MEK-OP Game Night: Final Exam Week!

Everyone was busy with the wrap-up of the semester (I'm giving an exam on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday), so we just spent a few hours playing through the first half of a Runebound game (1st edition). With six people the pace of the game is significantly slower, but I think everyone still had fun. We had to quit just as I had assembled a perfect combo of melee maces!

A few thoughts about the game:

• Although the biggest changes from 1st to 2nd edition was the norming of the dice distribution (2d10 vs 1d20) and necessary tweaks to keep the game challenging, playing with this many players makes it absolutely essential to use regenerating encounters. That's a rule that should import pretty easily from 2nd edition without needing to use the 2e Adventure Card set.
• The combat system is apparently more confusing to other people that I expected. I needed to explain it a few times before it made sense. It's very counterintuitive that "attacking" and "defending" use the same mechanic and can both cause damage to you after a failed check.
• The movement system is still wonky to me, since it doesn't really reflect any simulationist attitude toward terrain difficulty. Walking along a road, for example, requires "road face" results -- which means that it's almost impossible to be allowed to walk along four consecutive roads instead of taking a mandatory detour through the nearby mountains! Whether this sort of thing bothers you or not is probably a signature of where you reside on the vertical GNS axis.

For my own purposes in designing an "exploration game" that involves some similar pseudo-RPGish elements, the aspect of this game that I'd most like to modify is the "downtime" issue. I don't want to completely eliminate downtime; it's actually an advantage in slow, strategic games that are left up over multiple sessions so that, for example, my wife can put my daughter to bed while the rest of us keep playing. But I do want to make it more optional, and create a role for players who are not active in the turn cycle.

Some ideas for how to keep off-turn players engaged in a multiplayer adventure board game:

1. Group players into teams. I always prefer this approach to a free-for-fall once the number of players goes past three. In some games, even three players makes for too many sides to be stable in game-theoretic terms. (It's easy but rare for a two-player game to create an asymmetric equilibrium, but trivially easy to accomplish in an n-player game.) With good coordination, a team of players can complete certain portions of the game (like movement) simultaneously, speeding up the sequence of play.
2. Give players an intervention mechanism that activates during other players' turns. In a free-for-all, this needs to be something that involves hostile interference: playing a "wandering monster" in Munchkin, say, or anything in the Dungeonlord phase of Dungeoneer. But in a team-based game, this could be a form of material support. I prefer the latter mechanism since it has simulationist precedent (Lend-Lease during WW2, for example), which avoids the question of "Why am I suddenly playing the bad guys now?" In some games, it might make thematic sense that the enemies could be influenced by agents of the other team.
3. Segregate starting points. Instead of having all six players begin at the same location (which forces them to go one at a time in a race to valuable objectives/resources, etc), the players can then spend the early development portion of the game doing simultaneous movement. This works pretty well in 4x strategy games that involve exploration.

I'd recommend the first and the third ideas, but also apply the second idea sparingly. I can see some merit in having the game start with (3), and then transition toward emergent or preset alliances (1) and occasional cooperative interventions (2). But I appreciate a very small component of hostile intervention (2) to function as a wildcard, as long as it doesn't preclude effective strategic planning. Everyone deserves a healthy backstab now and then, right?