Pressing on towards the goal

Rather than reply to each reply, which I think tends to make my thought process disjunct, I'm going to summarize how I envision it might work.

I picture the obstacles and discoveries being on tiles. These tiles could fall into four distinct types; obstacles tiles, discovery tiles, combo tiles (have both an obstacle and a discovery) or blank tiles.

I think that once a cave gets completed, one of these tiles is drawn and placed on the completed cave. This tile would be revealed once the first player reaches that cavern (or it could be placed and revealed once the first player reaches the cavern, not sure if it matters).

To spice it up and run with Seth's icon ideas, I think we could put a number of icons on the back of each tile. At setup, we place them all face down and mix them up, then seperate them based upon the # of icons on the tile back. Then when a cave is completed and the discovery/obstacle tile is placed, you would randomly grab a tile from the pile corresponding to the # of icons in the completed cave... Any thoughts?

I'm going to reply to the previous two replies seperately in just a bit.
-Darke

Well, I think modularity would be cool also, but I guess I just can't get my mind around how your method would work well. If you could explain it better (pictures or diagrams maybe?) perhaps I could get a better understanding of how you mean to implement it. I'm sure it's just brilliant if my feeble mind could understand it.

-Darke

Essentially, I was trying to evolve the "what happens when someone draws a card" mechanic, keeping separate from the tile-laying mechanic (this is assuming that there were cards!)

I am very happy with the tile-laying mechanic you have proposed for caves, passages and entrances; it's very crisp and easy to understand and doesn't require complicated "how many tiles with a left-hand bend do we need?" sort of thing.

Where we are differing is in what happens if a player enters a completed cave and searches it (either for free the first time or by paying APs.) I was proposing a card-based system because I feel that the range of things that could happen was wider than a simple chit-marker system.

Ok I went back and read your old post. Some great stuff in there and it really got the creative juices flowing. I understand your point about keeping everything in one deck. I think the game would feel A LOT lighter if were to implement such a system (which wouldn't necessarily be bad). I guess we need to decide how we want the direction of the game to go. Do we want a lighter feeling game that such a deck system would create or do we want something more deep strategy wise with the system I'm proposing? In my heart of hearts, I prefer lighter games so I'm torn.

Perhaps we could propose a compromise? Why couldn't we seperate (i.e. color code) the discovery/obstacle tiles the same way in which you proposed we seperate the search deck? It wouldn't be too difficult to decide which stuff should only happen at 'cave level' and which stuff should happen at 'tile level' (i.e. searching).

Another possible compromise would be to ditch the discovery/obstacle tiles and put that information on the main deck. I.E. the main deck would be dual purpose. If you were drawing for a completed cave, you would draw the card and look at the bottom portion for the obstacle/discovery information. If you were doing a search, you would look at the top portion of the card for that information. I like this compromise? What do you think? My main concern was how to denote what obstacles/discoveries were actually in the caves. We still might need chits or tiles to denote what was in the caves and to give to players to show what they've scored.

On a side note, I just thought of an idea regarding draw X tiles, keep 1. Some of them might be mandatory. I.E. Perhaps, you drew 3 tiles, one of them happened to be a cave in. If the cave in was mandatory, the player would immediately show it ot the other players and discard the other two.

I just realized that this is what you might have been refering to all along?

-Darke

David,

What did you think about the color coding of discovery/obstacle tiles?

How do you mean the dual purpose cards can get fiddly? I can't really envision how it would be a problem since in reality it's like having two seperate decks. (A neat little 'feature' might be to design the card backs half and half also, so depending on which thing you were drawing for, you'd rotate the card back to the appropriate orientation and then draw and read the card as normal, neat eh?)

I just realized a problem with the draw X and keep 1 card mechanic; this totally defeats any card staging mechanism we might want to use (if we still intend to use it. I remember the staging mechanic from reading your thread about the colored decks).

Thoughts?
-Darke

Well in the same way that, depending upon the type of game you were playing (tourist trap, spelunker, relic rush, etc), the search deck would be color coded, so could the obstacle/discovery tiles. So basically you take your 'single deck theory' and you break it up by deciding which of the cards relate to the game on a permanent cave level (obstacles/discoveries) vs a temporary tile level (searching). So if you were playing the spelunker game, you would use the blue search deck and the blue discovery/obstacle tiles. If you were playing relic rush, you'd use the yellow search deck and the yellow discovery/obstacle tiles. Understand what I mean now?

Not a bad system.... But your point above players missing obvious discoveries is an obvious shortcoming. Perhaps we could have some of these 'search tiles' contain a special symbol on the tile back. This tile could be the 'major' obstacle/discovery for caves. When a cave was completed, one of these tiles (if any are left) must be placed in the cave along with regular search tiles covering the rest of the cave tiles. When a player enters the cave, the special tile is flipped over for free and dealt with. I really like the idea about certain tiles 'freezing' the cave until they are dealt with. Good show.

As for reducing the chits, wouldn't you just be trading them for tiles?

Good use of symbols could help alleviate this problem. Most game system related information could be resolved with symbols with the rest of the 'white space' could be pictures/flavor text.

Sure, consider it defered. It might come back to bite us in the but though. I am confident we can find an elegant work around if need be.

-Darke

Ok, this sounds like a good way to go. Let's run with it. Now do we want to combine this method with Seth's cave tile symbol system? To clarify, some of the cave tiles will have symbols on them. Once the cave is completed, each cave tile with a symbol gets a search tile placed upon it. One of these search tiles MUST be a major search tile. Also we could add a rule that states that a cave can not be completed unless it has at least one tile with a search icon on it (therefore all caves will be sure to get a major search tile placed in them).

I think I like the finding an exit method, but I think using your idea about the different kinds of games, that we could do either, both, or neither (let the cards decide). However, for the 'base' game, I'd really like to give the players a impending doom counter (like Evo) and an exit mechanic. However, I'm not so keen on 'killing off' players that don't make it out in time. Perhaps we could explain it away and say that the cave was no longer safe and that the explorers had to exit from the way in which they came in.

Thoughts? Seth, chime in anytime my friend.

-Michael

Fair enough...I think we've made quite a bit of progress. I'm going to start a new thread to tackle some more issues.

-Darke