Achieving symmetry across the two phases

With respect to the concern I expressed in the last post that the turn mechanic will be different inside and outside the temple, of course one option could be to change the turn mechanic outside the temple so that it's more congruent with the mechanic inside the temple -- basically, to have you draw chips from a cup at turn's end. This wouldn't actually change the turn mechanic very much outside the temple: take actions, draw chips, done, which is not that different from take actions, done. However, I do think it will force a decision as to the role of the enemy operatives vis a vis the enemy cubes. Under the scheme as articulated in the last few posts, the enemy cubes represent the growing menace of the enemy outside the temple, and the operatives are a shadowy presence that lurks behind that menace for most of the game, until the temple phase, when the menace is unmasked and the operatives become its face. And I think that's compatible with the spirit of the movies. But under a different scheme, the cubes would disappear from the design, and the operatives would become the sum total of the enemy's presence in the game, chasing the players around the board and then around the temple, and acting as a constant threat that the players must deal with. And I think that's also compatible with the spirit of the movies! The trade-off is this; on the one hand, the latter approach could have more symmetry between the two phases of the game. For example, "noise" in the temple generates red chips and red chips, when drawn, move enemy operatives inside the temple. If some analogue of noise chips move operative pawns around on the board outside the temple, the whole thing may be easier to learn for the player. But on the other hand, the former approach will be easier to design and balance. An in-between approach, where there are enemy cubes AND operatives moving around, would probably feel cluttered. Which way to jump? In a game that's supposed to be richly themed, I think it's most important to get the feel right, and we've always found that the board filling up with enemy cubes over time has always given the feeling of a growing threat. And I like the way the enemy operative cards could amplify this: you know you're going to face these guys in the temple, but the enemy on the board are the more immediate problem to be dealt with.

So, that may be the best starting point: enemy cubes on the board outside the temple, enemy operative pawns on the "board" only after the action moves into the lost temple.

A framework for the temple phase

I think I have a framework that pulls the ideas of the last post together coherently, without bogging the temple phase down in complexity or rules compliance.

Preliminaries, which aren't crucial to the idea:  

• Say the temple is composed of cards, each representing a room 
• Say they're laid out in a 5x5 grid, and 8 of the rooms have testable features.  
• The room cards are all face-down, except the entrance, but the back-printing on the rooms containing testable features is different, so you at least know which rooms contain features.

Now on to the actual idea:

At the start of your turn, you are given a cup, containing 5 white chips and 2 (?) black chips.  You declare how many actions you are going to take this turn, and remove as many white chips as the number of actions you plan to take.

Then you take your actions, which can include (i) move to a different room (card), (ii) test a feature, (iii) fight an enemy operative, (iv) steal something from another player.

When you move into a room, one or more icons may appear in the room, and you must add a chip to the cup for each icon in the room, as follows:

• "Noise" ==> red
•  "Trap" ==> blue
•  "Operative" ==> black (special)
•  "Powerup" ==> white (special)
•  "Phobia" ==> special

The three specials:

A room containing an operative icon means that if that particular operative card is active, you add the matching enemy operative pawn to that room.  If you move through a space containing an operative pawn, add a black chip to the cup.

If you have a powerup card with an icon that matches the icon in a room (eg a map or an amulet, etc), you get to add a white chip to the cup.

If the phobia in the room matches your character's phobia (eg snakes), you take a "-2" tile, and are -2 against any encounter you may face at turn's end.

After you have taken all of your actions, you end your turn by pulling chips from the cup and resolving each chip that you draw.  (I think) the number of chips pulled is given by the number of enemy operatives in rooms that contain either a feature or a player. 

• White = no effect.
• Blue = Trap!, draw a temple encounter card and resolve
• Black = Enemy!, decrease enemy progress track by 1
• Red = Noise!, move any enemy pawns in adjacent rooms into the room you occupy, BUT enemy operatives don't move if they are in a room with a feature.

If 2 or more enemy operatives are in a room with a feature, they test the feature.  If it tests favorably (eg it's the well of souls, or the grail room, etc), the enemy track is decreased by 10 (?).

