The week of January 24th

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 mostly about thinking up an idea for a character and then answering questions about that character. It's about being prompted for more information in a specific way that feels organic. The crisis resolution step asks for a lot more information in a lot less specific way, and it doesn't feel very organic.

One of our testers asked us why we didn't put the crisis generation before the hero creation. We had an answer: that it hadn't worked when we'd tried it before. It encouraged players to make heroes tailor-made for the crisis at hand, which didn't feel right for a game about misfit superheroes. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that it could work. Our cards are bad enough that it should be rare that players can actually make a hero that is perfect for the crisis at hand. And in games of 4 or more players, the best hero for the job is going to be outside of Reject Squad's pay range anyway.

But most important of all, we realized that it strangely gives the game the period we were looking for. We needed our crises to make it feel like players were accomplishing something at the end of hero creation. We thought that meant adding story to the end of the game, kind of like a dessert after a meal. But putting the crisis generation in front of the hero creation gives hero creation a better-defined purpose, making it more satisfying to complete. At least, that's our hypothesis. We'll see how it goes next week.