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Moctezuma revisited
Every once in a while I review The List and spare a moment's thought for designs that have been sitting on the back burner, some for far too long.
Every time I do that, I invariably have the same thought... why did I never get anywhere with that one? I have this thought pretty regularly with respect to some games, less often with respect to others. But one of the games I often wonder this about is Moctezuma's Revenge.
Moctezuma's Revenge is a sort of deduction, action efficiency game about looting Aztec pyramids, but some of the pyramids are cursed. At the beginning of the game there are 10 pyramids, 7 of which are home to Aztec kings, and the other three contain clues to the location of El Dorado, the lost city of gold. Some (perusing the rules it seems between 3 and 7) of the 7 kings are cursed, and treasure from the cursed temples will be worth negative points at the end of the game. You don't know which temple is which, and you also don't know which of the temples are home to the cursed kings, so you can do research at the Library to find out.
That's the status of the game at the moment, you can see an old rule set in my blog. While I've thought about it every now and again, I haven't touched this game since 2008. For 8 years it's been one of those perennially back-burner-ed ideas, just sitting there wasting potential. That's why I'm happy about this next bit...
There's a prominent game designer you might have heard of... his name is Jonathan Gilmour. He designed something recently that's turned out to be very popular, and I know he's got some other stuff either out there or coming down the line really soon. I contacted Jon on Twitter a few weeks ago, and it turns out he was open to the idea of co-designing something with me. So I showed him my list, and Moctezuma's Revenge caught his eye. We had a chat about it at BGGcon, and it sounded like we were both on the same page when it comes to co-designing and the value that could offer to each of us, so when I got home I sent him whatever details I had about Moctezuma's Revenge, and today he put together a prototype and gave it a try!
I'm looking forward to the feedback, and to working with someone on this game, as it's not one I was likely to finish on my own anytime soon. Just discussing it with Jon has already got some creative juices stirring... here are some thoughts that came up in our conversation at BGGcon, some of which may end up being tested out:
* I don't know what I was thinking when I made 7 "cursed" chits - the possibility of all 7 temples being cursed seems like a lousy game experience to me. Perhaps I didn't want players to be able to win by just picking a temple, looting it like crazy, and just hoping it's not cursed. But I do like how the curse system works (and I think Jon does too). I suspect we'll want to cut that down to something like 4 "cursed" chits, so that 2, 3, or 4 temples will be cursed.
* As I recall from my one or two playtests 8 years ago, it was too tempting to sit in the Library and peek at all the curse chits before running off with good information about which temples are safe. There should probably be some incentive to not do that... one thought is maybe when researching kings, you flip the next curse chit (revealing it for everyone), and then peek at another 1-2 [alt: peek at a couple chits, choose 1 to turn face up]. Would sharing info like that make any difference? Or just serve to lengthen the game?
* Should you be able to research temple names at the library
(look at X cards from the temple, keep none)? Maybe more efficiently than
drawing cards when you’re AT the temple (so like look at 2/3/6 rather than
1/2/5)? Should this also be “reveal the top card, then peek at 1/2/5 (or 2/3/6)
cards (again, so it helps others)?
* Maybe instead of action point allowance, you could
just take a Library turn (Flip next Curse chit, then spend turn peeking at 1
Name tile, some (3?) curse chits (max 1 per king?), or maybe a few cards from a
single deck) or an Explore turn (move and search or search x2, where “search”
in this case is look at the top 2 or 3 cards of the deck where you’re at. Maybe
it’s 2, and if you double search it’s 5).
* Maybe researching the name of a king (peeking at the name tile) should be done at the library by discarding a card from that temple. So you can pay points to learn the identity of the temple, or you can find it via exploration. If you learn that you have collected a cursed treasure, this would allow you an avenue to get rid of it. I would think you could only do this once per temple (leave the card face up in front of you to remember you did it), so you can't unload a truck full of tainted treasure, but maybe a limited discard would be good to have available.
* Instead of cursed treasure being strictly negative points, perhaps all treasure should be worth points. Maybe each treasure has 2 values, one for if it's safe, and a lower one for if it's cursed. In addition, the treasures could have curse icons which only count if the temple was cursed, and the player with the most of those at the end of the game simply loses (like corruption in Cleopatra and the Society of Architects or Unrest in Struggle of Empires).
I look forward to posting more about Moctezuma's Revenge, hopefully Jonathan likes it and gets some good tests and feedback in!
