Development Diary #4: How the Corporation works against you!

Hi everyone!
This is Francesco again and today I want to look into what the corporation does in NEON HOPE – and how we use an innovative concept to design our encounter decks. Providing not only dangerous threats to players, but also a high level of choice in how to deal with them.

Winning and Losing

The main conflict in almost all board games is how to win the game. In most competitive games, all players have the same goal and whoever accomplishes it first (e.g. scoring 7 points) or best (e.g. highest score after 10 rounds) wins. Losing is usually implicit: you lose if someone else wins. In a cooperative game, however, the game itself is your opponent and its goal is opposed to yours. Therefore, cooperative games usually have explicit loss conditions.
Their main conflict is: Can you win before the game makes you lose?

NEON HOPE has two loss conditions:

The Surveillance reaches the final threshold.
(At the end of the round the Surveillance increases automatically by 1 per character.)
One character exhausts by reaching 0 Endurance.
(Whenever you have no cards in hand your Endurance is reduced by 1. Then you pick up cards equal to your remaining Endurance from your discard pile to form a new hand. Therefore, there are two ways to lose your cards: You either play them to enhance your tasks, or lose them by suffering Stress. 1 Stress discards 1 card.)

Both, Surveillance and Stress, are also caused by all different kinds of effects. As a rough comparison, you can think of the Surveillance as time and Stress as health. The increasing Surveillance ensures that you need to act quickly, while Stress lets Enemies and other dangers pose a serious threat.

Thematically Surveillance represents the megacorporation’s ability to completely overpower you, if they ever become fully aware of your activities. While Stress represents the physical and mental strain your character can endure before breaking down.

The Goal Spectrum

Let’s take a closer look at the main conflict: Can you win before you lose? The players can distribute their assets (actions, cards, support markers) into winning or not losing. I like to think about that distribution as a spectrum, where at one end the players put everything into fulfilling their objective,accepting Stress and Surveillance. At the other end the players try to prevent as much Stress and Surveillance as they can.

At the extremes the play experience is one-dimensional, the pacing is off and the game becomes either too fast or too slow. However, in the middle area the players make constant progress in the story, while at the same time interacting with enough threats the corporation throws at them. Naturally, it is important for me and Dominik to design NEON HOPE in a way where players naturally gravitate to the middle of the spectrum. Our most potent tool to enable this is the encounter deck.

The Encounter Deck

The encounter deck is my favorite mechanic from my favorite cooperative games (Arkham Horror: The Card Game & Pandemic). How does it work? At the end of the round each player draws 1 card from an encounter deck that presents them with some form of challenge or punishment. The mechanic enables emergent storytelling and scales well with player count – and as a designer it gives you endless opportunities to create unique experiences for each episode.

In NEON HOPE you will face three different types of encounter cards:

Dilemmas force you to make a choice between two or more immediate effects. Afterwards they are discarded.
Enemies appear at your location. They attack you (dealing Stress) when you reveal a Skull from the Grid. Also at the end of the round they increase the Surveillance by 1 if they are at your location. By fighting them you can force them to retreat (removing them for 1 round) or deal damage to defeat them for good.
States are placed in a global zone called The Network and have an ongoing negative effect. They are discarded when enough hacking cubes are placed on them. You can Hack them to place hacking cubes. Though, at the end of the round 1 Hacking Cube is placed on them automatically.

Functions of an Encounter Card

Let us look into NEON HOPE’s encounter card design and how that relates to the goal spectrum: Each encounter card fulfills a function – trying to make you lose or stop you from winning. To explain our design philosophy, I want to introduce three terms that describe an encounter card’s function:

Punch: Hits you with a negative effect, but does not slow you down.
Wall: Stops you until you deal with it.
Thorn: Presents a decision. Deal with it and lose time or endure it and suffer a negative effect.