 Some advantages of this system:

• It lets all of the symbols be handled in the same way mechanically during temple exploration:  simply add a chip to the cup
• It keeps the action in the turn quick; just move and test features, and then settle up the "consequences" later
• (subtle) Because players will tend to move to rooms with features, having "noise" resolve after player movement will tend to draw enemy operatives towards rooms with features as well.
• Enemy operatives have a simple AI and a spatial impact on the game, but their primary role is still related to the progress track.

Disadvantages:

• It's thematically a bit weird that you don't face trap(s) until turn's end, instead of immediately as you pass them.  Maybe thematically it's that the trip wire and the actual trap aren't in the same place.
• It has limited continuity with the outside-the-temple turn mechanic.  It does have good conceptual continuity, but there will definitely be the sense that a different set of rules govern the turns inside the temple compared to outside of it.
• As I've currently laid it out, it only works if the "enemy operative" system is perfectly balanced.  If it's too easy to enter the temple with few operative cards in the row, or to explore most of the temple before you start tripping over operatives, then you won't be drawing many chips from the cup, and so you'll always feel safe maxing out your actions every turn.  (Maybe to balance this there are also "temple guardians", which spawn and move without needing a matching operative card in the card row)

Concerns aside, I think this completes the conceptual work of introducing some of these new concepts (enemy operatives, new encounter system, powerup cards, etc) and integrating them with the old concepts (check marks, challenges, enemy cubes, enemy progress, etc) in a coherent and compact way.  I hope to have a go at solo testing some of these ideas and will report back!

Into the temple

I've been putting off thinking about the temple phase until the thoughts for the external phase solidified, and while that's still in progress, it seems like an appropriate time to see where the temple stands and where it could go.  


The goal of the temple phase is a satisfying third act that mirrors the third act in the IJ movies, in which Indy, armed with some knowledge, enters the lost temple to try to recover the lost artifact.  There are four qualities that characterize the temple exploration:

• Urgency  The player feels time pressure to complete the temple before the other players, or the enemy, complete it first.
• Danger  The temple is a dangerous place, and is full of challenges the player will have to overcome en route to the artifact.
• Discovery  The temple's layout and characteristics aren't fully known in advance, and exploration in the temple reveals surprises.
• Intentionality  The information the player has collected steers his decisions in the temple and help him to make decisions about, e.g., route-planning.

Our previous version of the temple had all of these qualities to some degree.  There are 9 temple tiles, all of which start face-down, and each of which had 4-6 rooms, 3 spaces for challenge tiles, and 1 testable "feature".  The multi-room tiles let you do some intermediate route-planning, while still presenting some uncertainty with respect to what is on the next tile.  


The problem, as I see it, is that it doesn't really fully deliver on the last two characteristics.  There isn't really much drama to the route-planning at present;  if you don't know what feature you're looking for, you just wander around trying stuff, and if you do, you just wander around looking for it.  The path you take in both cases is a random walk.  And there isn't much discovery -- if you know what feature you're looking for, you activate it; if you don't, maybe you'll activate some features randomly, but again, there isn't a strong sense of wonder unlocking the temple's secrets.


The reason that these aspects fall flat, I believe has to do with the mostly generic nature of the tiles.  Yes, each card has a different feature, and yes, the random challenges will make each tile different, and yes, the rooms all look different thanks to Steve's great visual design work.  But there isn't a feeling of place-specificity to each room, a sense that the room I'm currently in, or the path that I want to follow to get to the Throne Room, is fundamentally different from others.


What makes this more challenging is that the temple phase should feel closely connected to the external phase.  This means of course that ideally, mechanics should be similar, but also that game elements that are important outside the temple should play some role in the temple.  Additionally, we want to keep players on-task, which means single-mindedly searching for the artifact; we don't want to send them off on extraneous side-missions to recover lost gold or something.  


With the addition of new concepts to the external phase (e.g. phobias, enemy operatives, allies, powerup cards), perhaps there is an opportunity to utilize these concepts to amplify the discovery and exploration -- i.e., they provide more stuff to see without necessarily encumbering players with more stuff that they want to do.


Here are sketches of some ideas of things that could possibly be included, and then a future post will pull everything together once I've figured out how to do that.

Phobias are easy:  these can be incorporated overtly into the artwork, and if you face a temple challenge in a given room, and you have a phobia that is illustrated in that room, your response to the challenge is reduced by 2, same as outside the temple.  (The difference is that it's out in the open, it doesn't need a player to "discover" it in the artwork).

