About
What is this?
"The Hunt" is a deduction game where you're trying to find the Mole. It is inspired by the electronically-assisted board game from Wild Planet Entertainment, "Spy Trackdown". The core gameplay is like the childrens' game "Hot or Cold", in that you get clues and progressively get closer to a hidden person or object.
Who is the Mole?
From a gameplay perspective, the Mole is the object of the game, the person you're trying to find. The Mole's location is secret, but some card actions will give you information about where it is.
From a plot perspective, it depends on how far you want to use your imagination. If you're in-character as a player, the Mole is your clever acquaintance who has found a good place to hide from you. When you're in-character as a player who is in-character, then "all we know for certain is that he (or she) is mysterious, elusive, and has a dark reputation. The Mole is presumed extremely dangerous and their capture is vitally important" (...notwithstanding that there is nothing to suggest that it is actually urgent or time-sensitive in any way...)
What's the plot?
You and your fellow players are participants in a live game, where you travel around a locale (not necessarily an entire actual world or continent, unless y'all have a huge budget) in search of one of your friends, the Mole. The game master and narrator keeps track of what everyone is doing, and you get in touch with them to move and perform your abilities.
Why the plot?
As with many other things I do, the restrictions that I decided on ruled everything else out.
In the game that this was inspired by, the players are secret agents looking for a villain, who was some sort of spymaster or crime leader. Development versions of this game initially followed the same outline, but I ran into problems.
The first one is that there was a previous game. I'm not versed on intellectual property law, but I was concerned about running into an issue here. Maybe it would have been fine; there are many games I've seen that copy better-known works, more faithfully than I intended to in this case. But I didn't know, and didn't have the resources to find out for sure, and it wasn't worth the risk.
When I started thinking about how I could change it, I thought of criteria that my solution had to meet. What turned out to be the key requirement is that the characters that the players are representing should not be immoral or morally ambiguous: every player should be able to consider themselves the 'good guy'.
At first, this may not seem so restrictive; if you're all trying to bring down the villain, you're all protagonists, aren't you? The problem is that you aren't just trying to bring down the villain, you're trying to do it instead of the other players. In fact, you're actively opposing and impeding their efforts to find him.
Why would you do that? There are only two possibilities, which aren't mutually exclusive: either the other agents are themselves villains, and/or you have something you want to gain from being the one who makes the capture. If the former is true, then because every other agent feels the same way, most, if not all, agents must be at best deceived or deluded into thinking that they are right when they are not. If the latter is true, then you are a person who finds it preferable that an evil villain should remain at large than that someone else should get the reward for his capture.
You might suppose that removing the villain from the piece helps; the plot could be about a search for another sort of person, or an object. But while you may not be protecting a criminal, it remains unclear how you could perform some of these actions (preventing all travel to and out of a country, for instance) in a moral and legal manner.
This being the case, if you want a competitive game (not a co-op) where the players can obstruct each other (not just a race), and you want virtuous characters, the only way that seems logically possible is for it to be an actual game, with rules that the characters are following and options they are making use of.
It helped that I've used this premise before. Some years back I hosted an online Mafia round. I felt that many of the settings for other rounds I'd seen were grim, depressing, and repetitive, and I wanted to do something different. The theme I ended up with is that the players were young people on a trip playing an organized Mafia game during some of their off-time. The plot was well-received, so I know that the principle here is sound, whether or not this particular game implements it well.
You're free to pretend on some level that you are trying to capture a villain, especially when you get to the end. I left the original messages I wrote for winning the game, largely unedited, because they're so [melo]dramatic. If I write more, I will probably do them in a similar style, because saying 'So and so wins' is a letdown. However, players should understand that the 'real action' is more like two friends pretending to be these characters rather than the real event as it is worded.
So the real plot is the spy one, and you just said all that above to cover your bases, right?
No.
I intend to make sure that the game has enough whimsy that you cannot be easily confused into supposing the premise of this question is true.
What are clues?
Each region of a map has a corresponding clue (a person, place, or thing that the Mole has arranged to be there) hidden in a random territory. At the end of each turn, you get information about how far you are from the clue in the region you're in. When you move into the right territory, you discover it. After you discover a clue, and leave the region that it is in, you draw cards. Each time a specific clue is found, the next player to find it will draw one card less, down to a minimum of one card. If a player has discovered all of the clues, they draw one card at the end of each turn from that point on.
What are the rules for placing the players, Mole and clues?
At the beginning of each game, players, the Mole, and the clues are all placed randomly, the clues being placed in a random territory in their region, and the players and Mole being placed in a completely random territory. The territories are mutually exclusive. You know that your starting territory does not contain either the Mole or a clue, and if you visit a territory and find a clue, you can be sure the Mole is not there.
What are the cards?
Cards are drawn after finding clues in territories, and leaving those clues' regions. They offer abilities that are unavailable otherwise, some of which are essential, like searching for the Mole, and some of which are just useful, like moving to distant territories or blocking other players' travel options. Each board have unique decks with certain cards in them.
