Playing with Portals
Matt and Bob came down for Memorial Day weekend and played the game a couple of times. The fixed bonuses are definitely staying and the revised cards seem to be working well. This allowed us to zero in on a new problem, and fix it.
I had not realized just how much I didn't like Forward Camps. They were a solution to a real problem (going back to start when you take too many wounds is too harsh near the end of the game), but they were a very clunky solution. The right answer was always to hold onto your camp until you were somewhere in the top half of the board, preferably Level 3, and until you took a second wound. Then you drop your camp, and if you take a third wound you go backward as little as possible. That's it. And if luck determined that your camp was placed 6 rows away from the Heart, and another player's camp was placed 2 rows away from it, oh well. Too bad. Better hope you don't need it. That made a little more sense when the players started in opposite corners and followed their own paths to the center. But now?
There were other signs that they didn't belong in the game. Placing your camp was easy to forget because it was a one-time thing. Unless the tile it was on got removed, then you got it back and had to place it again, which is unlike anything else in the game. I toyed with one of the player powers being “You may move your forward camp after it's been placed” but it seemed pretty useless compared to other power ideas. Either you could do it for free, which would render the camp meaningless because why wouldn't you just carry it with you every turn of the game? Or there would be a penalty, such as missing a turn to move your camp, which made it very weak compared to getting an extra item.
There's also the fact that there's no such thing as “Forward Camps”. Look it up. Base Camp is a term in mountaineering, but other camps further up the mountain are also called base camps, or just camps. I had to make up the name just to have something to call them. And the fact that I was using random junk to stand in for them in the tabletop version of the game was another sign that my heart really wasn't in them. It just took finding a better solution for me to realize it.
That solution is: Portals
The concept is that there will be Portal tiles mixed in with all the other floor tiles (6 of them for now, that may change). They only have a single entrance, and contain a green swirly energy vortex that I hope will look much more impressive when I draw it on the computer. If you move onto a portal, then on your next turn you may move out of any other portal on the board.
This means that you can go all the way back to Base Camp when you take too many wounds, without being out of the game. Ideally the portals will be spaced out across the board, so you can go to the nearest one and pop out at a level and row that is appropriate to your current strength.
What if they aren't spaced out? What if they get clumped together near the beginning or the end of the board? Well, that will affect everyone equally. If you have well-placed portals to get back in the action quickly after healing, then everyone is incentivized to take more risks and push the limits. If the portals are hard to get to or don't pop you out where you want to be, then everyone is likely to play a little more cautiously, not take too many chances. As opposed to the current situation where everyone's Forward Camp is in a different spot and you're stuck with wherever you had to put it.
To be fair, I haven't playtested this yet. But it just feels right. It fits so much better with the other parts of the game. It also works with the theme, since these portals could easily be how creatures and explorers from all over the world were drawn into this single mountain. They went into a cave or fissure or burrow, and ZAP! They were here.
Other changes:
- There are actual Heart cards now. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas, and I've made five of them into cards so far. One is the Nietszchean Abyss that I've had in my head since last summer. Two of them are straight-up fights, except one only uses your attributes and one only uses your items and gems. And two are a series of three fights that you need to survive, not necessarily win all of them. This seems like a pretty decent variety of end-game scenarios that build on what you've done throughout the game without just being more of the same. I will almost certainly add more once I've tested and balanced these.
- Added the concept of disabling items. This already existed with items that were Use Once or Use Next Turn or whatever, but I added an Event that forces everyone to disable an item, even if it's a permanent one. I made some tokens to represent this. This hasn't been tested at all yet. If it works, I may expand it: for example, there could be items for which “Disable an Item” is the cost to use them.
- Toying with the idea of having Traps not wound you if you fail against them. Instead, you would miss a turn.
- Going to run a couple of playtests to try out these new ideas first, but then: it's finally time to get serious about player powers. I imagine these to be a hugely important part of the game, and can't afford to put them off any longer. That will be a separate post.