The Untouchables

Last Monday I got a chance to test drive the first draft of my cooperative experiment. The game is called The Untouchables, and it's about... well, here's the flavor text I jotted down:

A Mafia Boss is on the loose, and a crack team of FBI agents has been assembled to catch him! You’ll chase down leads and catch the crook, it’s only a matter of time. But if you don’t catch all of his accomplices, they’ll just take over control of the operation. In order to shut down crime in this city once and for all you’ll need to find out how many accomplices this criminal has, where they’re hiding, and send cops to surround them by the time you catch the Boss!
Each marked space on the board represents a location with a suspect. Send cops to interrogate the suspects, surround the accomplices you think are at large in the city, and catch the Godfather before he slips through your fingers!

Here's what I had in the way of rules for the first draft:

GAME TURNS Your turn consists of first drawing 1 card, then playing a card. Cards can be played in any one of the following ways: 1. Follow Lead: Discard a card face down to advance the Investigation track 1 space. 2. Interrogate Suspect: Play a card to place a Cop token on the indicated location. 3. Take Action: Play a card and resolve the Action effect printed on it. GAME END The game ends when one of 2 things happens: 1. The deck of cards is exhausted - when a player draws the last card, they finish their turn and the game is over. 2. The Mob Boss is caught - when the Investigation track reaches the final space (marked with a star), the Mob Boss has been caught and the game is over. When one of these events occurs, players reveal all cards in their hands and the face down discard pile. All locations on those cards are considered to have Suspects (this can be marked with the transparent red discs). Not all of these Suspects must be captured in order to win! Any Accomplice space (unmarked) on the board which is COMPLETELY SURROUNDED by Suspects represents an Accomplice at large. If all Accomplices at large have been COMPLETELY SURROUNDED by Cops, AND the Mob Boss has been captured, then the players win!

After the first play it became clear that those rules have a few glaring problems. For one, several of the improved actions require you to discard an additional card, and if you only draw 1 card a turn, you soon get to the point where you're hand is empty and you are simply drawing a card and then playing it.

In the 2nd game we tried "draw 2, play 1" which somewhat helped this problem, because most of the time you want to use one of the 'discard a card" actions. The speed of the game seemed reasonable too. Another problem that I noticed was that the idea behind discarding face down and counting the cards in players' hands as suspects at the end of the game was to make it hard for players to know for sure which Accomplices must be surrounded. The problem with that is that you KNOW which cads you discard, so you KNOW whether or not you'll win, or where cops need to be sent. It turned out that communicating that info somehow wasn't a big deal, you would simply send cops to the space you know need them. One feature that was actually kind of cool in the first play was that at the end we didn't know whether we'd won or not until we checked. I like the idea of that, and if possible I'd like to maintain that feature. But if you know which cards you discard, that doesn't really occur. Also, since you get to choose your discards, you simply discard duplicates of spaces that you already know have Suspects, which is kind of anticlimactic.

Thinking about it afterward, I think a better 'cost' for the actions is to flip a card from the deck and add a suspect to that location. That way you always play just 1 card , and can draw just 1 card as well. And I hope that the injection of Suspects at surprise locations will give players something to actually do on their turn.

My goal is to emphasize the decision between helping the team win (catch the Mob Boss), and making sure you don't lose (fail to surround the Accomplices). Further, I'd like players to have to somehow figure out how many and which of the 4 Accomplices are in play in any given game. I like the idea that the longer the game goes on, the more Accomplices are likely to be "at large" - but I'm not sure I like the possibility of player rushing the Boss track and potentially winning because no Accomplice happens to be in play. I almost don't mind it as a strategy, but I think it would be a pretty disappointing way to play - win or lose.

So I think I'll update the actions and consider that all (or most) of them will require adding a Suspect to the board, and try the game again with the following updated rules"\:

GAME TURNS Your turn consists of first playing 1 card, then drawing 1 card. Cards can be played in any one of the following ways: 1. Follow Lead: Discard a card face down to advance the Investigation track 1 space. 2. Interrogate Suspect: Place a Cop token on the indicated location. 3. Take Action: Play a card and resolve the Action effect printed on it. Then Flip a card from the deck and place a Suspect at the location indicated on that card. GAME END The game ends when one of 2 things happens: 1. The deck of cards is exhausted - when a player draws the last card, they finish their turn and the game is over. 2. The Mob Boss is caught - when the Investigation track reaches the final space (marked with a star), the Mob Boss has been caught and the game is over. When one of these events occurs, the game is over. Reveal all face down discards and place Suspects at each of those locations. Not all of these Suspects must be captured in order to win! Any Accomplice space (unmarked) on the board which is COMPLETELY SURROUNDED by Suspects represents an Accomplice at large. If all Accomplices a large have been COMPLETELY SURROUNDED by Cops, AND the Mob Boss has been captured, then the players win!