Thinkiness, a somewhat recent addition to Lost Adventures

I'm proud of what we accomplished with v7; it was a complete, publishable game that unfortunately just didn't get in front of a publisher who wanted to run with it.  I think we succeeded in two important ways:  we found a way to implement the information puzzle in a satisfying physical and mechanical way, and we captured the right feeling of mounting tension and urgency through the enemy zeal concept.

At the same time, we didn't worry terribly much about the decision space or the competitive space of the game, and as a result I don't think it was terribly deep.  I don't think that's a bad thing at all.  But in thinking about v16, I think I can see quite a lot of considerations and counter-considerations that emerge from the four 'negative currencies': hubris, time, injuries, and curses.(*)  And that's what this post is about. 

Starting at the end:  you can't win if you don't survive to the end, and most importantly that means you must purge all of your hubris in the final challenge.  To do that you'll need green cubes.  If you have 7 green cubes (the max) you can purge about 16 hubris over the challenge's five rolls of the white die.  If you acquired less than 16 hubris, you might be able to get away with fewer green cubes, which you like, since each cube you claim helps your opponents in a small way.  

Except there's another consideration:  you also must roll the black die and compare to the number of curses you hold.  'Bad' rolls cost you injuries, and if you peg the injury track you die.  Depending on how many curses you've acquired and how much damage you took during the temple phase, maybe you can survive all five rolls but maybe that's a close call.  If you will only be able to survive a couple of rolls, you'll want to have more green cubes or fewer hubris, so as to purge your hubris in fewer rolls and exit the hubris challenge earlier.(**)

Now, you'll say that you can mitigate this concern by just taking fewer curses, and one way to avoid them is to have perfect knowledge of, e.g., the true grail.  But temple card lookups are hard to come by and you probably can't look at all of them, so looking for grail information may mean you have fewer opportunities to obtain knowledge about the temple perils.  (Of course, you can get more lookups by investing more heavily in encounters, but that requires either taking on hubris or playing adventure cards, which require time to acquire.)  Anyway, better advance knowledge about the perils gives you the ability to acquire the right equipment and to know that it's the right equipment.  So, when a given peril comes up, and you know what it is, and that you're prepared for it, you can invest (bid) accordingly.  For perils you don't know, you have to bid more conservatively or else accept that your bids may incur penalties (hubris, damage, or time). 

This brings us back to the hubris challenge, because your exposure to risk depends on how many injuries and how much hubris you took due to these bids.  But from a game-winningness perspective, that's not the only thing you care about.  Mere survival doesn't win the day.  If it did, those conservative bids would be perfectly fine.  But low bids ensure only that you'll move very little across the temple track, and the surviving player furthest to the right on that track is the game's winner.  (Sure, you can play it safe and hope that everyone else dies, except that you might still be to the left of the enemy pawn, and thus you'll still lose).

What makes the bidding particularly difficult and, frankly, nasty, is that you don't know until after bidding what type of penalty a particular card deals out.  So there's another level of deciding whether to play it safe or go for it:  if, say, you have a lot of hubris and are close to the end of the time track, but have few injuries, can you get away with a high bid?  You can if the penalty for this card happens to be "injury", but if it ends up being "hubris", you may put yourself in a tough spot.  So do you go for it or bid safely? 

Thus the competition against the other players is what creates, indeed what has to create, the urge to be more aggressive than you'd otherwise prefer to be.  But the way I've presented things above is slightly misleading, because once the temple starts, and once the hubris challenge starts, what you've got is what you've got.  You can't get more green cubes to shore up for the extra hubris you've acquired, nor can you take on fewer curses to counteract the risk from the injuries you took as a result of reckless bidding.  Certainly, going into the temple you know how many green cubes you have and you know what you know, so you know a bit about your exposure to risk, but if you overextend yourself, there's no going back to fix it.  I like games like this but new players may not enjoy flaming out, although it usually won't happen until almost the end of the game. 

