New developments and streamlining

It's been quite a while since I posted here! Before I get to what's new, I'd like to explain why updates have been absent. 

I ran up against some walls in the design process:

Too much complexity. Too many decks of cards, too many tokens to move around, too many dice rolls.

Not enough strategy. I wanted a game with a lot of choices and a feel of exploration and narrative, but forcing the players to scrounge for loot by drawing random cards with random outcomes made it feel like you were just rolling dice until you either won or lost.

The rulebook. I've never written a rulebook before. In my head it seems so simple - just lay out the rules and expand in the sidebar when necessary - but as I wrote I started second-guessing the order of presentation. It didn't help that there were too many components and fiddly bits.

The ending. I wasn't sure how to end the game. I wanted a final confrontation where the players team up, but getting everyone in place at the north end of the board was a nightmare.

I have some new ideas that might help. I don't know how much time I'll have to work on the game with all the other projects I have going on, but I figured I should at least write down the ideas.

Change the board from randomized hex tiles to path cards. There will be less randomness in the map, but instead, there will be more focus, more room for art, and less wasted horizontal space - when the point is to go north, it's weird to have so much east-west room. Instead of a card with seven hexes, a map section will have a northward path with predetermined spaces and landmarks, but will still connect to paths on either side - probably three per zone. This way you'll choose which path to take, and have the ability to change to another path at certain points, rather than being free to move in any direction but probably still just going north.

I'm also thinking this will allow me to give each zone a hub, so instead of dying and going back to the green zone at the very bottom of the map, you can reset to the start of the zone. That means death doesn't feel as horrible a setback. 

Combine card decks. I don't need three decks per zone. I can just put them all in one deck and tell the player to just keep drawing cards until they get a relevant one. Much easier. I also want to write some encounter cards that feel more like Dead of Winter's crossroads cards - give the player a stronger story choice to make, rather than just telling them to roll some dice or choose which dice to roll.

Change or eliminate monster movement. I had the idea to take monsters off the board entirely and simply make them encounter cards, but now that I think about it a bit more, having set paths means I could keep the monsters on the board without having to roll for their movement - they can just move a space south each turn. On the other hand, it makes them harder to avoid when you can't skirt around monsters. I'll have to think about that.

Maybe I can do a big final battle after all. With checkpoints in every zone, it's much easier to get players together at the north end of the map, and that'll encourage teamwork - sharing items and escorting. Which makes me think I should have a system for players moving together and helping each other with encounters, but which increases their risk of negative encounters - can't just have the whole table group up and easily accomplish everything.

So that's what I'm thinking right now. Maybe I'll even put some work into it sometime soon. We'll see.

Cat for scale

This is the current shape of the board, with cat for scale. 

I plan to make the board smaller - the individual hex size is unchanged from the last design, but now that there are more hexes in a different shape than the original plan, the board is too big. They could be smaller, so they will be smaller.

Very slowly working on the instructions for the playtest. I thought I'd just write down all the rules and that would be that, but making sure everything is well organized and in a good sequence to learn the game is tougher than I expected.

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.

Skill redesign

This is probably the biggest change in the new design, which will significantly change the importance of items. Most of the difference is behind the scenes math/design stuff, but it's still worth posting.

The first design used a 20-sided die for skill checks, and relied on players obtaining a lot of bonuses from items to be able to succeed at tougher checks. I think this was the weakest part of my first design - there's too much range here, the bonuses quickly become more important than the die roll, and players would need to stack multiple items to have a reasonable chance at hard checks for a single skill. Instead I'm switching to a simpler system with less variability and less reliance on racking up a huge bonus.

Now on a skill check you roll 2 six-sided dice (by default). An easy check requires a result of 6, medium requires 9, and hard requires 12. If you've played games that use 2d6 before, the medium and hard might sound a little steep; that's because items and abilities will still award bonuses, but on an easier-to-manage scale. The range of numerical bonuses will be +1 to +3 (ie, it's capped, even if you have more). At +3, you're virtually guaranteed to pass an easy check, it's quite easy to pass a medium check, and a hard check is still hard, but more manageable. There will also be another rare bonus: an extra die to your roll. An extra die is stronger than a +3, but hard checks are still hard unless you have +3 and an extra die - and even then, success isn't a guarantee.

This isn't the kind of change to make on a whim. I looked at probability and distribution charts to help me decide what kind of difficulty to look at and how items and abilities would provide bonuses. The main goal was to flatten the curve a bit, so that players don't have to accumulate a +10 bonus through five or six different items just to get a decent chance at passing a hard check.

Of course, I'll also have to re-work most of the items to fit this new system. A +5 bonus is now too big, so I'll have to flatten some of those. On the other hand, I can probably cut a lot of items now, and even make them a bit rarer, because the players won't have to collect as many bonuses just to survive. This will also simplify the decision of which items to equip - you still won't be able to have bonuses to everything, but you won't have to worry as much about what specific combination will optimize your combat bonus.

The skill system is what I'll have to look at most closely during playtesting. Getting the balance just right is important: if it's too hard to pass a skill check, the players will never get to do anything, but if skill checks are too easy they'll sweep through everything. But I do feel a lot more confident about this system than the last one!

Tomorrow will be my last post on the redesign, featuring a change to the win condition.

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.

New mechanic: day & night

North is an idea that originally started as a video game. In that concept, I wanted the player to have to choose whether to travel during the day or during the night, with different risks for each. This is something I didn't do a great job of incorporating into the board game design - it only showed up in that the enemies (bandits and coldbringers) moved during different turn phases.

After looking at the board game Mage Knight, I now have a much better idea of how to incorporate day and night into North. In Mage Knight day and night are different phases, and multiple turns take place during each day and night phase. That's a little too complicated for what I want to do with North, so for the redesign I opted for a simpler version: alternating rounds. The first round of the game is day, the second is night, the third is day, the fourth is night, etc.

During a day round, it's warmer outside, so it's easier to regain heat by spending endurance (see yesterday's post). More importantly, coldbringers aren't active during the day, so you don't have to worry about them at all - you can even safely move through their spaces! The risk during the day is that bandits are active. Bandits won't kill you, but they can steal your stuff, which makes skill checks and surviving more difficult.

At night it's colder and more difficult to regain endurance, and you risk coldbringer attacks eating your heat and potentially rendering you "mesmericed" (see yesterday's post; also I still don't think I like that word). On the other hand, bandits sleep at night, so you don't have to worry about having your gear stolen.

I also mentioned resting yesterday. Resting is a special action that costs no endurance, which is why I didn't get into it when I was talking about the endurance overhaul. When you rest, you take no actions on your turn, and regain all your endurance. You can even activate special items or abilities that trigger on a rest - for example, start a fire to keep you warm while you sleep.

Of course, resting does come with a risk: since you're less aware, you take a penalty to your rolls to defend yourself against bandits or coldbringers. I haven't decided exactly what that penalty is yet - maybe a negative modifier, or the inability to use your skill bonuses. Regardless, it means you have to take a look at what enemies are nearby before you decide to rest: sleeping at night means your stuff can't be stolen by bandits, but you could be chilled by coldbringers; sleeping during the day risks theft but keeps you safe.

That's it for today! Tomorrow I'll talk about the other new mechanic I hinted at yesterday: weather.

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.