Continuing to work on agent cards for HCI. Realized this morning that Defense could be just another kind of effort, but when a creature in its location would take damage, the players can remove defense to reduce the damage. Making it a type of effort should make the game easier to learn. It also opens the opportunity to have defense be applied to resolving challenges, which I quite like.
I’m getting a little too caught up in the exact wording of these cards. But now is not the time to go into that level of detail. And as I’m writing the cards, I keep thinking of ways to have this game’s mechanisms act differently from other games. (Example: What if when an agent takes damage, they lose exactly 1 resolve, regardless of how much damage they took?) And only the important mechanisms should be substantially different from familiar ones. That’s both to keep the game playable, and to prevent me from going down rabbit holes that delay getting a playable prototype on the table.