All For One

As I may have mentioned, Scurra was kind enough to send me a copy of his Three Musketeers game: All For One.

I Can't get over what a good idea I think this game is, and I'm excited to playtest it- hopefully tomorrow. I will keep you all posted as to how the game goes, but in the meantime I've been pondering it a lot and playing some solo games (controlling all players in a 3 player game) to make sure I've got the rules right. I've been asking Scurra a thousand questions to make sure I'm clear on how it goes. Finally I think I've got a handle on the rules of the game, and we will be playing by those rules tomorrow to see how they go.

Just from thinking about it and my solo tests though, I suspect there will be some suggestions from my friends along these lines... First I'll summarize the rules, then I'll post the probable suggestions. After playing the game as written it may turn out that those suggestions do not come about.

On their turn players choose one of the 6 characters to play as for the turn, and there's a small penalty for choosing the same character the last guy chose. Players have a secret loyalty to either King Luis or the Cardinal, and they can pay a price (a turn and a VP) to change that loyalty. In the endgame there are bonuses based on which faction you are loyal to. Mission cards (which double as Dueling cards for combat) describe items located around the board that need to be taken to certain locations, and completing these missions scores VPs for both the player and the character. Movement is restrictive, and running into another character ends your movement. There are also NPC Guards which serve to not only stop the movement of a musketeer, but also forces them to Duel via a Rock-Paper-Scissors based mechanic. So the point is to complete missions, and to do so with characters of the faction to which you are loyal.

The changes I see as likely to be suggested are as follows:
1. Instead of loyalty bonuses and scoring the VPs that 'your team' scored, deal out characters (face down) to each player and let each player's score be his VPs plus the VPs on his secret character.
2. Change rules for healing injuries- make it an action that can be taken only at certain locations and seperate it from the Move action (rather than replacing the move action and teleporting the Healed character to his home base).
3. Just thought of this- maybe reduce movement by 1 for each wound...
4. Change Incapacitation rules (for when a character takes too many wounds in a duel)- An incapacitated character drops all his stuff and 'respawns' at his home location. this would end his turn. This would be instead of the character dropping his stuff and having to wait until a player chooses that character and uses a Heal action to get that character back in the game.
5. Make the Pickup/Drop Token a free action as opposed to using an action for each token dropped or picked up. Or at least let 1 action cover all the dropping and picking up at a location. I don't think it should cost 2 actions for a character to drop an item and pick up a different one (like if they're at capacity for example- and can't pick up any more stuff).
6. No suggestion will likely be made about the duels, although I still think the Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic is a little iffy, making the duels largely luck-based. There's really very little way of giving yourself an edge in combat. In a thread before I suggested a different mechanic wherein a player could set it up so they have a better chance to win a fight, and I still think something like that might be appropriate. But that would take more changes to some of the other rules and components (my suggestions above can be implemented within the game system as is)

So as I said, we'll be playing the game as written first, and I will post the results here.

- Seth