As is, this makes strategy incredibly uninteresting – optimal Burglar strategy is to enter the hotel for just one minute, in which you cause a Distraction, then leave again; and there is no interesting Guard strategy available to attempt to counter that.

The Preparation Actions were intended to remove the “camp the Ingresses” strategy by allowing Burglars to create their own Ingresses. If you want to break through a window, the current ruleset lets you do that! There’s a rule “The Back Door” that exists for that specific purpose, and making everything an Ingress would make that rule mostly irrelevant (in addition to making most of the other dynastic mechanics mostly irrelevant).

The main issue is that right now, Preparation Actions aren’t usable. For some reason, my proposal to make Preparation Actions usable got voted down – any Burglar who voted for SingularByte’s version of that over mine probably deserves what they got. But from the next round onwards, they should exist and will let the Burglars make Ingresses anywhere.

This is a nomic, you can change the rules.

The core question is: do ingresses themselves make the game more or less interesting? Ruleset-mandated chokepoints do not seem like fertile game design space. Preparation Actions for Guards to help them manage the influx better would be worth investigating but that is what we call a game design provocation.

Paying for ingresses is interesting design space (which we have at the moment), and there are four ingresses available for free, to allow Burglars to do something if they don’t want to (or can’t) pay.

Ingresses everywhere isn’t interesting design space, because it means that most of the Spots don’t do anything – if there’s an artifact on an Ingress, the only Spots which matter for that artifact are the spot of the artifact and Grounds, because Burglars have no reason to go anywhere else. Say there’s an artifact at X. The obvious strategy for Burglars is “go to X, pick up the artifact, go back to Grounds”. There is nothing that Guards can do about this other than standing on X, and no reason for someone guarding that artifact to go anywhere else.

Ingresses add interest by forcing paths to be multiple steps long. (“Dynamism in routing” had a similar motivation.) I’m finding it hard to think of an alternative mechanic that might do the same thing, other than locking Burglars in the hotel for all 12 minutes (which is also uninteresting, just in a different way).

Your own example is, I think, unintentionally revealing. If there’s an artifact on X then won’t every single guard be there? And if that’s the case, each Burglar is comfortably giving away more than they are getting. I think you’re underrating the strategic calculations that would go into that scenario.

As is so often the case, we should go back to the theme. Why would Burglars stay in the hotel longer? To push their luck. Right now, GROUNDS - LOOT - GROUNDS x10 gives you 5 Infamy (12 -11 Grounds spots + 4 for a single Loot). A route of Grounds to Grounds with 10 other spots and all four Loot in it gets 22 Infamy. Which one looks like a winning strategy?

Sorry, 26 Infamy for the longer route

I hadn’t even considered the possibility that one Burglar might want to go for multiple Artifacts. I think that doing so is an obviously bad strategy – although the rewards for success are good, it is so difficult to succeed at that that they may as well be irrelevant.

In any case, such a strategy would be highly likely to be prevented by other Burglars stealing the loot first (once a Burglar picks up an Artifact there isn’t an Artifact there any more). A good way to think about it is “running around the Hotel trying to get multiple Artifacts doesn’t actually do anything to increase your chance of Success – because that only needs one successful steal – it just screws over the other Burglars’ attempts to get Infamy”. And Guards have no reason to try to prevent Burglars from trying to screw each other over, because that sort of intra-team backstabbing is necessarily going to be good for the other team.

Yes, you have highlighted one way we can change the rules to make them more interesting!

Seems pretty reasonable to me. We might need to tweak stations a bit. But definitely seems more dynamic than the current gameplay. 

How is “enter the Hotel for 1 minute with a Distraction to pick up an artifact, while the Guards catch all the Criminals who don’t do that” dynamic gameplay?

Normally I don’t like revealing the optimal strategy because it gives me an advantage when I’m following it and everyone else isn’t (although I will say that, in general, the optimal strategy in the current ruleset is not to camp the Ingresses). But the optimal strategy after this proposal passes is so straightforward and uninteresting that I may as well point it out because I expect everyone else to spot it too.

  I have mixed feelings about this one. It does make sense to allow entry from anywhere, but it does also simplify the gameplay as ais has said. I’ve proposed artifact traits to help mitigate this, but I think as it stands, this might still simplify things a little much for the burglars.

I agree that we should shake up the rules to make it more interesting, but I don’t think this is the way to make it happen. What is the right way? I don’t know yet, but this doesn’t feel like it.

I think I’m of the opinion that we already have a way to reduce camping - namely, the Back Door Preparation Action. We haven’t even started the first round with that action available yet, and it seems premature to conclude it’s insufficient.