Because of all of these considerations and the interplay between them, I think we have a nice challenge for the players that isn't just a puzzle, but neither is it an insoluble exercise in fatalism.  I think the game is about managing your exposure to risk, and doing this more effectively than the other players.   I'm not sure that's what we set out to do, but I think it's a good place for it to end up.



(*) But do we need all of these currencies?  v7 has none of them, after all.  Why four?  They were added sequentially.  First (v11 I think) came time/injuries, a hybrid currency that represented the total amount of stuff you could do, but getting hit by the enemy or the temple cut into this.  These separated when time became your film's "running time" as a thematic nod, in v13.  You can run out of screen time or your character can die,   Late in v13 came the huris concept.  Curses are a minor thing that emerged in v14 as a solution to the problem of what bad thing happens to you if you drink from the wrong grail?  Obvious answer used to be "lose time/take injuries", but I liked the idea that it gives some risk in the hubris challenge.  Now that the hubris challenge is resolved with dice, it's a perfect solution for how that second die can do you harm in a way that scales with how many curses you have.  A developer could maybe merge a couple of these concepts to reduce the number of currencies but for now I like the dynamics that emerge from having all four.


(**) This is in a sense a dynamic balance: it's not a question of how much hubris or how many green cubes you have, but the ratio between them.  My game Sands of Time has this same principle, where what matters is the ratio of your resource production to your unrest level.  So getting unrest down is good, but getting it down lower than you need to is actually inefficient.

More thoughts on encounters and variety

Thoughts after writing up the "New nutshell" post about encounters and encounter cards specifically.


Each encounter card features a scene description (flavor text), a challenge category, and a success track.  I now think that the success tracks for all cards of the same city shape are going to be the same.  Thus, we could perhaps just have the track(s) on the board or a mat, and the encounter cards could become mini cards.  I like this, since all of the other cards in the game are mini-size cards.  The encounters were the only holdouts, because they needed those tracks, and the tracks needed to be on the cards because each track was slightly different (each had a different payout curve and/or the placement of some damage points, but all of that is going away, I think).


Of course, this also means that the encounter deck is a gussied-up version of the die-roll-to-find-the-encounter-category of v7.  It does exactly the same thing mechanically, but also provides a little story.  Maybe that's ok.  Perhaps what we actually want to do here is to have a paragraph book.  It could be quite simple:  roll a d6 (or d12 or whatever), look up the corresponding entry in the book for the city you're in.  "Cairo 6", "Bucharest 4", etc.  The entry tells you your challenge category and the pertinent flavor text.  There are obvious benefits; we can make encounters city-specific to inject more flavor, in addition to having more variety; instead of 45 encounter cards we'd have 72 or even 144 encounters.  And 6 or 12 entries should be easy to fit on a page, so it's a 12-page book, basically a second rulebook, which is probably not super different cost-wise from a deck of cards, maybe.


The decision of whether to implement this as decks of cards that are city-shape dependent, or as a paragraph book, is a publisher-level decision.  What we need to decide is whether it's sufficient to differentiate the encounters merely by the challenge category and flavor text, or whether we need something more.


I think we may need something more, but it needs to be an extremely simple something.  My current thought is that each encounter can modify the standard encounter resolution rules in some simple way, such that it brings out some aspect of the encounter but is easy to remember and implement.


For example, maybe the encounter is "the basket game" scene from Raiders, a "wits" encounter.  So, flavor text might be:


"You turn the corner to find a group of large baskets; men are loading the baskets on to a truck.  An enemy agent lifts the lid of each basket as it is loaded.  You notice one of the lids move slightly; is your contact hiding in the basket?  Which basket was it?"


