New mechanic: weather

Weather is another thing that I thought up for the video game idea, and that didn't translate well to the first design of the board game. The idea was that some encounter cards would apply a weather effect that's active until a new weather encounter comes up. The trouble with that idea is that especially harmful weather might last a very long time, which could produce a depressingly random difficulty spike with no reasonable way to counter it.

So now I have a better idea: weather dice!

At the start of each day (see yesterday's post), you'll roll a weather die for each of the three map zones - green, blue, and black - and place the die beside the correct zone. The weather effect showing on each die applies to every player in the zone until the next time the weather die is rolled. So, in other words, every two turns the weather changes. This means you're much less likely to spend a long time stuck on a particularly nasty weather condition. It also means that there's more variability on a turn-to-turn basis.

Currently I'm thinking that each weather die will be a twelve-sided die. There are six weather conditions, and the frequency of each condition is weighted differently in different zones. Since it gets colder as you go north, the green zone is relatively mild, and the black zone is the most dangerous. To make the different weather conditions easy to understand, I'll want to include reference cards so any player can easily check what each weather condition does.

The basic effect of weather is the chill rating. Those of you who live in areas with cold winters (like me, as a Canadian) probably know that a cloudy winter day is warmer than a sunny one, because the clouds help trap heat. Each weather condition has a chill rating, which reflects those differences in temperature. Weather's chill rating replaces the original design's per-turn heat loss: depending on the weather, you might lose more or less heat on each turn. I think that's a lot more interesting than a flat "lose X heat per turn".

Some weather conditions have additional effects. Here's my current list of weather:

• Overcast: chill -1
• Clear: chill -2.
• Fog: chill -0. During enemy movement phases, instead of rolling, move each enemy in this zone to the nearest landmark. 
• Snowfall: chill -1, movement cost +1.
• Windy: chill -2, pierce 1.
• Blizzard: chill -3, pierce 2, movement cost +1. Lose 1 endurance. 

Some of that needs explaining.

• The idea behind fog is that the enemies get lost and reorient themselves at the nearest landmark (special map spaces). This is a good way to shake up enemy movement every once in a while, and to make landmarks more of a risk/reward, since you could get ambushed if the weather turns. Fog mostly comes up in the blue zone, the frozen river.
• "Movement cost +1" means that the endurance cost of entering a space is increased by 1. Heavy snowdrifts are harder to move through.
• "Pierce X" means that X amount of this weather's chill cannot be reduced. High winds can cut right through your clothing.
• "Lose 1 endurance" means that when this weather condition is rolled, each player in the zone immediately loses 1 endurance. Blizzards are dangerous and require a lot of effort to move through.

As I said above, weather is weighted per zone. The green die will have mostly overcast and clear weather; the blue die is a bit colder and has more fog; and the black die has a higher frequency of dangerous weather, including more blizzards than the green or blue zones. During playtesting I'll tinker with the frequency and severity of each weather condition; these are only starting values.

That's all for weather. Tomorrow I'll post the revamp of the skill system, which is probably the most significant change to how the game plays. And Friday will feature the last new mechanic, which will help provide a more exciting goal for the game.