creative solution to a very old problem. My main questions are how individual turns play out, the specific nature of threats, and other minutiae that i understand you didn't have time to cover in the pitch.

The main thing though is that I feel like the adventure archaeology thing is perhaps a little too colonialist for me. seeking lost temples and acquiring artifacts seems harmless in the context of our favorite childhood action films and video games but I think perpetuates a line of thought that says ancient peoples and their culture are simply for fun and plunder. A bank heist theme a la Ocean's 11 or an action hero movie in the vein of Mad Max Fury Road or Terminator might preserve the format and structure of the game while avoiding harmful tropes.

Nevertheless I wish Lost Adventures all the best and I hope to see more!

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Game: Lost Adventures
I really like the concept of the game, particularly how a player can build hubris doing move powerful effects but must remove it to not lose to their own hubris. The description and video did little to inform me how the game actually played, though.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I love the idea of basically making this meta-narrative around an Indiana Jones move as a game, but what I found lacking is what we as players actually do in a turn. I hear talk of phases and hubris tokens, but not what I actually do in a phase or what the hubris tokens actually affect. In other words: I still have no idea what kind of game I am looking at! It seems like a really cool and engaging concept, but as I am lacking context in terms of the actual game, all of it falls very flat.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I liked your initial description of the theme, but then your description of the gameplay didn't seem to fit with that theme. It sounds like players are really acting as the characters fighting the bad guy, not screenwriters. Gameplay seems to be all about how successful individual characters are in their goals, not things like how much screen time the characters get. (Not to mention that screenplays aren't written character by character, with different writers jockeying for different characters to do better.) Do you really *need* the screenwriting part? Wouldn't it be more compelling and immersive to say that players are each taking on the role of a character in an archaeology adventure movie? I'm intrigued by the hubris mechanic and would like to hear more about that.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I like the theme. It is an underdeveloped area of design I think. Is the game semi co-op or competitive? What advantage is there to taking on hubris? How does the risk vs reward play out in that area?
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Game: Lost Adventures
I like the 'push your luck' element, both in the bad guy approaching in the over-world, and needing to shed hubris in the temple.  The main thing I would like to know more about is the overall groove of the game. Is it a race game? Where we are judging how ready we are to enter the temple? Or do we have a set amount of time to collect sets (for example) to prep for the temple phase. And our ability there sets us up to do well or not in the temple phase?
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Game: Lost Adventures
I genuinely appreciate that the game starts with research, its a fun addition to the story. You mention action movies, but I'm not quite sure if that's the meta of the game or just the way you've described it. Good luck! 
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Game: Lost Adventures
I don't think I got a really good sense of the flow of the game. When you're pitching, at least for me, I want to know how a turn works and how that turn is a larger part of the overall game. I appreciate the end-to-end description of it, but I think I got too much of a high-level look at the encounters / hubris / the enemy without a sense of how it all fits together. That said, I do love the theme (and your spin on it), so I'd be interested in finding out more about it down the line.
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Game: Lost Adventures
I appreciate that the theme and mechanics go hand-in-hand -- what happens during each player's turn seems very intuitive. The pitch video was great and I hope to learn more about the game in the next round.

Frankly and accused

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

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

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



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



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


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


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







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