Moving targets

A while back I posted a half-formed thought on changing North's win condition: putting the rescue targets on the board and having them move slowly north, so that the players would have to chase them. At that point I was thinking about switching to actions instead of the flat 1 move and 1 encounter per turn, but I was worried that putting the rescue targets on the map would cut the original mechanic I was using for the win condition: coldbringer lair assaults.

Now that I've decided to revamp endurance from a disguised health bar into an action allotment, putting the victims on the board as moving targets works much better. Redesigning the board into the hexagon tiles also expands the distance involved, and the skill redesign makes success very hard but not impossible without bonuses. So there's a much better risk/reward system in place now: the players can burn all their actions to catch up quickly, but without spending a little time looking for gear, they'll have a harder time dealing with any challenges along the way.

I'm also thinking that instead of putting coldbringer lairs only in the black zone, they might now occur in all landmarks. This means that coldbringers will be in play earlier, and they'll have easier access to the village. I don't remember if I wrote about it here, but: the village is a place where players can go to heal, and where they go if they lose all their health. Coldbringers will target the village, and if too many of them reach it, they'll destroy the village - meaning that if players run out of health, they're gone for good.

So back to the lairs. Coldbringers enter play on lairs, and when one is defeated, a new one emerges from a lair. Assaulting and destroying lairs will restrict where coldbringers can spawn, giving the players a little more control and another option to protect the village than simply attacking coldbringers as they close in.

All of this should help give the players more choices to consider, hopefully without overwhelming them. In my head the game is still relatively simple compared to some of the very complex games I've looked at (like Arkham Horror and Mage Knight), and hopefully playtesting will confirm that.

That's the end of the redesign overview! My goal now is to get the game into shape for some proper playtesting. First priority is an instruction manual, so that I can watch people play without my input. 

And I'll try to actually work on this game more often, because I haven't done much in months.