While borrowing from Yedo's Mission Cards for Adventure system ideas, it became very clear that one thing I don't like about Yedo is that it's really painful when you go through a lot of trouble to get a new Mission Card, and when you do, it's requirements are not anything you are set up to accomplish, nor do you have hope you could get it done before game end. Extraneous quests are doubly a waste of time and resources if you have to invest something to get a new one and can't do anything with it. So while I enjoy Yedo's bonus objectives on the Mission Cards for extra rewards, characters in the Venture Bros. are far more likely to spontaneously, and often irresponsibly, abandon their plan for a radical new change of strategy if it seems things aren't working out. So for Project Venture Capital I thought rather than using bonus objectives, each Adventure Card should also have a "Simple Goal" option. If you feel you can't or don't want to accomplish the full Adventure's main goal, you can meet one of a subset of much simpler, more generic objectives, such as stealing an item, earning a lot of money, or taking a hostage for ransom or rescuing a hostage, in order to get a smaller reward more quickly and discard the Adventure Card. This helps keep players flexible in their short and long-term goals, and with the right balancing, searching for a bunch of Adventures and then quickly getting rid of them for their Simple Goals as quickly as possible should be a viable strategy towards winning.

Speaking of winning, the victory conditions are often one of the first, and most important aspects of a tabletop game design to figure out, but with a more sandbox-oriented approach, victory conditions often come last. And it can definitely show in a design. Considering how broad I want players' options to be, I would like the paths to victory to be equally as broad. This has so far only lead me to the "point salad" approach to victory conditions, where victory points can be gathered throughout the game by a variety of means, and currently the development of a Faction's Influence sets the pace of the game, where the first Faction to earn all of their Potential Influence triggers the end-game.

While I'm not fully satisfied with this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink goal in the game, I haven't come across too many other viable options unless I want to really over incentivize one aspect of the game. For example, if completing adventures lead to victory, the player that wants to stay true to The Monarch's character and just arch and obstruct Dr. Venture all day doesn't have much of a shot at winning. Victory point salad might be the best to aim for in this particular design.