de BGG
An overview of the gameplay of Deep Madness. The components shown below are just sketches, the graphic design is still in progress…
1.Deep Madness is a scenario based game.
The core game is comprised of 8 scenarios, which tells a continuous story line. The game board is built with Room Tiles according to the current scenario. Each scenario has its unique objectives and Investigate Actions that the investigators can perform, which give it a completely different experience.
2.Deep Madness plays in limited number of game rounds.
A game round has four Phases. Each Scenario Sheet has a <i>Devour Track of its own.
In the first phase, the Devour Phase, the Devour Marker< will advance by one along the Devour Track and trigger the corresponding effect. If the investigators fail to achieve the objective before the Devour Marker reaches the end of the track, the game is over and the conscious world is devoured by the madness. The game provides a fast-paced experience.
3.The game board of Deep Madness evolves as the game progresses.
As the Devour Marker advances, two types of effects could be triggered. The scenario specific effects and the devour effect. When a devour effect is triggered, reveal the top card from the Room Deck then the corresponding Room Tile is devoured and flipped to the opposite side.
Spawn Markers and negative Devour Effect Tokens will be placed on the tile. Monsters will also have stronger abilities on the devoured tiles. The world becomes even more dangerous for the investigators.
4.The monsters in Deep Madness are spawned in ‘random’ locations.
Six types of monsters are selected for each game, and their Spawn Cards are shuffled into a Spawn Deck. In the second phase, the Spawn Phase, the position of the Devour Marker on the Devour Track decides how many Spawn Cards should be resolved.
A Spawn Card specifies which type of monsters will be spawned, how many room will spawn monsters, and the number of the monsters spawned in each of these rooms.
Monsters will be spawned in devoured Room Tiles. Their corresponding Room Cards form a face-up deck, after the top room spawns monsters, its card is placed at the bottom of the deck. In this way, each devoured room will spawn monsters in turns. And more rooms will become devoured and more cards will add to the deck due to the devour effect in the Devour Phase.
5.In Deep Madness the investigators and monsters take turns alternately.
In the third phase, Activation Phase, after each investigator takes his turn, a type of monsters will act immediately. An Activation Marker moves along the cards in the picture below.
The players must plan their actions strategically or the investigators later in turns may have no chance to react to dangers. The intertwined turns mechanism keeps the players engaging at all times, making changes to their plan as the game round plays out. The order of the monsters are fixed, while the order of the investigators' turns will change after each game round.
6.The investigators in Deep Madness could choose from many actions during their turns.
Including: move, attack, search, trade cards, recover sanity, close hatches (to block monsters), activate components, and the most important the Investigate Actions defined in the Scenario Sheet. Each choice will impact the rest of the game. As the number of game rounds are limited, so is the number of actions taken by the investigators.
The investigator ability system is simple and intuitive, without complicated level system. The investigators have unique abilities and strong synergy. Each team of investigators requires different strategy. There are six investigators in the core game. And there are in total of 21 investigators coming up in the stretch goals and complementary Kickstarter exclusive.
7.Deep Madness has an underwater mechanism.
The story of Deep Madness takes place in a deep sea mining structure. Some of the tiles are submerged. Each investigator has a Drowning Dial. Taking actions underwater gives investigators drowning points. If a certain amount of drowning points is accumulated, the investigator starts to take damage. And investigators are more likely to be trapped by monsters underwater. Prolonged activity underwater without careful planning can cost greatly.
8.The monsters in Deep Madness have their distinctive characteristics.
Each monster has its own action pool to provide AI, and different abilities. The monsters’ abilities is enhanced in the devoured tiles. Different combinations of the monsters, even different turn orders bring unique game experiences.
9.The combat system of Deep Madness is straight forward.
The investigators can obtain four kinds of cards from Search Deck, melee weapon, ranged weapon, equipment, and sanity card. Weapon cards can be used to attack. Each weapon card has range, dice number, accuracy, and hit damage, which is similar to Zombicide, but they do have some differences:
- Players can assign damages from melee weapons to different monsters in the same space freely, But can only target 1 monster within range when using a ranged weapon.
- Damage is calculated as the sum of hit damages from all the hit dice.
- Each weapon card has a unique effect.
- Investigators and monsters have their resilience value to block some damage. Monsters have fixed resilience, while investigators roll dice to decide.
- Monsters has fixed attack damage, but most has unique abilities during attacking, some of them requires rolling the 12-sided monster die.
10.Deep Madness has a ‘Sanity/Madness’ mechanism.
Each investigator can exhaust his sanity to perform different effects, e.g. trigger special ability, use special search card effect, or more frequently re-roll a die he’s just rolled.
When an investigator exhausts sanity, an Insanity Token is taken. After the number of Insanity Tokens equals to his sanity attribute, he cannot exhaust sanity any more. Insanity Tokens can be discarded by taking the recover sanity action. Killing monsters will recover sanity too, by flipping a number of Insanity Token equals to the monster’s Corruption Value to the opposite side, the Madness side. Madness is hard to remove, and a certain number of Madness will force the investigator to resolve Madness Card, a nasty negative effect card with horrific flavor text.
Killing monsters without Insanity Token will award Consciousness Card, each Consciousness Card reveals some interesting background story. With enough number of Consciousness Cards, the Devour Marker pauses and allows extra game rounds. However, sometimes, madness is inevitable.
Je vois pas trop pourquoi ils le disent déjà 8-O
