Bandit Country: The Risk - Consequence - Opportunity Loop.

After completing my latest work on Rocket Age I am turning back to Bandit Country. If you are new to the blog and you don't know what Bandit Country is, check out this link and check out the back posts.

One of my goals with Bandit Country is to be able to express the game as a series of flowcharts. This is what I call the Big Picture, the primary play loop as a whole.

The Big Picture works like this. The Player selects an Objective for their Consultant and goes through the Risk phase to Assess, Address and Apply a solution. Moving to the Consequence phase we discover the outcomes and apply them. Shifting to the Opportunity phase we find the exploitable circumstances that have emerged from the Consultant's solution and a new Objective is selected. The loop iterates until the Player has achieved their Mission Goal or has been captured and is being tortured to death.

Network sits at the center of the Big Picture because it is informed by each phase of the loop and is protected and enhanced by the Risk Management process. Bandit Country is not a heroic game in the genre meaning of the word and Players will need to recruit, manage and organize one or more networks to achieve their goals.

Risk, Consequence, Opportunity and Network are the four key modules that define a game of Bandit Country. I have written the Risk module and I plan on writing the Consequence and Opportunity modules before the next play-test, 2 weeks.

I am also thinking about how the Network module will work because I want it to be a mini-game within the game as a whole that is simple, strategic and deep. I suspect that I will be looking at card and board games for inspiration there and that will be fun because I don't have much experience with either.