Week of August the 30th

This week we looked back at our notes from GenCon and talked through what we liked and what we'd like to change about Crises.
  1. Crisis resolution works very, very differently from hero creation, which is both a good and a bad thing. The good is obviously that it adds variety to Reject Squad, but the learning curve of jumping into the Crisis is something we may have to mitigate a bit.
  2. Crises definitely need more narrative structure. It's great that players can construct stories from an opposition, a location, and 3-5 random task cards, but sometimes the random task cards aren't so easy to pull a story out of. We discussed the possibility creating specific starting, middle, and ending task cards which would help every crisis have an obvious uh... beginning, middle, and end.
  3. We really want to include the cast-off heroes (the ones deemed too-powerful in 4+ player games and the ones that were simply unused in 3 player games) as villains for the crises.
We also came up with a prototype for how we might make crises work in the future. As before, an opposition and a location are revealed, but then instead of revealing as many task cards as there are players, that many task cards are instead laid face-down on the table. Each task card is revealed one at a time, and all players collectively decide whether they "succeed" or "fail" at that task by submitting cards marked "succeed" or "fail." The trick is, players only have so many "succeed" cards in their hands, and they have to use all of their cards eventually. A task can only be completed if more than half of the cards submitted for it are "succeed" cards.

Because there's no more confusion over which task the table is going to talk about next, and you only have to think about one task at a time, we believe revealing task cards one by one will both make the transition into solving the crisis easier to understand and easier to build a story around. Additionally, resolving tasks with cards allows us to include all players in each task while also streamlining how those tasks actually get resolved.

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