Here is one example for each category (Punch, Wall, Thorn):

»Profiling« is a prime example of a Punch – you can choose between Surveillance or Stress, but you cannot avoid both.
The »Corp Loyalist« is a typical Wall. Because of his Confrontation ability you can not move away from his location until you defeated or retreated him. In most situations you have to move eventually to fulfill your objective. Therefore, he must be dealt with if you want to win.
»Advanced Surveillance« is a Thorn as it gives you a choice. It will increase the Surveillance by 2 in the following round (and is then discarded, as States receive 1 Hacking Cube automatically). That is twice as much as Profiling does. However, you can try to Hack it to avoid the Surveillance altogether.

While Punches and Walls have a specific function, they still give you a choice: »Profiling« explicitly and the »Corp Loyalist« implicitly, as you can take care of him temporarily by retreating or take him out permanently if you defeat him. By giving the players multiple ways of dealing with an encounter card, we want to avoid frustration (“I couldn’t do anything!”) and at the same time give room for different strategies.

Putting it Together

By design most Punches are Dilemmas and most Walls are Enemies. However, all three card types can have the Thorn function.

»They are Watching You« lets you choose between suffering Surveillance or drawing an Enemy.
The »Freelance Security Officer« does not have the Confrontation ability. Therefore you can move away from her instead of dealing with her. But then you risk suffering Stress from her attacks or Surveillance at a later point.
»Data De-Anonymization« is similar to the previously mentioned »Advanced Surveillance« in that you can simply suffer 3 Stress or try to avoid it by Hacking it three times. Any combination of these is also possible.

It’s important for us to have a high density of Thorns in an encounter deck. A typical encounter deck is 25% Punches, 25% Walls and 50% Thorns. This distribution enables players to decide how carefully or recklessly they want to play. At the same time, it guarantees that the game does not end up at one of the extremes – stalling out with too many Walls or feeling non-interactive because of too many Punches.

What about Leads?

Leads are cards specific to one episode which you interact with to fulfill the objective. Naturally, they are Walls, as you need to clear them to progress the story.

A Wall has the risk that their combination of attribute and difficulty could be hard to succeed at for your character. Then it can feel like you cannot do anything (except going for a lucky shot) and your experience becomes frustrating.

To prevent this, we applied the philosophy of Thorns to Leads using a game mechanic that gives Leads multiple ways of approaching them: threat and secondary Hack tasks.

Let me explain this by comparing a fictional simple version of »Strangers in the Dark« (left) with the actual version that is in the game (right).

The left version simply requires the characters to perform the Investigate task against difficulty 5 three times to remove all 3 Secrets. This can be a moderately challenging endeavour for a character with high Perception, but could be frustratingly hard for a character with low Perception.

The actual version of »Strangers in the Dark« on the right has only a difficulty of 2, but has a threat value of 5. Meaning that reaching 2 is enough to remove a Secret but you must suffer 1 Stress unless you reach 5 or higher. But that is only the case, if you do not Hack the card beforehand. By succeeding at Hacking you can place a Hacking Cube on the threat icon to deactivate it. Therefore, turning the task into a simple Investigate with difficulty 2.

»Strangers in the Dark« presents you these options:

Investigate with a high value to reach 5 or more.
Investigate with 2 or more and suffer 1 Stress.
Hack the card first and then Investigate it without suffering Stress.

By having multiple options on encounter cards and Leads we are enabling different strategies and character builds. Your character could for example be focused on playing quickly, rushing through an Episode, before the Surveillance catches up with you. Or you could take more time, Hacking every State and Lead, collecting Resources, and purchasing powerful Tools to overpower the episode in the late game.

Let Us Know Your Thoughts!

Encounter decks are used in many cooperative games. I hope this article gives insight into our focus of designing them for NEON HOPE. Do not hesitate to leave a comment, if you have any questions!

And let me know:
What is your favorite game that has an encounter deck?
Tell us in the comments!

Have a great week!
Until next time!
Francesco
(Lead Game Designer)