Tactical Choices

Oddly enough, this post isn’t about the tactics people use when playing Close Encounters. I’ll talk about that another time, because it’s an interesting topic in itself, but today we’re going to be looking at something different: representing tactics in the game.

Along with equipment, tactics were one of the things I wanted from the start to include in Close Encounters. They didn’t make it into the base game, because I was deliberately trying to keep that as streamlined as possible, but they’ve stayed in my mind the whole way through. Now that I’m working on expansions, I’m looking at ways to include them. Unfortunately, this isn’t going as smoothly as I had hoped.

Up until now, the model I had been working with was a set of tactics cards for each squad. The player drew their allocation at the start of the game, and could then choose when to put the tactics into play. Each tactic only lasted until the beginning of their next turn, and each squad could only use one tactic each turn. And this system worked – sure, the balancing and effects of the tactics needs some refinement, but mechanically it does what it needs to.

What concerns me is that this model is very similar to the model I’m using for equipment cards. Testing has shown that the two concepts – tactics and equipment – are being treated as pretty much the same by players. Which is fair enough, because they are pretty much the same mechanically.

I’m not sure if this is a problem or not – at the end of the day, as long as people are having fun and getting something they like out of it, then perhaps it doesn’t matter very much. On the other hand, having two things which work similarly but not identically seems likely to cause confusion, and even though that can be overcome it still increases the challenge of learning and playing the game. Keeping things simple is still a design goal for this.

As a result, now I’m wondering about what to do with respect to tactics. There are a few options I’m considering.

1. No Change. Keep going with the system as it is. The advantage is that this more or less works, the disadvantage is the likely confusion it may cause.
2. No Tactics. Another option is to get rid of the concept of tactics entirely. The other expansion content still gives people plenty of new toys to play with, and there’s something to be said for limiting the amount of new stuff people have to cope with at once. The advantages are that this is easy to implement and lowers the cognitive load for players, the disadvantage is that it removes something that has the potential to be pretty cool.
3. No Duplication. I could probably find another way to create the effects I want without using the same game mechanics. That would avoid the confusion of similar systems for different entities, but it would add another mechanism to be learned and used by players. Although this was my original idea for a solution, I’m starting to get a bit lukewarm on it now.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping me from changing my mind. And as I do more research and testing, I’ll probably come up with other options for handling this. For now, though, I’m going to separate the tactics testing from the equipment testing while I think this over a bit more.

I guess that means I should play some more Close Encounters. What a shame!

Got an opinion about the issue discussed in this post? Let me know in the comments or by email!