Rule:  a "1" on the white die turns to a "4"


Now this is easy to implement (and for the other players to help you remember), since you only roll the dice three times.  It has an interesting effect.  The general rules is that white die moves the success track up by the white die result IF your investment exceeds that result.  So for this card, you know that an investment of 3 or less is harmed by this rule, because a "1" turns into a "4", which exceeds your investment, and gets you nothing; but, an investment of 4 or more is actually helped by this rule, as a "1" becomes much better.  Thematically this fits: investing more 'wits' makes it more likely that you'll find the correct basket before the enemy, but not enough wits and you might not make it.


Or perhaps instead it's


Rule:  "If the black die exceeds 4, end the encounter"


Thematically, this means that a high roll for the enemy means they've found Marion before you.  Mechanically, the enemy ordinarily moves toward your city when their roll is lower than their presence (number of cubes) in the region.  Thus, ordinarily high black die rolls are good for you -- less likely the enemy will move toward you.  With this encounter, they're bad.  As a result, do you maybe want to invest more so as to get further along the success track before this happens?  Do you want to invest less but plan to use a dynamite card to cancel an unfavorable enemy roll?  Oops you rolled a 5, do you want to burn a 'script rewrite' card to re-roll, or have you gotten far enough along the track?


Simple rules like these are easy enough to use, but may be substantive enough to make the encounters each feel just a bit different. 


My concern is that without this, after playing a few times, you'll just gloss over the flavor text of the encounters.  "Yadda yadda, the basket game, got it".  Whereas with them, it might be "Oh, the basket game -- this one makes high investment especially valuable and low investment especially bad; how badly do I need this info again?"


Of course it could instead be that each encounter is an entirely distinct mini-game unto itself with particular rules for how it's resolved (e.g. "Choose a basket on the card, then roll both dice; if the white die matches your choice but the black die doesn't, get one success.  Repeat 3 times" or whatever), but I think I prefer a common framework to a mini-game approach in that it will tie in better with the rest of the game, and specifically the game's "penalty currencies" - time, hubris, curses, injuries.  There's another post on that subject, coming up next.

New nut, new shell

v16 is coming together.  It's a nice riff on the simple map phase of v7 with some tweaks for immersion, with the temple concepts that culminated in v15 welded onto the v7 map phase chassis.  Is this the final version?  Gosh I hope so; there are only so many different things to try and we've tried a lot of them.  Anyway, here's the gist:


High concept


Lost Adventures is an adventure archaeology movie game.  Players are screenwriters, trying to invest their favored characters with the most compelling narrative arc such that that character emerges as the film's protagonist in the editing room.  "Doing stuff" is monetized in screen time.  Endowing your character with some trait or piece of gear (a card) requires some screen time to explain how that came about; traveling from London to Ankarra requires the obligatory "red line map overlay" sequence, and so on.  You can make your character's life easier by letting them take on 'hubris', but the powers that be don't like hubris and the character will face a reckoning in the end.


Thematically, then, your characters are trying to find a lost temple and gain enough information about its perils and tests that they can pass through it expeditiously to retrieve the lost artifact hidden within.  So, there's a map phase in which information and gear are acquired, a temple phase in which players jockey to exploit this information so as to run furthest ahead of the pack, and a final challenge in which players must purge hubris or else have their face melt off. 
Here's what this looks like, mechanically-speaking:


Map Phase

Each player gets 7 turns.  On your turn, do four things: 

1.  Move:  Move to any city.  If you change regions, incur one time step.  Add a black cube to the region you arrive in.  Reveal a relic, if you know you're in the right city.

2.  Encounter:  Flip the top encounter from the deck matching your city's shape.  Read the flavor text aloud.  Take a white cube.  Buy one white cube for each adventure card you play or hubris you take, two cubes if your adventure card matches the encounter type.


Then, roll a white and black die together, three times.  If the white die is less than the number of white cubes you hold, advance the encounter card's success track by the die result.  If the black die is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn closer to your city by the die result.


If the enemy pawn reaches your city, encounter ends, and only do one of the following two steps.  Otherwise do both.

