How exactly does the hidden information work. I looked through the TeamCovenant demo video and read the entire rules for the scenario being demonstrated. There is nothing in there that the Empire player chooses and does not reveal. If players have played before or own a copy, they could just as easily know the mission.

Someone explain to me how this version of "hidden information" works. As far as I can tell, its only hidden because the Empire player is the only one allowed to look at the book during the game.

I'd imagine it would work similar to Mansions of Madness.

If you're not familiar with that game, it goes like this;

The Keeper (Overlord/Imperial player) is given some options with how to setup the scenario. To speculate on this with regards to Imperial Assault, listen to the demo closer, and use your imagination;

Maybe the goal is to have the heroes sneak into the outpost to steal the docking bay codes to get their ship out of a lockdown. So maybe in the book there's 3 places the codes could be; the control room, the commander's quarters, or the briefing room. The imperial player chooses one of these in secret, and as the game plays out, when the Heroes get to "that room", they are greeted by the officer holding the codes, and his stormtrooper bodyguards, but in the other rooms, they're more or less empty.

So even if the Heroes read ahead, they still can't perfectly plan which room to storm right away, and while they're searching, the Imperial player is building that threat up. When the heroes reach the right room, the Imperial player reveals the officer and his mooks, places them on the table and mayhem ensues.

Ultimately, you could replay the campaign again, choosing different options like that as you go, or even do it the same way and meta-game your friends, because there's no way you would just put the secret plans in the exact same room again, would you?

Of course, with future releases of enemies, that would also provide you with more mooks to spawn in a given scenario, so these things should all come together and keep the same missions from being too stale on future replays.

That sounds better. That's similar to the influence effect in Descent. The reason I ask is because I didn't see any such effect in the sample scenario.

That sounds better. That's similar to the influence effect in Descent. The reason I ask is because I didn't see any such effect in the sample scenario.

I would guess that for the purposes of the demo, they just figured out all of those details ahead of time, so when you sit down, they can just quickly explain how to play, and what you need to do, like "your heroes need to find the [whatever] which is in one of these rooms"

Then the heroes just go for it, decide how they want to tackle searching out the objective, which will then lead them to the next component of the adventure, and so on until one side emerges victorious.

from the demo i saw with Team Covenant there was a lot of info and good questoins asked just kind of hard at times to hear since the con was so busy'