Huge redesign!

So maybe this isn't a great idea without actually having playtested yet, but I'm finishing up a pretty big redesign of how the entire game works. I'll be posting an overview of the changes over this week.
 

But first, why am I doing this? I felt that the original design is much too straightforward and doesn't give the player enough choice. Every turn is the same: move a space, resolve an encounter, lose some heat. The skill system relies too heavily on obtaining lots of items to rack up big skill bonuses. And the goal of the game is pretty static without much threat. So the redesign is aimed at giving the players more choices, focusing on risk vs. reward mechanics and resource management.

First up is a look at the core player attributes: heat, endurance, and health.

Since these core attributes were tied so strongly to each other, they sort of felt like a single large resource instead of three separate ones. It's more interesting to have to manage three different resources, so I'm making a pretty big change here. Well, except to health - that's not actually changing at all.

Heat works pretty much the same way as before - you lose some at the end of each turn due to the cold weather, and you'll be able to find items or use abilities to prevent heat loss or regain heat. One addition is that you'll be able to transfer some of your heat to other players if you're nearby. There will also be a new way to regain heat, but I'll cover that more in the endurance section. 

The main change to heat is that if you run out, instead of losing endurance instead, you now lose control of your character. Instead of doing stuff on your turn, you'll be forced to move one space north. This will continue until you're rescued by another player - meaning another player catches up to you and gives you some of their heat or uses an item to start a fire. If you remember the story of the game, you'll recognize that this mirrors what happened to the people you're trying to save: people just started walking north for no apparent reason. So this change ties the heat mechanic into the story of the game, which I think is more compelling and also scarier.

I want a name for this effect, but all I have right now is a stupid pun: "mesmericed".

Endurance has received the biggest change. Instead of just being a number you want to keep an eye on, endurance now represents actions: on your turn you can spend endurance to take actions, dependent on the cost of each action. The basic actions are moving and taking an encounter card for your space, but there's also some special stuff like trading. You regain endurance by resting - spending no actions on a turn. That might sound boring, but it ties into another change I'll post tomorrow. As a bit of a teaser, choosing when to rest is an important tactical decision.

This change to endurance means that I have more control over how fast the players move across the board: I can have variable movement costs on different terrain types, or with special events (like weather, there's another teaser). Perhaps more importantly, this gives the players more choice. In the original design, your turn let you move 1 space and take 1 encounter card. By allowing the players to choose how they spend their endurance, they get to decide whether to run ahead or to spend more time searching for items, or have more meaningful decisions over which route to take.

As another addition, how and when you choose to spend your endurance can also help you regain heat. If you spend more endurance than the amount of heat you would lose this turn (which will be easier to understand when I explain weather), you gain heat equal to the difference, because of your character's physical exertion - you get hot when you work out. So, as an example, if this turn you would lose 3 heat and you spend 5 endurance, you gain 2 heat. You'll still lose the heat during the chill phase, but spending endurance is now a way to make your heat more sustainable.

But in the spirit of a survival-themed game, I still want the players to have to manage their endurance carefully. With that in mind, I'm keeping one endurance mechanic from the original version: if a card or event tells you to lose more endurance than you currently have, you lose the difference in health. This will make the players think about when they want to spend their endurance, and in what order - for example, it's safer to take an encounter before moving... but maybe you want an encounter for that space over there, not the space you're currently occupying.

So that's the end of the first look at the revamp. Tomorrow I'll talk something I halfheartedly threw into the original design but now have a better handle on: the day/night cycle.