With a sample of the game sitting on my desk, and the rest of the print run on a ship heading to our warehouse, time for another Encounters: Shadowrun dev post (last one was a while back, so feel free to re-familiarize yourself with the first one if this game looks like your cup-o-tea).

For this post, let’s discussion keywords. Encounters: Bravest Warriors is a great, fun game. But for Shadowrun, I wanted a little more. Both in terms of the tactics of game play, but also in having such a monster universe-of-awesome to pull from. Keywords brings in those extra tactics, while simultaneously providing great additional universe immersion; even if the players aren’t really aware of it, the Sixth World is coming alive via the keywords.

So how do they work? Well, for those that haven’t played Encounters before, it’s a push-your-luck dice game, where you roll up an Encounter card and roll 6D6. If you can exactly match values on any of the rolled dice with the card, you lock those die on and its defeated. You can then take your earned points for defeating that card, or you can push-your-luck by rolling up a new Encounter card, re-rolling any un-locked dice, and trying once more to exactly match the dice to the value on the card (it gets harder and harder each time as you have less dice). If you manage to lock all of your dice onto cards, you get to Escalate, by taking all of your dice back, and starting over again. Every time you Escalate the cards are worth more points. And of course along the way the Encounter cards themselves have extra rules that can make it easier or harder to defeat them, while you’re acquiring Shadowrunner cards to help more easily defeat the Encounters. And most importantly, even if you’re looking at a dozen defeated Encounter cards and thirty points you could take, if you ever fail to lock dice onto a new Encounter card, you lose it all! Hence, push-your-luck.

With that explanation out of the way (again, for those that haven’t played an Encounters game before), let’s dive right into an example of how the keywords for Encounters: Shadowrun bring more tactics to the game.

A player has Contrary Mary and Topshelf and is in the middle of a run. Contrary Mary includes “All rolled 4s & 6s are wild” and “Megacorporation: Apply +1 to a single die roll.” Topshelf includes “All rolled 2s & 5s are wild” and “Metahuman: Apply +1 to a single die roll.” The player has already locked three dice onto an Encounter and is pushing. The next Encounter is Ancients Captain: an Encounter Value of 7 and the Metahuman and Underworld keywords (as shown below). Reviewing her Shadowrunners, the player knows the keyword ability on Topshelf now applies as well as its standard ability. The player rolls 1, 1, and 3. There are several paths to achieving 7, including using both Shadowrunners. However, the player chooses to use just Topshelf. First she uses the Metahuman keyword ability to apply the +1 to one of the 1s to make it a 2, which she then immediately uses for Topshelf’s “All rolled 2s & 5s are wild” ability, changing the 2 to a 3, locking on all dice and allowing an Escalation. This is well worth using Topshelf since this card cannot be Retained.

Hopefully you can immediately see the interplay of fun tactics back and forth between your Shadowrunners and Encounters facilitated by those keywords as you work towards a win.

That’s it for this dev post. Next time I’ll dive into the District cards, as well as touch a little more on some additional words from the example above (such as what “Retained” means) not found in Encounters: Bravest Warriors.

Enjoy!

Randall