Powerups are also easy:  illustrations in the temple rooms can show icons matching those of the powerup cards, and when you go to a room with an icon matching a card that you hold, you get to execute a special ability as indicated on the card.  

Enemy operatives have to be handled carefully.  On the one hand, the idea of enemy agents chasing you through the temple works thematically; on the other, forcing players to police the operatives via some AI is a distraction.  But not having operatives in the temple at all may feel like a missed opportunity.  I may have an acceptable compromise:  some of the temple rooms have a color-coded spot that matches the color of one of the operatives.  If that operative is activated (ie, his card is face-up in the row of enemy operatives), you place an enemy pawn on that space.  Then what happens?

The easiest thing is that the pawn stays put and does something bad when you enter that room:  moves the enemy progress track, or increases the difficulty of a challenge, etc.  Something like that could work.

But I have an idea for a different system, that integrates with this.  The idea is basically this:  the player can set his "aggressiveness" level at the start of each turn, basically representing how fast he's going:  more aggressive means he will traverse more rooms in this turn.  But, there are three aspects that counterbalance going full-speed.  The first is that he's more likely to trip on the trigger for a trap.  The second is that he's less likely to "see" features that he can test.  The third is that he's more likely to generate noise.  Noise acts like a magnet for operatives in nearby rooms, pulling them closer to him. 

I think the way this would be handled is with a set of icons on the traps and in certain rooms. When you pass through a room with an icon, you check your aggressiveness and see if you are required (or enabled) to activate that icon.  What's neat is that some of the features can organically have associated effects; opening a heavy sarcophagus inherently creates noise; approaching the forbidden altar inherently triggers a challenge.  


As more rooms are discovered, the attributes of each room will create a network of effects that players will have to navigate, and this will add route-planning, particularly if the solution to the temple involves multiple steps (eg find the grail and then bring it to a font to test it).


The details need to be worked out further, but I'm optimistic these new ideas might provide useful raw material.

Still more on encounters again

So, to try and distill these encounter ideas into something that sounds like a coherent and compact playable version of the idea, here's what I'm thinking:


When you arrive at a location, you select an Encounter card from the deck for that city type; each card in the deck represents a sublocation (eg a Large City might have a Library, a Hotel, etc), and you know from the backprinting what type of sublocation the card comes from, and what the reward will be if you pass the encounter (it's always the same for a given sublocation).

When you flip the card over, there's an icon showing the challenge category.  You, and all of the other players, get a few seconds (5? 10?) to survey the scene.  Then, you announce how big of an outlay of APs you will make against that category, through a combination of your base stat in that category, any Ally card you have with ability in that category, and any Adventure cards you wish to spend.  Then, you slide the card into the Interrogator and see whether your outlay of AP was sufficient to pass the challenge or not.

But before you get to that point, while you're looking the card over, you and the other players may notice actionable visual elements embedded in the scene.  Specifically:

- Phobia:  Each player has a phobia; if you see someone's phobia on an encounter he faces, his AP outlay in this encounter is reduced by 2

 

- Enemy Operative:  Through another system, "Enemy Operative" cards are revealed in a row, and affect several systems.  If you see one of the enemy operatives on an Encounter card (whether it's your turn or not?), you can initiate a Fight challenge with the operative to remove him from the row.  The difficulty of the Fight challenge could be the number of Operative cards to his right in the row, and maybe an operative card is worth 3 enemy cubes if you neutralize it.

 

- Special item:  Through another system, players can aquire "Item" cards, which come in perhaps 6 varieties (eg map, book, amulet, torch, etc).  If you see your item represented in the illustration (eg you have a book card and you see an opened book on the table), you get to execute the special action associated with that item.

 

Perhaps to add a "race" element, the first visual element identified by one of the players is the one that obtains, whether or not a card has multiple elements.  So if I see a "snake" in an Encounter that you face, and I say "snake", you are -2 for the challenge, and don't get to fight Toht (an enemy operative) even though he is present on the card.

