Second pass at... Aliens

We began with talking through the backstory, checking for holes. Now we had to make sure the rules lined up with the story we’d written. I’m going to try not to spoil anything so please bear with.

My Alien co-designer spotted that the story lent itself nicely to a 3-act story. So we had to decide about how many turns each act would be: best case and worst case scenarios. We kept the rules mostly as-is but had to add in a couple more actions that the players would use to solve the problems we put in front of them, specifically for act 1 & 2. 

Act 1 is a throwaway, the sort of thing you’d do in the tutorial mission on a video game. Still important but it’s quick and after it’s done, you move on. 

Act 2 has a really nice game behind it. It’s particularly hard to talk about without spoilers so I’ll just say that I’d had an idea for it since we came up with the story. I pitched my idea to my co-designer and he bought my idea and helped me clean up the implementation. That’s the beauty of a second pair of eyes: He spotted a simple solution to something I’d been struggling with and I think it’s now a super smooth gameplay mechanic. When we get to the playtest phase, I’m not going to tell the alien players what they’re supposed to do in the hopes that they’ll just put the pieces together. Nor will I tell the Human players what the aliens are doing as I want them to be able to work it out, just like the real game. What’s nice about the solution is that it can be lightly “fudged” so that control can assist if the players struggle or do too well, but not so much that it feels cheap. 

Act 3 is a different matter entirely, although we didn’t get a chance to work on the technologies in great detail, we knew that act 3 would be dependent on technologies. Each option for the act will have similar mechanics - do something to get a semi-permanent presence on Earth, collect stuff and develop technologies using the stuff. What’s nice about act 3 is each step has different ways of being completed. As mentioned in the first pass, options for completion were very important and I think the technologies will allow for that. It’s also open enough that players can make up their own rules. 

Balancing will be the hardest part of the design now - that’s what Excel is for!