3.  Look at Cards:  Look at temple secrets cards from categories matching those on the city's theme tile; total value of temple secrets cards you view cannot exceed the final value of the success track.  A temple secrets card's value is the number of green cubes on that card.   For each card you view, take a green cube from that card, if you wish.

4.  Receive Adventure cards:  Each city shape has four face-up adventure cards.  Take 1/2/3/4 at a cost of 0/1/3/6 time steps.




Temple Phase

The temple is made of tarot-size 'map' cards, laid end-to-end in a row.  Each card has a movement track over which player pawns will move, and an action track with 1-3 spaces.  Thus, the row of cards comprise one long movement track and one long action track.  Action in the temple consists of moving a marker to the next space on the action track and everyone doing what it says.  There are three types of actions:
1.  Gates.  The last space on each card.  Any player whose pawn is to the left of the gate when the marker reaches the gate takes one curse.

2.  Tests.  These are things like the Grail Room or Map Room, or lesser tests like locked doors.  Each holds several temple secrets cards that give information about e.g. the characteristics of the true grail.  Players write down their answer to the prompt (which grail is the true grail?) and then reveal simultaneously.  Players who guessed right move their pawns by X, players who guessed wrong get a curse or two.

3.  Perils.  This is where most of the action happens.  On a peril, three things happen:

i.  All players select a number, representing their investment in this peril.
ii. The peril category is revealed by flipping the temple secrets card that goes with this action space, and a 'threat' card is drawn and revealed, which shows a type of penalty (time, hubris, or injury).
iii.  In order of investment, players first pay off their investment and then move on the temple movement track.  Paying your investment means incuring the penalty indicated on the threat card, but having adventure cards that match the current peril offsets the penalty you incur.  So if you chose an investment of 6 and the peril is "heat", and you have two "heat" icons on your adventure cards, you'd only incur 4 penalties.
Movement is given by a lookup table, corresponding to bid order.  High bid moves 4, low bid moves 0, or something like that.  Ties are unfriendly.  Enemy pawn moves in this step as well.


Final hubris challenge

Each player rolls both dice.  If the white die is less than the number of green cubes you hold, purge hubris equal to the die result.  If the black die is less than the number of curses you hold, take injuries equal to the die result.  Repeat this five times.

If you hit the end of the time track or the end of the injury track, or if you didn't purge all of your hubris, you are eliminated.  Of the remaining players, player furthest to the right on the temple track wins, UNLESS the enemy pawn is further still. 


Some comments


1.  The map phase is similar in conception and execution to the v7 map phase.  There's the growing enemy presence, the time cost of movement, the ability to help other players and be rewarded in the process, the acquisition of knowledge.  Differences (improvements?) are (i) scripted sequence instead of free-form, (ii) encounters have a bit more substance and suspense, (iii) information isn't all equivalent in cost/value, (iv) ability to use time and hubris as resources to improve your efficiency, but with possible ramifications later on.


2.  Some tweaks for balance may be needed.  A specific concern is that late in the game, there may be no city the enemy can't reach in three rolls.  There are cards to mitigate this, but may need to go to a custom d6 for the black die.

3.  Luck.  Each player will roll each die 26 times, which should be enough for statistics to even out, but you'll have turns where there's no suspense and turns where you fail spectacularly due to poor rolling.  May reintroduce "script rewrite" cards to allow you to buy, or impose on other players, re-rolls, to smooth out these swings of luck.  I'm not even sure luck is a problem, per se, but it may mean the game won't appeal to certain players -- certainly the "no output randomness!" crowd will hate this game.  I think it's ok if the game doesn't appeal to everyone.


4. The mechanics for the two phases are quite different  That's how v7 worked so it's no worse, and the temple phase should be much faster than the v7 temple.  A couple of attempts (v11, v15) to make the mechanics symmetric across phases didn't pan out, so here we are. 