 

I like this as a way to get all players involved in every turn of the game; to add a mild time element that makes players feel like they must react, which adds some immediacy to facing an encounter; and to enhance the theming by incorporating the illustration into the actual gameplay, and not having it serve merely as window dressing.  This approach has two improvements over the v9 version:  the reward is known in advance, and the challenge category is known in advance.  So it's a simpler form of injecting uncertainty, making it a simple risk-reward dynamic; you don't want to overpay if you can help it, but you don't want to fail the challenge if you can help it.  

One downside might be that it will be easy to memorize the "solution" to each card.  But maybe not, since you'll only know whether a particular outlay worked, or not; you won't know where the threshold lies.  And perhaps several cards will look pretty similar for each illustration.  Another downside could be that to be on the safe side, you'll always just lay out the max outlay possible (if you can), so you're assured of passing.  

A third downside is the possibility of subjectivity -- "what, an outlay of 3 AP isn't enough to dispatch that wimpy looking street tough!?!"  It might be necessary to have a rubric that explicitly structures how the "passing" outlay is determined for each challenge category -- but perhaps the players should never be given access to it, or perhaps they are, but the elements that add to the required outlay are subtle elements in the illustration, and won't always be noticed.  Eg a wimpy looking tough holding a knife may have a difficulty of 3, but since he's holding the knife behind his back it's kind of hard to see unless you look carefully.

The thing is, given this somewhat elaborate way of resolving encounters, you'd kind of like to have a similar system operating in the temple.  Otherwise, the temple could seem like a let-down, or could feel disjointed from the outside-the-temple game.  I do think the Temple is probably due for an overhaul, in a way that possibly incorporates ideas like Item cards, Enemy operatives (though I think they mostly just function as a game clock), and maybe a different conception of how the challenges/traps are triggered.  I don't have such a scheme clearly articulated in my mind yet, but I think there may be some opportunities.

 

Encounter structure for v10

[Note:  I had already mostly drafted this before Steve's post on Friday...some of these ideas may have good overlap with that post, and some may conflict -- but I think it's worthwhile to have both posts preserved, for comparison purposes]


Assuming we are going to adopt a v8 scheme for challenges (at least for now), it's desirable to have a few things crystallize.  Here are some possibilities for v10.

In this approach, instead of rolling a die to determine the type of challenge you face, you flip an encounter card. To give a feeling of place-specificity, the encounter card that you face would be determined by the location you go to. In addition to the three main city categories (disregarding Strongholds for now), I think that each city each city type will have several "sub-locations", and each sub-location has associated encounter cards. The questions we need to answer are:

1. How much can a player control what sub-location he goes to?

2. How much knowledge does he have in advance of what reward he will receive for passing the encounter?

3. How much knowledge does he have in advance about the category/difficulty of the challenge he'll face?

4. What consequence(s) does he incur should he fail a challenge?

I'll engage these questions out of order. For question (3), the v7 approach to this has proven the test of time -- a player knows, going to a circle city, that he'll face either a Luck or Wits challenge, and so on for the other city types. The encounter cards should capture this dynamic, and remove the overhead of a die roll to determine the category of the challenge -- the distribution of the challenge categories on the encounter cards handles this organically.

For question (2), I would suggest that, per Steve's suggestion, the reward for passing a particular encounter should be known in advance, and all encounter cards for a given sub-location should pay that reward (and possibly something better as well for some "surprise" cards). I think this is important as a way to aid player planning and move progress along. It's one thing to go to a city, and face a swordsman that you're not adequately prepared to beat. It's another thing to beat that swordsman and find that he gives you a check mark in category X, instead of letting you remove an enemy cube. So I think it's good for the rewards to be fixed and uniform for a given sub-location, but the challenges to be uncertain but bounded.

For question (4), I increasingly favor the scheme mentioned in a previous post. The "vanilla" consequence of failing a challenge would be something minor like "end your turn". BUT, as "enemy operative" cards are revealed, each makes a particular encounter card outcome bad.

For example, for encounters that give a check mark, if Enemy Operative Z is activated, then these ALSO move the enemy progress track, e.g. So in the case of failing a challenge, Enemy Operative Y might, in addition to loss of your turn, ALSO force you to be relocated to a stronghold. (See that post for arguments about how this might help to make the game more dangerous and convey a more tangible sense of the enemy becoming more and more powerful as the game progresses).

