Reject Squad Design Blog

This week we realized we put the horse before the cart, so to speak. We weren't able to get a group to test with last week (hence the lack of an update) but since then we've tested with a four player game (two of which were us) and a 6 player game (none of which were us). The crisis system we had settled on was put through the ringer and we realized that it's... not really working. For some groups - groups that are far more comfortable with improv, groups that are happy telling stories together at the drop of a hat - the crisis system works fine. Rarely, they may be saddled with a truly terrible reject squad and they'll have their work cut out for them, but in general they'll be able to tell a fun story and move on to another crisis.  But for other groups, this step of the game just falls... flat. The game suddenly stops, flips around, and asks you to do something completely different. As one of our testers today put it, the hero creation part of the game is...

So we're now in the new year. To celebrate, we had our first real test of the new crisis system. As a refresher, under this system, all players draw 3 "twist" cards, then the crisis is revealed, then the players all simply play one of their three twist cards onto that crisis. This is how you get things like a hundred invisible kittens stuck in a tree with no gravity. This method of crisis generation is good. We knew that. The major problem is: what does it lead to? We want the game to be about telling funny stories about dumb superheroes, and we want the crisis to be the celebratory capstone to all the fantastic ground work that gets done during hero creation. The best we have so far is that, once the crisis is created, players simply tell a story about how their heroes accomplish their goal. We weren't sure how that was going to play, or if it was going to work at all. The good news is that it does work. Our earlier hypothesis, that making the crisis crazy enough...

This week we reimagined the implementation of the concepts we spoke about last week. After the advice we received, and the conversation we had, we knew we wanted our crisis round to more closely resemble the gameplay of assembling the players' reject squad. We knew we wanted crises to be composed of (1) A certain crisis premise and (2) A twist that makes that premise dumb. Beyond this, however, we hadn't really changed how players interacted with the system. We didn't want any one hero to be the one solving the crisis. We knew the purpose of the game should either be to tell a joke, or a story, or both. If we were leaning on a looser, more narrative way to play, we knew we didn't want players to simply look at the crisis and say "I win." And at the end of the day, we still wanted these crises to be "one-shot" rather than a collection of smaller tasks. Here's what we're going with: Each player has modification cards they can play onto a cr...