FastLearner wrote:
Here's an idea: If you make it to the summit you win, period. If no one makes it to the summit, though, or the Royal Team gets there first then points acquired through good climbing determine the winner. Then I tweak the game so that reaching the summit is improbable, that in only (say) one game out of three or five will someone actually make it. This provides two ways to win, always a plus in my book. What do y'all think?
I like it very much! It improve the replayability (or the freshness, as Mario would say) and will make the games more memorable. Also, it's very easy to implement and give a nice end condition tied with the theme so the game will never bog down.
All appreciated, I assure you.
Yeah, after hpox's excellent initial post I pretty much thought of them as useless, too, but later I realized they did still serve a couple of purposes and so I'm confident that they're back.
I'm considering this.
Aye, something like that makes good sense. I especially like the idea of the climber with the lowest ability with that type of terrain is the guy who dies (with the player choosing in the case of a tie).
Aye, though I'd probably want to limit it to one tile per climb action (which you do imply).
I'm pretty much convinced to kill the auction now, though to give the game enough "depth" I'm going to work on a slightly more complex scoring system or something... elegant is good, but I'm concerned about falling over the line into "simple".
I think the current camp system is workable unless something else pushes it around.
Definitely an interesting idea. I'm concerned that it might make the game too fiddly, but I'll think about it.
The route tokens make the final board look too cool. Shared routes are a possibility but don't fit the 1930 theme. (As an historical aside, today most climbers take the same couple of routes, but that's only after a lot of people died or were seriously injured figuring them out. For example the last portion of the north face was considered unclimbable due to a 100 foot high rock wall that no one had managed to climb, both because of the features of the wall, a 15-foot gap that had to be crossed, the wind, and other things. In 1975 a Chinese climbing team made a huge sacrifice to succeed at the north face: they brought a 20-ft ladder up with them and when they got to the wall they all took their gloves and boots off so they'd have really good grips. Standing on each others' shoulders and cramming their fingers and toes into tiny crevices they managed to put the ladder across the crevice. In the process, though, all of them lost some fingers and toes to frostbite. Everyone who climbs the north face now uses the ladder they put in place.)
Based on some comments above I figured an Evo-type movement of the weather was the way to go, so I'll work something up. I'm not big on that kind of flavor for this game, especially since I'm eschewing text for the whole game. I'm avoiding text for the bulk of my designs so that it can easily be internatinalized.
[EDIT: There could be a facedown deck of Gadgets where you turn up the top three- like Sponsers and Climbers- which would fit the theme, and you could just make it another action rather than only at a camp... might work out that way.]
I think allowing these items for purchase as an action that's only available at a camp would add to the flaver and also the scoring mechanism described above. Yes, it means more peices, but in this case I think it addsmore than it subtracts. Besides, we're doing away with route tokens, board clutter (I still recommend the 1-line energy track rather than 1 per player or having lots of Energy Counters), extra tile piles... looks like the game will consist of a few tokens (Camps, Climber, Energy tokens in each color, 1 Weather token, Climber cards, Sponser cards, maybe Gadget cards, and Gold Bars. Oh, and a way to keep score, which could be a paper and pencil, or a scoring track, or VP chits.
As I noted in a previous post, I once had equipment in the game. There are a couple of downsides that were strong enough that I eliminated it. First was that the game seemed too... fiddly. There's already a fair bit to manage, and tracking equipment just seemed to make it worse. The other thing is the amount of math: The more numbers you need to add up (a) the more likely you are to screw it up and (b) the more you punish people with bad math skills. The same holds true of negative numbers: I'd rather just increase all of the numbers across the board so that things that would be negative can be set to zero.
Yes thanks, it's quite helpful! [/]