3 comments:
Hey Seth,
sounds like a good idea. I think the basic choice you need to flesh out here is the collecting points vs. collecting knowledge. I know too little of the game (did not read the rules), but some points of thought from me:
- Does the library give perfect binary information (temple is cursed / temple is not cursed)? If so, I'd change it to a probabilistic system, like each temple having a set of cards with cursed/not cursed symbols. If there are enough cursed symbols in the deck, the temple is cursed. The number of cards you can look at just determines the balance between collecting points and information. Consider shuffling all the cards after looking at them, so you can never perfectly well know if a temple is cursed (if you may not draw enough of these cards, that is).
- How much can players deduct from other players actions? If a player can know from the library that a temple is safe, and he goes and collects treasure there, other players not knowing that much will go after the same temple. Unless you can bluff and somehow get rid of treasure.
- Is there any set collection mechanism to reward many of one or one of many? Maybe you can present your findings to the public and thus score points, but if you do this with artifacts of the same king all the time, they get bored and your point gain diminishes.
- Have you played Tikal and Artifacts, Inc.? They might be good sources of inspiration for theme and some mechanisms (but neither of those use deduction)?
Cheers,
Josh
Thanks for the comments! I'll respond one by one:
- Does the library give perfect binary information (temple is cursed / temple is not cursed)? If so, I'd change it to a probabilistic system, like each temple having a set of cards with cursed/not cursed symbols. If there are enough cursed symbols in the deck, the temple is cursed. The number of cards you can look at just determines the balance between collecting points and information. Consider shuffling all the cards after looking at them, so you can never perfectly well know if a temple is cursed (if you may not draw enough of these cards, that is).
Originally, 2 chits were assigned to each king (3 each for Moctezuma I and II), some "cursed" and some "safe". If either one was "cursed", then the king was considered cursed, and treasure from his temple was therefore tainted.
The new idea Jon and I talked about was upping the number of chits to 3 per king (maybe 4 or 5 for Moctezuma I and II), and increasing the number of "cursed" chits so that any king with 2 "cursed" chits is considered cursed. This would give more room for research, where research = peeking at face down chits. It would also mean that seeing 1 "cursed" chit would not tell you the whole story about that particular king.
This is sort of like your suggestion, I think. Also of note, the chits are a game timer, after each round of turns, you flip 1 face up, and when they're all revealed then the game is over.
- How much can players deduct from other players actions? If a player can know from the library that a temple is safe, and he goes and collects treasure there, other players not knowing that much will go after the same temple. Unless you can bluff and somehow get rid of treasure.
This is a good question, and will take some playtesting to answer. The plan/theory was that the players COULD act based on their opponents actions, but hopefully that wouldn't always work out for them.
That's part of the reason 3 of the temples aren't "real" temples, and instead offer clues to the location of El Dorado. Basically, treasure from a clue temple is worthless, but if you have at least 1 from each of the three clue temples then you score a big bonus. So if I learn that a particular temple is a clue temple, and I go grab treasure from there, you might deduce that that temple is safe, and you might go grab treasure from there as well... only to find that your treasure is worthless without the set.
I don't know how impactful this aspect of the game will be, and I'm not sure how impactful I even WANT it to be, but it makes sense to have something like that in there.
- Is there any set collection mechanism to reward many of one or one of many? Maybe you can present your findings to the public and thus score points, but if you do this with artifacts of the same king all the time, they get bored and your point gain diminishes.
As I mentioned above, the clue temples represent a set collection aspect to the game. However in my discussions with Jo, the idea for more set collection has come up. Perhaps at the end of the game you exhibit your treasures in your museum, and the better your exhibit, the more bonus you get.
Looking to one of my other games, Exhibit, Artifacts of the Ages, might lend some insight into that aspect. In that game, each artifact had a type (tool, art, weapon), an era (early, middle, late), and a culture (Roman, Mayan, Greek, African, Egyptian). An "exhibit" in that game was any number of artifacts that shared either culture, era, or type. So you could have a Weapon exhibit, or an exhibit of Early artifacts...
Exhibit didn't reward it, but you could also have more specific sets, "African Weapons" for example.
Perhaps the treasures in Moctezuma's Revenge could be more specific and could be made into sets like that as well.
- Have you played Tikal and Artifacts, Inc.? They might be good sources of inspiration for theme and some mechanisms (but neither of those use deduction)?
I have played both, at least once each.
Thanks again for the comments!
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