I'm not sure what you mean. What do you mean by work? Is the game playable to a conclusion...almost certainly. That doesn't really seem to me to be a good standard. I imagine that if your looking to make a change to the game it is to improve it or at the very least customize it to fit your tastes. Obviously any change that fits you and your groups play is all to the good, but if your going to propse it tfor others to use then I think its imperitave that you have a good idea of the orginal unchanged systems intent as well as the intended outcome of your modification.

Talking about this mechanic specificly, why do you think its desirable to have more knowledge? The game already makes a LOT of vp knowlege public. In a mp game where you have s9ignificat ablilities to concentrate against a single player it is bad design to make all vp knowlege public.

The use of negative evidence helps to hid a players hunches in general. You CAN still make good deductions about other players hunches especially if you make use of the Snitch but if thats important to you then you have to expend effort.

It also messes with game balance. Some players have a bigger interest in the murder resolution evidnece system then others. By making that portion of the game simpler you are unbalancing the game towards those players.

One sytem you talked about does intrgue me is a way to interwave the turns a little more. I though about that myself before I got to play a few games. I have to say though that those 6 (or so) points tend to go quite fast once people become experieced with the game (and the dark cards really start flying). For now, on balance I think the complexity isn't really worth it .

tommh said:

Thank you! That's much more useful discussion.

By "work" I mean that it would continue to be an enjoyable, fun, challenging, balanced game, and a game that works (slightly) differently to how it did before.

(Also please note that I did not say "I think people should/could use these rules as a good variant". I said "what do people think of these rules as a possible variant?" - big difference)!

Do you mean VP knowledge, or evidence knowledge? I agree that keeping the VP knowledge hidden is a good thing (especially in a story-based game such as this), but making the evidence knowledge more or less secret (or rather, more or less difficult to *keep* secret) doesn't necessarily affect that. From what I've read so far, the evidence knowledge is a little *too* secret ("too" being defined as the fact that it's almost impossible to determine the guilt values of each suspect during the course of the game), which is the reason I came up with the positive-only evidence variant.

If the general consensus is that the evidence on each suspect isn't nearly as secret as you might think from reading the rules (by use of particular cards to look at facedown evidence, Lily or Jimmy), then maybe the variant isn't a good idea. Maybe in the practical course of things nearly all the evidence is turned faceup by the end of the game, meaning that players gradually find out how things are developing as the game goes on. However, the impression I get from reading the rules and cards is that looking at evidence is quite a rare occurrance, wouldn't give you much information that is useful to you (especially not with negative evidence values) and takes more effort than the result is worth. Removing the negative value tokens would make looking at evidence much *more* useful.

As for the time mechanism, yes - it's more for thematic reasons more than anything (though the original reason I came up with it was to give the First Player/Jump on the Case mechanic more prominence). I personally think I would prefer this system of movement/actions over those in the original rules, so my question to the community was to ask if there was any reason why it wouldn't work mechanically...?

Bleached Lizard said:

Where do you draw this conclusion from? People have picked on one or multiple of your proposed rule changes arguing against every one in particular and specific. Nobody stated anything regarding to an implementation of all rules at the same time.

Also, since house rules are meant to improve a game, and maximum improvement for a game is intrically intended, there is no fault in assuming you wanted to implement all these rules at the same time. It is rather faulty of you to not inform us that that was not your intention.

Bleached Lizard said:

Citation needed. You opened up this thread and got a large number of replies by Paul Grogan, Kias, tommh and - aside of my first post - me included, that objectively looked at the proposed rules and explained why in their opinion and based on game mechanics, they believed it would not improve the game. Attacking people in such a polemical way doesn't seem to be the way to go.

Also, just by simply labelling a rule change a variant doesn't automatically bring this rule change up to par with the original rules (as the label "variant" implies). You still have to prove it does.

Bleached Lizard said:

May I suggest re-reading the previous posts then? It's all there. Even in tommh's original post - he summed it up pretty nicely.

hmmm.... your definition of "work" is as subjective as subjective can be, really...

Well if we look at all the sources of vps. Plot VPs, corp secret VP tokens, and Puzzle VPS, they are ALL public. So the only (or at least major) source of VPS that is secret is the crime resolution. This makes uncertainty of how the evidence is currently/will play out very improtant.

In addition to Lilly and the snitch you can always play evidence face up if you choose by the way.

About your turn order proposal. I was thinking about it and it brought up two considerations.

Would you allow the player who is the current "leader" to adjust their own again? This would allow you to set up a two turn play much more easily.

It also allow you to really screw the player who is currently first. How? You can set the new first player to be the person after him. this will mean effectivly that everyone will get two turns before he gets to go again. While its true that you can also do this with the current rules you have to yourself become first player to do so. Under the propsed chang you can essentially pin that tail on someone else's donkey. I'm convinced there's more going on with the whole turn order thing then we (or at least I) have grasped. Once I've played a few more times and have a better grasp of the various mechanics, especially all the card interactions, I'll feel more confidnet about this one.

The main problem I see with everyone taking their turn at once it it makes it more difficult to play dark cards. I encourage my friends to try and plot out their turns as fast as possible, even thinking about what theyre gonna do during other peoples turns.

Also, I like the negative evidence counters because it helps keep other people from guessing who your guilty hunch is. Draw a -1 counter, put it on someone that's neither of your hunches; it'll throw the others off a little bit, plus theres a decent chance it's someone elses guilty hunch.

And as for altering the "getting a jump on the case," making it cost 0 time would make it a bit more tempting, but it gets enough action as is. I'd maybe make it a choice between 1 time or 1 trauma.

Keggy said:

After playtesting the TIme variant, we found that it actually made it a *lot* easier to play dark cards. This was because each player was only (in general) performing *one* action that would act as a trigger for those cards, so not only was it a lot easier to track, it also encouraged players to declare their actions verbally (i.e, players were more likely to say "I'm just moving here and following up this lead", whereas in the old rules players were less likely to note everything they were doing, as in "I'm moving here, folling up this lead, then discarding a card, then drawing a light card, then...etc, etc, etc").

I incorporated the idea of positive-only evidence tokens into my variant for turning the murder into a true deduction. Check out the link in my signature.