[The Gay Recruitment Squad Wants YOU!] At Conception

[knicknevin]

Thanks Graham, the game was  ablast and I'd been loking forward to getting a game since seeing you and Andrew play it the previous day.

So much to think about in all thse posts, so I'll just take my usual 'stream of consciouness' approach and ramble...

In fact, just to really confuse you, what would probably make it even more fun for me would be adding a bit of competition to it.  Unless I've missed something (entirely possible -- it was a noisy hall and I was tired) the end game is just everyone trying to get out of the club cooperatively.  Maybe some victory conditions there, with it being more of a race to get out, might make the end game a bit more tense.  In fact, I'd like to see how it felt if there were some kind of scoring for individual players based on the number of seductions performed and security guards/devices evaded.

For some reason, I immediately thought of a 'Capture the Flag' endgame, where the players compete to take some trophy of their victory and be first to get it back to an insertion point...  but then, I do like the co-operative nature of the game, so I'm not 100% invested in that idea.

Like Rich, I had no idea what the Baggage on my character sheet was for, which is why I didn't use it, but I would like to see something like that in the game. A nice simple mechanic like the skills... maybe you can only acquire one of the special cards if you narrate your Baggage into your failure at the seduction?

The three types of conflict token do need to work differently, as there wasn't any real difference between the Guards & Straights and we only ever crossed one Security Device, because most of them had been placed well out of the path between our insertion points and the target. So, what if:

• Security Devices: must be placed in doorways or other access points and they don't deactivate when you pass them, so they are still a challenge in the endgame, forcing you to either go the long way round or try to beat them in a novel, second way?
• Guards: you get their phone number, so you can call the ones you seduce during infiltration to help you during the endgame

I still quite like the modular board idea: there was a lot of space we simpll never went near, with one whole 1/4-board segment never being interacted with at all. On the whole though, it's difficult not to adopt a 'If it ain't broke, down fix it' attitude to your game, as we enjoyed it so immensely. I do like the idea of there being some character development/characterisation, as we never got past defining our characters by the pick-up lines they used.

As I said on the day, if that game had been a commerical product, right there to buy, I would have spent my money on it without thinking twice; the issues are generally very minor and the sort of thing that would be taken care of by most people's house rules anyway.

• Straights: keep the rules as they stand now

[Graham W]

The idea of the guards helping you out in the endgame is great.

Could I get some feedback on the specific issue of restricting the numbers of cards? I'm thinking of starting people off with just three or four cards, giving an incentive to do things (narrate in baggage, neuroses etc) to get more cards. Would that make it less fun in any way?

Graham

[knicknevin]

I think some card restriction would be more than acceptable, so long as the mechanics for it are as simple & intuitive as the rest of the game. I'd be quite happy to start with only 3 cards, say, and on my turn be faced with the choice of manuevering closer to the Target or increasing my hand size. This would also be a strong way for players to support each other, since increasing your hand size only helps other players and is irrelevant to your own attempts at seduction.

Does there need to be some scaling here? I assume in your game with Andrew, you were only getting 1 card each per seduction attempt, whereas in our 5 player game, we got 4 cards per seduction attempt. Is that how it works or is there a mechanic to compensate for fewer players? Could the restrictions on hand size instead be a restiction on drawing cards, so that you had to have a special scene (involving your Baggage?) to replenish your hand?  In this case, you could decide to give more than one card to another player or even decide not to give them a card at all... Sorry, just thinking olff the top of my head as I type again, which is why my typing is usually so messy!