Back to question 2: what are the rewards for passing a challenge? I think there should be 6, with one reward on each card:

• Receive a check mark in solution element 1
• Receive a check mark in solution element 2
• Receive a check mark in solution element 3
• Remove (capture) an enemy cube
• Receive an "Ally" card (provides stats boosts)
• Receive an "Item" card (provides a special power)

(For the last 2 items, my thought was that each region would have one card of each type face-up, and by passing an encounter in that region, you would be authorized to take the region's card.)

So, on to question 1, which becomes important in light of the answers to the other 3 questions -- if you want to receive this reward but not that reward, or if you want to face this challenge but not that challenge, you want to have some control over where you go. So how are the encounter cards structured into decks, and how do they convey a sense of place-specificity? I think there are two schemes that could work.

(i) Each city type could have 3 sub-location types, each of which pays one of these 6 rewards, for a total of 9 rewards (strongholds don't count in this since they are special). The sub-locations are appropriate to the type of city you're in; so a "circle" city, a "Major City", might have a Library, Museum, and Hotel; a "pentagon" city, a "Minor City", could have a Market, Castle, and Church. Maybe these are 3 separate decks for each city type, or maybe a single deck and you're given a choice of a couple of the top cards from that city type's deck when you face an encounter.

(ii) There are 6 location types, each with its own deck of encounter cards. Each city type has 3 associated with it: 2 that are shared with the two other (non-stronghold) city types, and one that is unique to that city type. So a Market might be present in both a triangle and pentagon city, but a Church will only be found in a pentagon city (eg).

The advantage of (ii) is that it's a more unified framework, the disadvantage is that there's no way to ensure the challenges you face in a city will be properly bounded, UNLESS we rigidly associated a particular challenge type with a particular sublocation. (Which could work, but loses some of the fun associated with the unpredictability of v7, in which you might go into a circle city loaded up on Luck but poor on Wits, just hoping you'll get a Luck challenge).

The advantage of (i) is that it can be more city-dependent, the disadvantage is that it creates more kinds of cards, but only 3 more compared to (ii). And if all of a city's encounter cards are kept in the same deck, then it might actually feel more compact (but then there will be some luck as to whether you can go to the sub-location you want to go to. To mitigate that, maybe there's a rule that you can draw down into the encounter deck until you get to a sub-location you're willing to face, but each card that you "skip" is +1 to the enemy progress, or you have to pay 1 AP to flip cards, etc?)

Finally, back to question 2 one final time: how does this integrate with "leads"? If we adopted Steve's idea, that most/all theme cards are available but must be pulled on to the board at a particular city type and sub-location, maybe it's simply that, instead of (or in addition to?) receiving the standard reward for passing an encounter, you can pull a theme card into that city, if its associated sub-location matches the sub-location you're in. I think I like this idea -- though it doesn't have the immersive quality of getting a card that says "You've received a telegram from Henry Jones that he's in Vienna", it does permit some planning, some competition between the players, but doesn't require as much bureaucracy as lead cards would. So it's worth thinking more about.

Quasi-Leads that Work Within the System

I really like the aspect of previous attempts to have a system whereby you have information about where something may be located and can act on these hunches. However previous systems have fallen short by adding cumbersome levels to the information system.

The concept of quasi-leads gives the feel of having leads to where something is and a reason to find it with no drastic change to the systems already in place or under consideration.

The system is based on three parts:

The first is a combination of theme cards and city designation. Each of the three city types is given a designation based on shape and region for a total of 6 city types. For example, the circle in the west is a museum and in the near east it is the site of ancient ruins.

The theme cards are then organized into three groups based on the city shapes. For example, the curator can be found in a circle city. Following the themeing of the cities, you get the result that a curator can always be found in either a museum or ancient ruins.

Players have a reference to show which theme cards can be found in what city types, though it is largely intuitive (an informant can be found in bars or markets, books of ancient knowledge can be found in libraries or temples, etc.).

The second is a combination of challenge cards and item cards. Challenges are divided into the 6 cities and regions, so that museums, libraries, ruins, et al would each have a pile of challenge cards. In the v7-8 hybrid, each pile would be divided into 2 known categories (so that players have some control over their route planning and optimizing their turns) that have a value of from 1–3. This value would be added to the enemy in the city to give the total challenge level of from 1–9.