5. Encounters may be a bit samey now, but that might be strictly better than the extra rules that would be needed to make each play out differently/"thematically".  The current approach appears to take the view that the flavor text that sets the stage, and the suspense of rolling the dice, are sufficient to convey the right feeling of encounters vis a vis the old system which was just a barrier you had to pay cards to surmount.


6. The game should be fairly tight, which I like.  We can adjust the tightness/looseness by adjusting the length of the time track and injury track, and the number of rolls you get in the hubris challenge. 




7.  Nice (to me) that there's some flow to the things that you're worried about -- you're able to kick the can down the road on some things at each point, which is tempting.  In the map phase, you mostly care about time and hubris, curses a bit and injuries not at all.  Then in the temple time becomes a peak concern, hubris and curses are worrisome and injuries, somewhat of a concern.  Then in the hubris challenge, time isn't a concern but now you're very worried about the dance between curses, hubris, and injuries -- it's the day of reckoning where you learn whether you took on too much hubris or too many curses for the number of injuries you took in the temple.


8.  Corollary of this, may need to provide some first-time guidance, or an 'easy mode' setting (e.g. adjusting tracks in step 5), so first time players don't crash and burn too spectacularly first time through. 


Some testing is certainly going to be required to balance everything, but from a design perspective I think it's complete and coherent with few rough edges.  Is the end in sight at long last?

Modular construction

For most of the game's development the setting has been the quest for the holy grail, but we always thought of this as one scenario among (possibly) many.  For the last year or so I've wondered whether the game strictly needed different scenarios, or whether it couldn't just be thought of as a generic standalone game that encompasses all films in this genre.


I still mostly think this; at least I think we may not gain much by changing the basic layout and logic of the temple, and of the theme cards, from scenario to scenario.  It doesn't matter whether it's "Liesl von Osterreich" who gives info about the true grail or "Mathilda Cottonwood" who gives info about the headpiece location.  These are all just chrome.  For the temple, changing the structure too much might result in a whole lot of rules to support variation without necessarily making the game more interesting to play.


I do still think we could have different map boards and different encounter cards and such for some fun variety, but I don't think these are strictly necessary either.


However, that's not to say we couldn't add just a bit of variety to the temple.  Take it as a given that the temple includes five peril cards, two red (the approach to the temple) and three purple (inside the temple).  Take it as a given that the temple will always feature one big knowledge check: the true grail, the staff length, the idol's weight, whatever.


Within this framework, we can shake things up just a bit.  For example, we can add a "gate" or two, as described in the previous post, which presents a knowledge check or a test of some sort.  Which stones are safe to step on, which key opens the big door, which chords must you play on the instrument to reveal the hidden passage, etc.  These are similar to the 'big knowledge check' but maybe the stakes are lower -- a minor bonus for passing, as opposed to a steep penalty for NOT passing.


And, it's fairly straightforward to vary where in the temple these knowledge checks occur.  The grail room comes at the end, the map room (staff length) comes between the red and purple perils, the idol room is after the purple perils but you must then go BACK through the purple perils, and so on.  And correspondingly the gates can be placed in a couple of different spots in similar fashion.


As a result you can create temples that feel slightly different.  They aren't a ton different from a mechanical or strategic standpoint, but they change things up just a bit to offer some variety from game to game.


There are two challenges to implementing this vision.


The first is the player notepad.  If we want a single notepad that can be used in any scenario (I think we do), how do we capture all of this variety?  I think something like, have a separate area for each module on the sheet, and during setup just physically scribble out on your sheet the modules you're not using, or something like that.


The second is, how do you instruct the players how they ought to set up the game, i.e. how to select modules and where to put them?  Is it done randomly, or are there a couple of prescribed setups, or do players get to choose, or what?  Probably there must be at least one "default" setup for first time players, but allowing for modularity without leaving players feeling overwhelmed by the options may be challenging. 

No, dice!

