The new version is out and brings new challenges:

• Mixed Costs: These costs are very high, but you can use any combination of Fighting and Stealth to pay for them.  This is my attempt to fix those situations where you only had the wrong currency for every card in line. Watch out for the revamped Mission 4!
• Rebalance: I’ve been getting a lot of feedback on and offline, and updated several cards to make the game flow better – and remove some exploits!
• Difficulty: After playing it for a while it became pretty hard to judge the game’s difficulty. I didn’t find it hard, but I knew every single card so I could plan differently. I had to get the game out there to hear it from the player’s mouth, a fresh different point of view. Turns out most people finished the whole campaign on their first attempt, which might leave them with a first impression that the game is too easy. Why would they ever come back?  The game is now harder! The question is… is it too hard now?

You can get it for free here!

New Agent Decker prototype!

After some good feedback and struggling with serious balancing issues I couldn’t really solve, I decided the best thing would be to go back to the drawing board, so this week I restarted the game.

The biggest change is the mission sequence. Initially there was none of that. The player would draw a goal to complete during that mission, or even raise the difficulty by drawing more than one. I liked that concept because it would add replayability without adding new cards. If you felt you were getting better at the game you could create new challenges for yourself.

All the “Obstacle cards” (the ones you can buy) were shuffled in a single deck and six of them were placed in the center of the table. Every turn some cards leave the line and new ones come in. That means some cards need to be “affordable” at the start of the game and a lot of them need to be more expensive, because later in the game your deck is so much better.

The thing is, the cheap cards might not show up at the start, which can lead to a few really frustrating turns.

Games like Ascension or Star Realms solve this by having static piles of “upgrade” cards which you can purchase independently from the central market. I had those at the start as well, but they never felt “right” to me because of the theme. You are walking past stuff in the enemy complex, so how come these things were always at an arm’s reach?

Then, there was a really good surprise! The players always wanted to keep playing after completing the first mission. I started thinking how to achieve this without becoming monotonous and that lead to…

REDESIGN!

• Story! Now the game has five missions you can play in a sequence. Every time you finish a mission you get a reward, and some horrible new cards are added to the obstacles deck.
• Changing rules! That even allows me to change the rules mid-game, as a reward!
• Layout! No more upside down cards. You really need to consider both halves of the cards every turn, so having them upside down can be really confusing for the player.
  Also, I’m including notes or symbols to make setup and teardown easier.
• Highscore! Another cool thing this mission sequence brings is the possibility of a highscore! It’s pretty simple. Add up the alarm you had at the end of each mission, and that is your score! …but don’t forget! You want a low number here.

Next up, a digital version so you can try it out!

Agent Decker is a mission-based deckbuilding game for one player where you’ll acquire gear and skills by facing obstacles. The alarm raises every turn, so you must pick who you take out. Do you go for the cool weapon, or take out the security camera?

You’re a rookie spy straight out of spy school, and the yellow deck of cards represents what you can do: Punch or Hide.  These are the base cards of each of the game’s two currencies, Violence and Stealth.

As you defeat obstacles you learn new skills and get gear. For example, you can defeat an Armed Guard

…to get a machine gun! That will give you four “Violence” when it appears again.

I’m developing it for the 2015 Solitaire Print and Play Contest on Boardgame Geek, so it will be available as a free print and play PDF when it’s done. For now there’s only the handwritten paper prototype, but soon there will be a prototype version you can test. It’s the first time I’m letting the internet play one of my games before it’s finished, so I’m pretty excited (as well as terrified)!

I’ll post about the game’s design and progresses here, but the best place to follow every step of the development as well as player feedback is at Agent Decker’s WIP thread.