Game #72 - Doppleganger by doho123

I was really confused by the combination of Refresh and Discard stacks for the supply cards. That sounds like an excessive muddle to me. Maybe by Discard stack, you mean Draw stack? From what I noticed, it looks like you discard to the Refresh stack, not the Discard stack. That's typically the draw pile and discard pile. The only thing that seems different in your usage is having the draw pile be face-up and the discard pile face down.

Ah, I see a point where you discard into the Discard stack! Investigations. It seems overly complicated. I bet there's something major to be done to that entire thing to overhaul it into a nice simple system that people won't end up confused on. I guess there are really 3 decks- a draw, a discard, and a refresh. There's just got to be some way to whittle that down!

Speaking of that, Crash Hazards were a little confusing, but not nearly as much as the above. It says "Map tokens are removed from Crash Sites when entered". That sounds backwards - doesn't that mean that you can re-investigate them over and over? Oh, I think you have a mixup with removing and placing map tokens elsewhere too. Changed rules?

It also seemed like a pain to know what you could discard for a hazard. I guess that could be easily resolved by having the supply items note on them which hazards they work on.

Why is there a half-win option? That sounds like it came out of some testing for some specific reason. It also seems very bad - if the Alien agrees, he's committing suicide, if he doesn't agree, they know who he is! Of course others might not agree because they have a lot of good proof... but what if they all do?

I like the other final option - constructing the weapon. That gives the alien a little something more to do, although I worry that there's nothing the other players can do about it (except maybe notice that he never has anything to contribute to hazards?).

I wonder if there's a simpler way to set roles at the beginning. I don't want to be running from room to room. Since you want the alien to have a special stack, there's no real easy way. You could deal out the roles randomly, then throw supplies face up and let people pick their initial two items (everyone else can't look when they do), with the caveat that the alien must pick two recovers. The question of which two you would pick if you could have any two seems like a tough one as long as you're not the alien - alien proof would be nice, but won't help with most hazards.

I like the 3 decks of tiles, I can see that working well to escalate things, and of course keep the civilization tiles out until the end.

I think it sounds like fun overall, but I always like hidden roles and bluffing. I kinda worry that the alien doesn't have enough freedom to defy the others safely (won't they always move straight away from the center as much as they can, to get to civilization? Any other move would be very suspect, as would placing any tile to block that straight path). That's something you'd have to see in play.

Yeah, when I read it before (GDS) I thought it was right in line with the recent rash of 'Mafia variants' (only I thought of them as Werewolf variants ;)) such as Shadows over Camelot and Sabateur.

Not that that's bad. Indeed, it appears to be popular.

- Seth