I've talked at length about mechanics I've come up with to evoke a movie-making theme, and the one I'm proudest of is the resolution cards.  Previously I was resolving encounters with custom dice, with the number of dice you rolled for yourself and the enemy commensurate with the 'investment' of each in the encounter.  I realized that you could encode the same information onto cards, albeit at a slight loss of randomness, but with the benefit that we could add other stuff to these cards.  Specifically, we could include storyboard art and a description of what has happened -- "Protagonist throws punch"/"Operative draws a pistol" etc.  So in resolving the challenge it's as if you're story-boarding the scene, and the cards match the challenge category you face so it's thematically appropriate.  I love this idea and would hate to let it go. 

But it's not without a few drawbacks.  First, it's extra steps in encounter prep: "Grab the encounter deck for the appropriate challenge category, put a marker on the enemy track, put a marker on your investment".  It adds some minor fiddliness: shuffle the deck you just used after the encounter.  The randomness is bounded (this I consider very minor).  It's another component (48 cards) that eats up some table space (4 decks).  And it requires a mat for the encounter resolution, with tracks for your investment and the enemy investment.  And possibly the worst part -- when you flip a resolution card, you have to place it very precisely so that the tracks on the card line up with the tracks on the mat, so you can compare your investment and the enemy's to the results indicated on the card.

Now none of these are that big a deal and the pros, to me, outweigh the cons.  But it does take time, and those extra 48 cards and the mat are not insignificant in a game with a lot of parts.  Compared to 10 custom dice, maybe it's a wash, but what if we could do this with standard dice?  What if we can do it with just two standard dice?  Unfortunately for my beloved resolution system, I think we can.

It's so simple I wonder why I didn't think of it before.  When you face an encounter, roll two dice, one red, one white.  For the red die, if the number is less than the number of black cubes in the region, move the enemy pawn that many spaces closer to your city.  For the white die, if the number is less than the amount that you invested in the encounter (adventure cards, basically), advance that number on the success track.  Repeat this three times.

That's it.  There are other bells and whistles about ways to use adventure cards to get out early, block bad results, and some things like that, but then there were some bells and whistles with the resolution card version too.  The statistics are different.  In the resolution card version the expected number of successes scaled linearly with investment, but here it grows with investment.  But on the whole it captures some of the same suspense but with zero overhead, fewer rules and fewer components. 

Ah, but there's another problem; the hubris challenge also used resolution cards, and these had two effects.  First, they ate hubris, their main function.  Second, they deal out penalties for curses you've acquired, e.g. if you drank from the wrong grail.  Can we capture this with dice as well?  Here again, two dice to the rescue.  White die is for cancelling hubris, red die checks against curses.  If you roll less than the number of curse tokens you have, you lose life equal to your die roll.  

There are a couple of things to think through, most notably that, assuming we use a d6, there's no difference in your performance in the hubris challenge if you have more than 6 green cubes.  If there are ways to lose green cubes during the challenge, then having more cubes is better.  On the other hand maybe it's ok for the game to be saying that if you have more than 6, you've been inefficient, and could have played it closer to the bone.  Or we could just use a d8 or d10 in the hubris challenge, although that may be swingy.
I've rolled through a few challenges this way just to try it out, and I like how quickly it sets up and resolves.  Yes, you have to use your imagination a bit as to what the dice represent, but that's true of every dice-based resolution system.  The biggest drawback may be that over three rolls (six dice total), the statistics just won't even out very well.  Sometimes the enemy will scream to your location, sometimes they won't move at all.  Sometimes you'll fly up the success track, sometimes you'll be sucking pond water.  In previous versions players had "script rewrite" cards that changed an outcome in some way.  We could reintroduce that concept here, maybe just in the form of a few tokens that everyone gets that you can spend for force another player, or allow yourself, to reroll a die.  A different thought was to roll two dice for one or both effects and keep the ... lower? higher?  That's the problem, it's not easy to define what you want!  You ideally, for the white die, want the highest die that's lower than your number of white cubes.  Neither "keep the lower" or "keep the higher" quite capture what you want here. 
So I'm potentially very upbeat about this change, particularly since it seems to move us closer to the simplicity of the v7 system but with more substance and suspense, but will just have to see how much of a concern random swings of luck are and whether they balance out over the course of the game.   

