I don't much like the mechanism of two monster variants on each encounter card. I assume the intention is to grade things so people get nastier monsters as the game progresses?
Yeah, the intention is basically just to make the enemies tougher as the game progresses. --AC
An alternative mechanic, borrowed from the ever-forthcoming Yet Another Trains Game:
Have four grades of card, A, B, C, D, six of each, 24 in total
Have a red die and a green die
Setup:
Shuffle each grade separately
Place grade A cards as the "solar system" pile; stack the other grades B on top of C on top of D in the "galaxy" pile
On each turn:
Roll the dice until they differ
Put the solar system card indicated by the green die in play
Discard the solar system card indicated by the red die
Roll the dice again until they differ
Move the two indicated cards from the galaxy pile to the solar system pile
That's probably simpler to describe diagrammatically than textually, and simpler to do than either.
I knocked up a quick program to simulate this and the distribution of card grades you get through the game looks like:
ABBACCDCBD
ABABCADCDD
ABBBABDDCD
AABACCBBCD
ABABCADCDD
AABACCDDDB
...you get the idea.
As an alternative, a play deck could be stacked by die rolling in advance.
That play distribution looks rather good. I don't quite understand the mechanic you're describing, though: are you saying that if you rolled G5 R3 then you'd reach five cards down in the solar system pile for the current encounter, and then discard the encounter two cards above it? And then if you rolled that again you'd fish out the 3rd-from-top and 5th-from-top of the galaxy pile to go on top of the solar system pile? That does sound rather fiddly. I do like the somewhat-unpredictable ordering that your scheme provides, but it's probably just as good gameplay-wise to create a deck that just goes AAABBBCCC. That way also allows a lot more encounters total in the encounter supply. --AC
Yes, you'd play the fifth card and discard the third. Then promote the third and fifth cards. I suspect in practice those are actually fairly easy operations, and in any case only happen ten times in the game. In YATG the idea was to have a tableau of two rows of six cards plus a stock, which would make things easier -- on the other hand, in YATG (a) some of them are face up in Ticket-to-Ride style and (b) they cycle faster. The combination of promotions and discards would need tweaking if the deck was a different size (indeed, I did so to suit it to 10 of 24 cards for FlightDeck!) but that's not tricky to do.
My motivation is that I think uncertainty about what strength of foe is approaching and, indeed, the overall strength of all foes to come, would be a significant aspect of gameplay, encouraging players to think flexibly. And I designed it for YATG because I don't like the Agricola mechanism where the turn cards go in defined waves. --Clive
Reminds me of the mechanic I use in SteamWorks, actually. Sounds like it's more suited to a tableau of visible cards like in those games, rather than a stack of encounters. I do like the idea to having uncertainty about what's coming up, but if the enemies within each band are sufficiently different that ought to provide a reasonable amount of that; and remember that there are also noncombat encounters of a few different kinds. (I'm probably binning the current concept of traders, but there will definitely always be a variety of kinds of noncombat encounters, probably around 1/3 of the encounters.) --AC
OK. This is the Mark2 version of the idea:
Prep the solar system deck with six grade-A cards.
Prep the galaxy deck with 6*B, 6*C, 6*D and finally 4*bosses.
One player is the primate. They hold the solar system deck and one die.
The player to their right is the something-else. They hold the galaxy deck and another die.
At the start of the round, the primate rolls their d6 and plays the card nth from the top of the solar system deck.
Meanwhile, the something-else rolls and extracts the card that far from the top of the galaxy deck. Twice.
They pass the two chosen cards to the primate, who adds them to the top of the solar system deck.
The game ends when a boss is played.
This produces a distributions like these:
10 turns: AAACBBBDDE
11 turns: AACABCDCDDE
10 turns: AABBBCCBDE
10 turns: ABACBBDCDE
12 turns: AABACBDDDDDE
11 turns: ABACCBDDCCE
12 turns: ABBBBBCDBDDE
13 turns: ABACBBCDDDDCE
11 turns: AACBBDCDDBE
9 turns: ACABBDCBE
...which I think I prefer. It also involves only two decks, with "debris" accumulating in the outer reaches of the solar system deck.
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