Turn on the lights!

One of the features of the Disarm the Base board is that it has a light in each corner. In the final game these will be brightly coloured tiles, but for now I’ve got little scraps of yellow card.

As the players try to unlock hangers and disarm the planes inside, a guard moves clockwise around the outside of the base. If the light comes on when the guard and a player are on the same quarter of the board then the player has been seen by the guard. It’s game over.

The key questions are how often the lights should come, and how easy it should be to turn them off. There are eight “the light has come on” cards in the play deck, two for each light. And there are four “turn off the light” cards which players use as an action. But where should this action be taken? From anywhere in the relevant quarter makes little narrative sense, but is it too difficult for players to get to the control centre every time they need to turn off a light?

The solution (for now) is that lights can also be be turned off from other lights – as if they were all linked together. While it’s a little hard to go out of one of the gates and along to a light, the board is small. We’ll play with this as the default for a while.