More cowbell

I finished a playtest of v15, and while it mostly worked, some issues emerged.  By about the 4th of 7 turns, nearly all of the players had full information about the temple. Thus there were subsequent encounters where no one cared about the info that was available, and those encounters fell flat.   Happily it made for a good stress-test to see whether the new temple system ("poison") works even when everyone has full knowledge, and the answer is a qualified yes.  The experience of wanting to bid high to get to move seemed to come through successfully. 



There are actually two problems bundled together here, players having full knowledge and players having identical knowledge.  We can address the former by making info harder to get, but getting info is fun and increasing the frustration level is a poor solution.  A different solution may be to put more information into the game.


Currently the info you can get includes:

Relic locations (2)
Temple start city (1)
Temple perils, red (2)
Temple perils, purple (3)
Aspects of the true grail (3)


That's 11 total pieces of information that are available.  But, we can't add more temple perils, although that would be the easiest thing.  Each one requires a bid-and-pay-and-move resolution step in the temple, so more perils would drag out the temple.  In contrast, the true grail is just a quick knowledge check, and we could have more items of that sort.



On the other hand, the perils affect the map phase in a way that the grail room doesn't, in that they tell you which peril symbols you should be acquiring on equipment cards.  How could a quick knowledge check also be actionable?



One easy-ish solution is to add a something like a door that is locked and requires the correct key.  There are several possible keys, which are treated like relics, such that each resides in a hidden location.  This adds several pieces of information, but unlike the others you don't necessarily need all of this info.  Some players will go for this info, some won't, so it adds player differentiation.   (And, to mitigate the effect of having spent time acquiring the wrong key, maybe each key also confers a special power in the temple).



The downside of this is that it ratchets up the number of different kinds of things that players need to know, and thus the number of different kinds of operations to perform in the temple, which is perhaps a concern.  However, maybe these knowledge checks are actually different modules, and different combinations of modules, along with where in the temple they occur, can give some variety to the temple.  Maybe more brainstorming on this in a future post. 




The problem of players having identical knowledge is probably exacerbated by the shared encounters, so even though it will take longer, I think we need to seriously consider a return to individual turns, as described by the previous post.  A nice benefit is that it removes at least some of the rules that the shared encounters require.  I think the turn mechanics are shaping up and I'm encouraged by their simplicity.


Map phase:
1. Move, add a cube to the region you're in (reveal a relic if you're in the right city)
2. Face encounter (read card, invest adventure cards, flip 3 resolution cards)
3. View temple cards (total value less than or equal to the point on the succes track you reached)
4.  Receive adventure cards (first is free, after that it's 1/3/6 time to take 1/2/3 cards)


Temple phase:
1. Simultaneous investment bid
2. Resolve in bid order:  incur penalty equal to your bid (offset by having the correct peril symbols on adventure cards), then move on the temple track (commensurate with your relative position; ties are unfriendly)
3. Players lagging too far behind on the temple track incur some penalty


And then a couple of knowledge checks are interspersed in the temple phase.  That doesn't seem all that bad.  v16, here we come!

Mostly for Seth, a v7/v15 hybrid

Seth expressed in a tweet that he was nostalgic for v7.  Naturally this got me to thinking, what would v7 looked like informed by the sensibilities of v15?  In some ways this was what v13 was trying to be, but it didn't work because, at that time, the encounter system was open-ended: encounters continued until you reached either a positive or negative resolution, so they could keep going for sometimes 6 or 7 die rolls each before the player learned whether they succeeded or failed.  