In addition to the challenge cards, there are 12 item cards (or a combination of "No Challenge" and items) that show things like the grail diary or headpiece of the Staff of Ra. The items give a challenge category and value (v7-8) or an image to be decoded (v9-x). If the player passes the challenge, they take the item into their holdings.

The item cards are shuffled and dealt two each onto the 6 piles of challenge cards. Each pile is then shuffled and placed on the board.

A player entering a city (or using an action to face a challenge, giving an option to hunt for items) flips the top of the challenge pile for that city, possibly getting a regular challenge or rewarding him with an item.

The third part is the interplay between items and theme cards. Each item is only useful when taken to a theme card. Only Professor Jones can decipher the clues in the diary, and he has no information without it. Return the headpiece to Marion and digging costs no action while you are with them, etc.

This gives players an in-game reason to try and target specific theme cards over the basic need for information to drive the game forward. A player in possession of the grail diary can look at the reference and know that the professor can be found in a library or temple, so he can target his search in that way.

The benefit to this is that it works well within the current system (or can integrate into newer systems) and give the feel of having leads to follow without having to overburden the information system. Solo playtest have proven very positive so far and I'm interested to get your feedback to see if this is something that can be folded into the next playtest session to test out.

A thought on encounters to tuck away for later

I don't know if this warrants its own blog post. But just wanted to capture a quick idea for posterity.

There are two candidate versions of the encounters/challenges system that we've discussed as a replacement for the approach of v7.

The first was tried in v8: you go to a city, flip over an encounter card appropriate to that city, and it shows you the category (luck, wits, etc) and degree of difficulty of the challenge, as well as the reward you'll receive if you pass the challenge. To attempt to pass the challenge, you add up your stat in that category, any adventure cards you wish to contribute, and the result of a d6. The advantages of this system are that it manages the location-specific distribution of challenges automatically, and that it's very simple: every card has a clearly-specified reward and difficulty.

The second was tried in v9: the encounter card shows only a picture, and you choose a response (category and degree) based on what you think will "beat" the challenge -- eg "Luck 3" or "Wits 5", then slide the card into the Interrogator to see what the outcome is. The features of this approach include the possibility of different outcomes for each challenge, and that it feels thematically appropriate as well as "real" -- you're forced to guess at a "solution" rather than being told by the card how to beat it.

The point of this post is to say that there may be a couple of in-between options that have the simplicity and ease-to-prototype of the v8 approach while still retaining some of the features of v9.

First, I started a discussion on this subject at BGG, and one suggestion that emerged could be adapted in this way. Start with the v9 approach -- you are shown the scene, and you pick your response (category and degree) -- then, you slide the card into the Interrogator, and look up the /category/ you're attempting. And instead of an "outcome", it shows you the die that you roll to find the challenge's difficulty.

For example: You face an Arab Swordsman -- you decide to respond with Fight, and commit, through your stats and cards, to a "degree" of 5. You look up the result for "Fight", and it shows "d6". So you roll a d6, and the result is 3 -- that represents the degree of difficulty of the challenge. Since it's less than the 5 that you committed to the challenge, you pass. If instead you had chosen "Wits", the result may have been "d10", or "2d12", indicating that it's more difficult to fight a swordsman with your wits than with strength.

This approach is more like v8 in that the reward for passing the card would always be the same, but it would still have the possibility of different solutions like in v9. And part of the appeal of this is that you'd often be choosing between an obviously "better" solution (eg fighting the swordsman) and a solution that is probably harder, but that plays better to your strengths (eg debating with the swordsman).

Speaking of which, I wonder if we should contemplate reworking the challenge categories. For example, "fight" could be generalized to "use force" -- you can use force to beat up a Nazi thug, OR to try to push through a locked door.

A second way that some of the v9 concepts could seep into a v8 approach could be through the idea that different visual aspects of the card affect the challenge or the resolution of the card. For example, every player has a weakness/phobia, and if other players see your phobia on a card you're facing, they can announce this and force you to face the challenge at a -2 penalty, or whatever. This kind of thing could encourage players to be attentive during other players' turns, which might make the game feel more interactive. Maybe this scheme also fits in with Steve's idea of some encounters giving you an auto-clue -- it's there on the card, but you have to spot the trigger to be able to get it.