Alter Ego - back to that again...

The other day I re-read my last post about revamping Alter Ego and making it into a Cooperative Deck Building game. That was back in April, right after my visit to Spielbany. Sadly, I have not done anything with the idea since then!

Today I finally got around to working on updating my prototype. I added 2 more types of Hero cards/icons, like I discussed with Richard at Spielbany. In updating the Henchmen cards I think I've run into a potential problem. I've noticed that with my current rules, players will be bringing 1 henchmen into play each turn. However, in the very beginning of the game they will not be able to defeat 1 Henchman per turn (not the way I'm thinking of having the henchmen) - and if they could, the game would be pretty dull anyway. That means later in the game, players have to be able to defeat more than 1 Henchman at a time in order to catch up a bit.

It's possible that players won't need to defeat every single henchman - and in fact maybe it would be best if they could not. That might actually help encourage them to beat the ones with the Arch Villain symbols in order to 'awaken' the Arch Villains and defeat them.

In any case, I think I need to think about the design of the henchmen cards. Should they start out very easy to kill, then progress on, so that by the time players can defeat more than 1 of them at a time, they must choose between that and defeating just 1 bigger henchman, which would confer some benefit? Or should I re-define the way that henchmen come into the game?

For now I have created a set of 5 really wimpy henchmen ("Pest"), and a set of 10 almost as wimpy henchmen ("Nuisance"). These will come into play, take just 1 Civ token hostage, and offer no benefit for defeating them (except that they will release the hostage, of course).

I think this could make for a reasonable early game - on your first turn you'll turn up a Pest, and you'll choose a hero card (probably the one needed to defeat that Pest). On your second and third turns, you'll add a Nuisance, and you'll choose a Hero card based on that. Then you'll start drawing harder-to-beat henchmen, and there should be some number of them built up in play...

This is the part I'm a little concerned about - if the Henchmen come out faster than the players can defeat them, then how can the players win? Perhaps that is the tension required to actually make this game any good - maybe it's just something I'll have to try out empirically.

The last thing I have to do before I can try it is to assign how many and what types of Hostages will be taken by the Henchmen. The "hostages" aren't necessarily supposed to represent actual hostages - like kidnapped people - though in some cases that's applicable. It's supposed to represent a group being hassled by the criminals. How many groups/types of Civ tokens should there be? I want to say "3," because I always seem to want to say "3." also, I'm currently planning on there being 3 Arch Villains, so having 3 types of Civ tokens might fit with that - each Arch Villain, once in play, could attack a different Civ type.

Hopefully I'll finish the henchmen cards and print out the new prototype before I get sidetracked or lose interest again...