The Week of December 6th

This week we tried to get a playtest together to test the changes we had made to the crisis cards we were developing. Instead, we got into an in-depth discussion which caused us to change the direction we were taking the crisis round.

Because we couldn't find a group to playtest with this week, we decided to start examining several different board games of all shapes and sizes to see what their rulebooks looked like, how they were constructed, and what kinds of layouts they used.

We were in the middle of this examination when a friend of ours, who had played Reject Squad more than a year ago, came over and asked us about how the development was going. We explained how it was going to him, which precipitated a lengthy discussion about how we were organizing things, what our ultimate goals for the game were, and what type of demographic we were targeting. He helped us re-examine a problem we had earlier identified - that the crisis feels almost like a completely different game from the hero creation section - and we spoke about having crises mirror hero creation by building a deck of crises and then a deck of twists. By drawing one card from each deck you could create crises such as "A cat is stuck in a tree," "but everything in this situation is magic." We also discussed whether our current scheme for crisis construction was a little overdone. We could simplify it by having a succession of 5-7 tasks, rather than 3 crises each comprising of as many tasks as there are players. And we reiterated that our goal was to have a game in which players created good stories about stupid superheroes, not necessarily to provide a robust crisis-resolution system.

With all that in mind, we're going to put the current mechanics of crisis generation and crisis resolution to the side and develop and test the following:

  • Once they've finished creating their reject squad, players will encounter a number of crises.
  • Crises are generated by pairing a crisis card with a crisis twist card, similar to how heroes are generated by pairing a power card with a restriction card. However, there is no selection process. A crisis card is randomly drawn, a twist card is randomly drawn and that's it.
  • Once that crisis has been generated, players immediately vote on who they think would solve that crisis best. That's who takes point and narrates how the team comes together to solve the crisis once the vote is over. If there is no majority leader, the crisis is lost.
  • Players will need to encounter a number of crises equal to the number of players plus two.

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