Lost Adventures sells out!

There hasn't been too much to say about Lost Adventures recently.  I've reached out to a number of publishers about the game, and haven't gotten even a "no thanks" email in response from many of them, which has been discouraging of course.  One said "this is a nice pitch but we're not accepting submissions, but reach out next year".  That's potential, at least.

Unrelated to LA, I've just had a chance to check out The Jungle Cruise by the Forrest-Pruzen design studio, which has been hitting IP mass market games out of the park lately.   Designers tend to look down on the mass market, but seeing good games on the shelves of Target is encouraging to those who hope to see their games do well but also to preserve some artistic integrity.

The Jungle Cruise does a couple of things that v16 of LA also does.  Instead of the (admittedly cool) solution cards with the clue sleeves and red masking, v16 has cards, face-down, that contain the temple info and you are trying to get permission to look at those cards.  JC has an element like this: you have passengers from 4 families, one family is the most valuable at game end, and along the voyage you can look at a 'clue tile' which basically says 'family X is NOT the valuable one'.  This is not a very complicated bit of deduction but it's simple and effective and still guides your decisions, particularly in the sense that you must pay attention to what others are doing.  If someone is tossing DeNyle family members overboard, maybe they know that family isn't the lucrative one.


From my perusal of the Prospero Hall games, it seems they understand a few important things about mass market games that designers aiming for mass market success would do well to keep in mind:

 The turn structure MUST be rigid. It can have a few steps, but they must always be the same steps, and there can't be many of them. Something like Acquire or Carcassonne is ok, something like action point allowance or worker placement is not.

 Moving on a track is a familiar concept and is encouraged. Moving around a map is familiar enough that it's an acceptable alternative. Moving around on hexes or a grid are more abstract and probably not as desirable.

 Rolling for movement or for resolution are familiar and therefore highly desirable

 Players don't want to be ultra-competitive. All this stuff we talk about like friction and opportunity cost mostly go out the window; players just want to kick back and have fun. Trying to win is a given but having to exert tremendous effort to win is unrealistic.





It wouldn't take too massive of a streamlining of v16 of LA to make a mass market-weight version of the game, maybe. I think it would work something like this:

Basics:

 The map is made up of fewer (9?) cities, still of three types (signified by a city shape). Each has an icon corresponding to one type of temple information (location, perils, artifact) (instead of tiles; this is now hard-coded onto the board)

 There's a display along the bottom of the board into which temple information cards are placed

 Players have an identical set of “adventure cards” which each have two icons. There are 4 icons that help in the map phase, 6 that help face temple perils. You can have up to 4 cards in a tableau, representing your character. Everyone also has four “selection” cards in their hand.

Map Phase
In the map phase, on your turn you:

 Move to another city, and flip an “encounter card” for that city type. It shows the type of challenge you face (luck, wits, fight, escape) (and some artwork, presumably) 

 Count up the number of that challenge category's symbols you have in your tableau. Roll that many (custom) dice. Count up your hits.

 You may peek at temple cards whose “value” adds up to the number of hits you rolled. (The board says how many hits are required to look at each temple card in the display). The temple cards you can look at must match the icon in the city you're in. i.e. one city has info about the temple location, another about perils, etc.

 Then, you can add one adventure card from your hand to your tableau, and remove one if you want.

The map phase lasts for 5 (?) turns. After that, the temple location is revealed, and we begin the temple phase. Everyone place your marker on the “temple track”. 

Temple Phase

In the temple phase, most of the action happens on the temple perils:

 For each peril, at the same time, everyone places a selection card face down, reveal together. The card you've chosen adds 0, 1, 2, or 3 to your bid; you must take that many hubris tokens. 

 Reveal the temple peril. Count the number of icons in your tableau matching the peril (e.g. “blades”, “asps”, etc), add that to your bid. Highest total bid advances on the temple track the most, lowest bid advances the least. 

Final Hubris Challenge

After we've resolved all the temple perils, then there's the “final hubris challenge”.  

 Roll all of the dice 5 times, and for each hit, remove one hubris. If you don't remove all of your hubris, your face melts off and you are eliminated. 

 Whoever is not eliminated, and is the furthest along the temple track, wins!



Now, that already feels maybe a little bit heavy for mass market weight; probably it's at least a 10+ game. And yet there are two other things that it would feel painful not to include:

 In the map phase, once per turn, after you look at a temple card, you can remove a token from the board next to that card, which means that anyone else wanting to view that card needs one less “hit” to view it. That token makes the final hubris challenge easier for you in some way.

