A New Style of Boogie

Based on feedback from a few plays of Boogie Knights at UK Games Expo (and, frankly, long before, but I'd not really faced up to it properly), it was clear that, if I wanted to get Boogie Knights running properly, I needed to make some more changes. The biggest issue that kept coming up is that at some point in the game, getting more equipment tends to become uninteresting, and there just don't seem to be enough challenge cards to go around at that point.

At UKGE various suggestions were thrown about, including having separate decks to draw from, so you could choose if you want equipment or challenges. That has some potential, but the idea that I ended up getting stuck in my mind was for multi-use cards. This is potentially a bit jargony, so the idea is that a given card has more than one way you can use it, rather than having separate card types for separate functions in the game. So, in this case, you could have cards that can be used as equipment, or as challenge cards (or other actions), and you choose which option to use. With cards set up like that, it should be possible to design the game so that in any hand of cards you always have options for something sensible to play, regardless of the game state.

After a few days of pondering I gave it a go.

Not quite what I ended up with, but very close.
Action icons in the squares, challenge bonuses in the yellow strip.

It took some thinking and fiddling around before I decided that I would have three copies of each "costume" (a kinda-matching set of head, body and legs equipment, which is how I created them), and add an action icon to each card to indicate the alternate use for each card.  The three copies of each equipment card would then have variations for different actions available.  The way I have set things up doesn't make each card unique (though I could have done that), but there aren't many duplicates: we have 48 different cards in the 54 card deck.

I settled on four different actions: the two types of challenge (disco and combat), a "tricks" action (swap cards on the table -- not quite as good as the previous iteration's dirty tricks card), and a "discard" (allowing you to drop as many cards as you like before replenishing). I think the discard may be too weak, but we'll see in play. The thing is that I can tweak the actual effects of the actions without having to modify the components, which I like. The distribution of the icons is such that there are rather more of the challenge actions than the others, hopefully meaning that play will be guided more towards challenges, which is what the game should really be about.

As part of this, I decided to drop the "kit inspection" cards, which were a way to steadily nudge the game towards an end, but didn't really fit properly in this iteration. These cards have been a part of the game I liked a lot from early in its development, but in the spirit of "kill your darlings", out they go. They can always be reintroduced later if the game needs them.

Print... cut... sleeve... et voila!

One of the results of this round of changes is that I have greatly simplified the game setup, which previously had multiple steps to defend against having an unplayable hand at the start of the game. I managed to knock a couple of paragraphs or so out of the setup instructions, taking them from 252 to 139 words.  Word count (or lack of it) is not the most critical metric of a rule set, but for a light game, having short rules is a huge advantage, and it felt like a really positive payoff for this revision.

As I write this, I have not yet playtested this version of the game, but will hopefully get a chance to do so in the next few days. I'm sure something will be wrong with it, but I have a feeling we are moving in the right direction again.

If you would like a look at the current state of the game, print and play files are available...

• Boogie Knights v8 rules on Dropbox
• Boogie Knights v8 cards on Dropbox

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.