Experimental Rules #7 - The Long Game

As we grow the concept of Zero Dark to incorporate more complex tabletops - corridors, doors, barricades, sentinels etc - so the desire to take the opportunity to exploit them becomes impeded by another core feature of Zero Dark: the ticking clock of the Control Deck.

As we contemplate the end of lockdown and the easing of restrictions on our ability to meet others and play Versus games with them, so I think this is going to become more important.  Players are going to want to really take advantage of the opportunities a diverse tabletop offers to  manipulate and overcome their opponent.

But I hope it will also become important in the solo and co-op game.  As the Zero Dark community grows, so too will grow the number of people willing to commit not just an hour or so, but maybe several hours, a whole day or even a whole weekend to playing through a more complex narrative in a single, extended scene rather than linked missions against the clock.

So I offer here several options to create longer games, from merely a few extra turns to a whole second deck.  Each can be used on its own or in combination with the others.

You can use these in existing missions to make it easier to achieve your objective (or at least to make it less of a desperate run for the objective to beat the clock) or to allow you to invent more elaborate missions of your own that can take longer to complete.

1. Extra Jokers

Many card decks - especially poker decks - come with two or even three extra cards with an identical back to the other cards in the deck.  Why not shuffle these into your deck, too?  Yes, more complications, but also more opportunities to achieve your objective.

A stretch goal for the Zero Dark playing cards deck will be to include multiple additional Jokers for exactly this purpose.

2. Spooks

Spooks make your life easier by allowing you to manipulate the odds.  But they also make your life harder by running down the clock.  If you get to the end of a mission and still have cards in a Spook's hard, shuffle those cards and place them face down where the Control Deck used to be.  You can now use them for a few extra turns to try to complete your mission.

3. Extra Time Deck

When you run down the clock at the start of your mission, instead of putting those cards into the discard pile, put them to one side.  If you haven't completed your mission at the end of the Control Deck, you can use cards from the Extra Time deck at a cost of 1 XP per card.  If you run out of XP to spend, you can go into negative XP.  Deduct the negative from your XP achieved in that mission and, if you still have negative XP, run the clock down by that many cards in the next mission!

4. Double Deck

When you flip the last card on the Control Deck, generate a complication, then shuffle the discard pile and put it back where the Control Deck was.  You have a whole new Control deck to spend to achieve your mission!  This option comes with no other down-sides but you need to decide at the beginning of the mission that you're going to Double Deck it.

Double Decking is a particularly good option for Versus missions.  Other occasions that might cause you to want to Double Deck are:

- Using loads of multi-level scenery involving climbing, jumping and even navigating playable interiors, doors etc.

- Placing objectives on an elevated or difficult-to-access location.

- Playing a mission with the objective of being super-sneaky and killing as many bogeys as possible without being seen (there will be new rules for doing this in Operation NEMESIS that might appear as experimental rules here, shortly).