This led to enormous latency, to which the shared encounters of v14 were the solution.  But in v15, I'm imposing a fixed length on each encounter: four resolution card flips.  Could it work to have individual turns with individual encounters, each with, say, three resolution flips?  Maybe, although I think there will still be latency issues.  But here's how I think it would work.

First, the turn mechanic in v7 was a Tikal-like action point allowance system.  Scrap that. Information is the point of the map phase, build the game around that.  Time is a resource.  On your turn, you can burn time to draw cards, and to travel to any city.  Once there, add a black cube to that city, and reveal the top encounter card from that city type.  It has a challenge category.  Set the "enemy investment track" at the # of cubes in the city.  Pay cards to get adventure points (cards matching challenge category worth more adv. points), set the "player investment track" at this number.  Then, flip three resolution cards.  For each "X" at or below the enemy investment, move enemy closer to your city.  For each "check" at or below your investment, advance the success track.

If the enemy reaches your city, the encounter ends.  You can look up information or get a card, but not both.  Otherwise, encounter ends after the third resolution card.  Then, you get to look at temple cards that match the theme card for the city you're in.  The solution track tells the total value of cards you get to look at -- the further you've gotten, the more total value of cards you get to examine.  A temple card's value is the number of green cubes on that card; several were placed on each card during setup.  After you view a card, you can remove one green cube, making it easier for everyone else to see that card but helping you in the hubris challenge later on.

After you look at temple cards, you get to take one adventure card from the face-up display, presumably based on information you have about the temple. 

Then, the temple would still be essentially the v15 version -- a map track to see who is furthest along, and players incur a series of five auctions.  In each, you are bidding for how much of a penalty you're willing to take in exchange for moving further along the map track, but your bid can be offset if you have adventure cards that match the current temple card's peril.  So advance knowledge, and advance preparation, both help.  The encounter system above seems compatible with this:  you want to progress as far as you can in each encounter so as to get max info and thus be able to draw cards wisely.

Now, in looking at this ... actually it's not too shabby.  It captures some of the nice things about v7 but in different ways -- cubes added to cities to make challenges more difficult, possibility of 'sharing' information but now handled abstractly. 

There's an interesting trade-off, though.  The v15 encounter phase has shared encounters, which need quite a few extra rules to make them interesting, but there are fewer encounters in total so there's a big savings in time.  I can't see the map phase in this hybrid version taking less than an hour, whereas in v15 it could seat 5 players and still clock in under 40 minutes, I suspect. 

Now the map phase in v7 wasn't exactly quick either, because all of that sliding clues into sleeves and complying with the cube and track manipulation bureacracy ate up a fair bit of time too.  So it may be that front-loading all of the turn time in the encounter resolution might not be that bad.  Really now it's just the equivalent of "roll some dice three times", it's just that the dice take the form of cards.  And the encounter setup is fairly automatic.  Maybe that's not so bad.

But it's not just that it's an hour, it's that 28 encounters is just a lot to sit through:  they're all a bit samey.  But more variety would add more rules and thus more time to comply with them.

I think it still has some of the players-acting-in-isolation issue of v7 but with the enemy pawn moving around, there's an effect sort of reminiscent of Hansa, i.e. where you leave the enemy pawn influences where the next player is likely to want to go. 

I'm not sure yet where hubris fits into this, but maybe I can find a couple of little ways for players to get a shortcut here or there in exchange for hubris, and of course you pick up some hubris in the temple.  We could of course get rid of hubris entirely but it's grown on me so I hate to see it go. 

One of the strong points of v7 was that it was pretty intuitive.  Players taking individual turns makes sense to players, since most games work this way.  It's less easy when it's "here are the rules that govern these shared encounters"; people have less of an intuition about what a shared encounter entails. 

Anyway, this idea is actually pretty easy to solo test using most of the same components as v15 so I'll at least give it a go and see how it plays.  It might just be that a return to v7, at least some aspects of it, are what's needed to really push things forward.