This is the interactive piece to the map phase: I can help myself in the long run by helping my opponents get info.

/ The role of the Nazis. In the map phase, maybe the dice you roll have an “enemy” symbol, such that if you get that result the enemy pawn moves toward you, and if it catches you you must [dump a card or get one less hit or something]

In the temple, the enemy is also a bidder, and they have a flat bid, indicated on the board, that increases the further into the temple you go. This means it's more important to be well-prepared for those later perils (but the info for those is probably also harder to get).



Is there a mass market version of LA in store, maybe a v17 of the game?  Eh I maybe somewhat doubt it, but it's not obvious to me that these ideas are strictly worse than the more involved v16, so maybe that's worth contemplating.

Quick fix

Lost Adventures is still under evaluation but it's tough to spend many months not thinking about it at all, and this past week I inadvertently started giving it some thought which led to a need to try something and play it through.

Happily, the thing that needed thought was something I had already alerted the publisher to: though the mechanics seem to support 4 or 5 p as well as 2 or 3, in practice it seems that by about mid-game, there aren't really any cards left in the deck that you're interested in.  Here we are talking about the "adventure cards", which represent your character's traits and which help you in the map phase to get info, and in the temple phase to pass perils without having to incur penalties in your bidding for position.  There are 50 such cards but each player can have 6 in a display and keep 1 in hand, and then there are 9 in the public display, so that's 44 of the cards spoken for by the time everyone's display is full by mid-game.

The simplest solution seemed to be to make up more cards, but unable to resist tinkering, I came up with two additional concepts.  Most of the cards have two adventure symbols, but I came up with two three-symbol concepts.  The first has three of the same symbol, so this card is great if it matches one of the temple perils.  But it also has a black symbol for a different peril, and if you face that peril while holding the card, it actually counts against you.  The other has three different symbols, but they are "smoke" symbols, meaning that once they are used a single time they disappear from your display.  Thus they help if you're lacking info to cover your bases, but they only help a little bit.

With 15 additional cards of these types thrown in, running out of cards was never an issue and you could almost always get something in the display that seemed useful.  So, I think with this simple addition, the 5p game seems viable.  It's possible there will be latency issues with specific groups but that's the nature of 5p games generally.  I think the mechanics work well enough as long as these extra cards are included.

There were, however, one or two interesting things that emerged from this session.

First, recall that in the temple, there are five 'perils', and in each peril, players bid and then there's a lookup table that tells how much you move based on the relative rank of your bid.  Ties are unfriendly.  Recall also that your bid has two parts:  the number of symbols on your adventure cards that match the peril category, and the number of cubes you place on a 'penalty card', indicating how much of that penalty you'll take.  

For each peril, I kept track of the total bid for each player, and for the enemy, and then totaled these up in the end, and somewhat to my surprise, the player who won the game had the lowest total bid.  Again, the connection between bids and movement is related but indirect, so it's not surprising that bidding the smartest can outdo bidding the highest.  But it was interesting to see this confirmed.  However, this player also won the very first bid, and it may be that this bid is disproportionately important; if so, we need to see whether this takes care of itself with more aggressive bidding by astute players.  

The second issue was that during setup, each player gets three adventure cards, which have challenge symbols, ones that help during the map phase.  The thing is, if you draw challenge symbols that match, you are very strong in the cit(ies) with that as their category, but on the other hand your movement is kind of scripted; you tend to just want to go to that type of city (although it shifts around as the game proceeds).  One the other hand, if you have a mixture of symbols, you're more 'versatile', but really you're just less strong with respect to challenges.

I don't know what to do about this or whether it's even a problem, but it's just something I'm watching at this time.

The other thing that happened was that one player managed to get 'skunked' in the first three encounters, rolling poorly and getting no information.  That player went on to get a lot of information later and finish in the middle of the pack so I don't think this is the end of the world, but it certainly would feel very frustrating to have half of your game amount to nothing due to bad rolls.  But the solution is always to add rules, and the game can ill afford lots more rules at this point, so it needs some additional thought.

Anyway, it was an informative 5p session and I see a couple of little things I want to try that change the game only very slightly but perhaps in a way that tightens a few things up.  But overall it's encouraging that the game can certainly support 2-5p, and even 6p might not be out of the question.

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.