❖ Version History ❖

30th of September, 2020:
By now I am designing initial board game mechanics into the concept for this game. The first plan of action of here is determining that there are going to be four decks of cards in the game, and beginning to identify rudimentary ideas for how all of these cards are going to interact within the game mechanics.

–Map (broken down by time zones)
–Aircraft (for establishing: crashes, skirmishes, diplomatic emergency, and movement)
–Player I.D. Cards (setting up the base statistics for each of the player characters)
-“Crisis Cards” (the driving mechanical force creating challenges for players to beat)

In this game, I am trying to have the series of events be: A crisis begins, it reveals crashes around the world, and players have to travel that world in order to arrive at the scene and solve the crashes. As a result, before mechanics for the map and players can be tested at all the crisis cards must be made with placeholder numbers…. but how exactly will they work? and what will they do?

Brainstorm on Crisis Game Mechanics: 

–Crisis is a Modifier Mechanic that has an Area of Effect. It can target: the players, the entire map, individual time zones within the map, or a specific area of the map: 
:: The Americas (GMT-10 through GMT-4)
:: Europe, Africa & the Middle East (GMT-2 through GMT+4)
:: Asia & Australia (GMT+6 through GMT+12)

-The Crisis will have Two Roles:
1. Setting a Solve Challenge: A Crisis will place aircraft cards around the world in different time zones. Players will need to travel to these places and attempt to solve what happened in order to help defeat the Crisis.

2. Punishing the Solving Process: Not only do the Crisis create crashes, but of course, they will make it hard for the investigation team to solve those crashes in some way or another. These punishing elements will be featured as ‘Global Effects‘ that affect everyone so long as the crisis remains unsolved.

-According to the author, players need different ‘Types of Crisis’ that the NTSB team might be able to solve. I have separated these types of Crisis into different categories of effects, and how each effect will modify navigation through challenges of that crisis type:
:: Diplomatic Crisis – Requires players to travel to specific places? (or avoid places)?
:: Aircraft Crashes – Requires/Benefits players solving crashes.
:: Hostage Scenarios – Restricts mobility and solving around the world?
:: Skirmishes / Dogfights – Requires/Benefits a different solving skill from crashes

Specific modifier types from crisis cards might include a variety of impacts to the player experience. Here is a list of game mechanics that I begin my planning around:
:: Movement – Positive and Negative changes to how players navigate
:: Solving – Adding or Subtracting from a character’s ability to solve the crime
:: Skirmish – Alter the strength a character brings to a fight
:: Flight Deck – Targeting where and how crashes / skirmishes appear on the map
:: Location – Forcibly move players around before they get the turn to move
 
After writing this list I decide to begin cutting up & drawing theoretical crisis cards onto some left over card stock. Once I have a look that I like, I make a huge batch for testing some of these ideas.

Cutting out & creating all of the physical cards is one thing…
…..creating a diverse set of modifiers and effects to put on these cards takes several weeks of agonizing play testing for good balancing. Initially I strive to make thirty of these cards exist, but I decide to stop with twelve at first. My original imagining here is that you would randomly shuffle up the thirty cards every time you wanted to play and just pick out a smaller set to challenge. Since I made twelve that seem to be functional I simply start shifting my attention toward play testing these before coming back to make any more Crises.