This is the second of three behind the scenes posts from my Patreon that I'm porting over to this Backerkit campaign. After these three updates are live you'll see new posts about this game at the same time as Patrons.

I've mentioned that one of my aims with Blood In The Margins is to lend more structure toe Wretched & Alone. I'm particularly drawing inspiration from the Legendary Encounters board games here. I play the Alien version a lot and I've always been very impressed by the way you stack the deck at the start of play to create a very narrative experience filled with rising tension.

I've been looking at how that works and trying to figure out how to apply it to W&A. Since we're already using the Ace of Hearts as a potential win condition in base W&A, that gives me three other Aces to play with in the way the deck is constructed. These map very nicely to three Acts, and it feels like the obvious choice to have the other Aces take the function of 'end of Act' markers.

In the last update I discussed the length of the game, comparing the number of pulls in an average Jenga game to the average number of rolls in my new system. I was worried about game length and pacing and trying to figure out solutions. I think this solves that problem nicely.

By splitting the game into three Acts I'm forcing myself to need to write three times as many prompts for the game, but that's a good thing. It means that I have much more control over the pacing. I can decide, for example, that none of the Act 1 prompts will call for tower pulls (or the equivalent in the new system). We can spend time establishing the scenario and exploring characters without the clock ticking. Then, come Act 2, things can start to ramp up.

Legendary Encounters has a smaller deck than the 52 cards in a standard deck of playing cards, and in my experience it's very rare that you see all of the cards in the deck because you either lose the game or complete all your objectives and win. To build the deck you construct three smaller mini decks and stack them on top of each other, and each one has an Objective card hidden in it somewhere. This is just shuffled randomly into each mini deck, because it largely doesn't matter when it appears.

My initial thought was that I could ask the player to split the 52 card deck into three piles and shuffle an Ace into each one to act as an End of Act card. Or, alternatively, I could place an Ace on the bottom of each pile. But in thinking about it I don't really like either of these options. In the first case, there's a chance that the End of Act cards come up fast and you don't get to see many prompts in a given Act. That's not really satisfying. In the latter example, you're always playing through a full 52 cards unless the tower falls (I'm going to keep using this "tower" terminology to talk about this game for now, even though it doesn't use a tower, purely because it's a handy shorthard). That could make for a very long game, and it also means that Acts 1 and 2 are a predictable length. I don't like that, so I've been thinking about how to split the difference. Here's the deck stacking procecure I've come up with.

1. Remove Aces: Take the Aces of Spades, Clubs, and Diamonds out of the deck and set them aside. Keep the Ace of Hearts in the deck.

2. Shuffle the Deck: Thoroughly shuffle the remaining cards.

3. Divide the Deck: Split the shuffled deck into three piles as follows:   

4. Shuffle the Aces: Shuffle the three Aces (Spades, Clubs, Diamonds) set aside earlier. Keep them face down.

1. Prepare Act 3:

2. Prepare Act 2:

3. Prepare Act 1:

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I still haven't figured out what the Aces actually represent in the fiction of the game, but this seems to me like it strikes a nice balance between providing structure and allowing some variation in gameplay. It will obviously need some playtesting, but at the moment I'm pretty happy with how this looks.