Basic Cards
These cards appear in almost all games.
Count Links to Mole
This tells you how many territories away the Mole is from your current location, or if the Mole is at your current location. Distance for this, and all similar cards, is given based on optimum travel conditions, as if all of the travel links are available.
Safe Capture
If the Mole is at your current location, you win the game. If not, then you have spent this card and an action, and revealed to the world a place where the Mole isn't.
This is, of course, preferable to immediately losing the game.
Guide to Mole:
This determines the quickest route to the Mole from your current position and tells you the next territory to go to on that route. If there are multiple routes with different first steps that are equally fast, it picks a random one. If the Mole is in your current location, it will tell you.
Get Another's Distance:
This works like "Count Links to Mole", but instead of your distance from the Mole, it tells you the distance of something else from the Mole. If you are in a multiplayer game, it will be a random other player. If you are playing a solitaire game, it will give you the distance from a random clue, which you may not have discovered yet.
Flight Check
This determines the distance from your current location to the Mole, in map pixels, 'as the crow flies', and tells you, in a vague sense, whether you are close or far.
Compass Direction
This determines the angle from your current location to the Mole, on the map, 'as the crow flies', and tells you which compass direction to go in.
The method that determines whether something is in a compass direction consists of eight expanding triangles, as in the picture below. A territory's exact center must be in the triangle for it to fit into a certain direction.
What qualifies as a compass direction tends to be increased with range. A territory that would be 'northwest' if it were nearby may qualify as a cardinal direction if it is far enough away.
Local Lockdown:
This blocks regular movement to, or from, the region that the player is in to other regions, starting with this player's turn and continuing until all other players have moved and it is this player's turn again. It blocks the player who uses it, so you may not want to deploy this if you want to leave a region.
Take Another Turn:
This gives the player an extra turn, for a gain of one action (two new actions total, minus one for playing this card).
Long Jump:
This determines the territories that are furthest away from the player (in terms of territory links) under optimum conditions, randomly selects one of them, and moves you to that territory. This card doesn't take lockdowns into account, so you can be transported somewhere that is currently inaccessible by other means.
Unlock Links:
This cancels out the effects of *all* Local Lockdown cards that have been played. There are also other border restrictions that may be ended, depending on the specific map.
Board-specific Cards
Alphabet Soup:
Monolingual: Like Local Lockdown, but at a larger scale: all travel from any region to another region is blocked.
Open Borders: In addition to ending Local Lockdowns, this ends the Monolingual block.
What are the boards?
Each one is a different setting, with unique maps, locations, flavor, and card decks, allowing for different distributions of abilities and powers from the other boards. It is hoped that this will help keep gameplay fresh. It's expected that some maps will be better-suited to certain quantities of players. The current maps are as follows (click the link to see the map):
Alphabet Soup
This board was the first to be fully implemented, and is typically used to test various aspects of the game. If new major features are introduced to the game, you will probably see them here sooner or later. It is a smaller map that currently has 4 regions, each named after different languages. Agents initially give three cards, resulting in slightly longer games than the territory count alone would suggest.
Cabatia
I developed this when I was experiencing ongoing writers' block with North America descriptions. It seemed easier to flesh out a fictional world than to be completely accurate to our own! The creative spark here was from the "Dice Games"' third roster, which had included a number of fictional cities. This map expands on that by showing a whole continent and alluding to a world which are similar to, but different from, ours. This is a moderate-sized board with six regions and four-card draws.
Understanding and using the control panels
This section will attempt to explain the interface.
Game Code: This is used for viewing and joining private games, although technically it can be used to access any game that you have the code for. The host copies this code and sends it to anyone he wants; they paste it into the box provided for it in the lobby page.
Last Activity: Games will automatically expire after some time with no recent updates, generally after a week or so.
Status: Game status options include "open", "active", and "completed". Open games haven't started yet, and may be waiting for players. Active games are being played. Completed games have been resolved, either by someone finding the Mole, or everyone losing or resigning.
The top box here is the region blurb, which shows the region the player is currently in and a short flavor-text description.
After this, we have the similar territory blurb.
The line of text after shows the current player and the number of actions that they have available in their turn.
The two adjacent boxes, the card chooser and location chooser respectively, allow you to select a card to play, or an adjacent territory to move to. Each will generally take up a single action. The bulk of gameplay is done here.
Below this, we have the button panel. These correspond to special, rare actions that are not always available, or desirable if they are available. To activate any of these buttons, you must first activate the checkbox directly below that button, to verify your intention. Buttons that are greyed out, and are totally empty (instead of having a checkmark or a line), are not available in the current game state. The buttons are as follows:
Capture: Attempt to capture the Mole in your current territory. If your guess is right (that the Mole is in your territory), you win the game. If you are wrong, you immediately lose the game and are out of play. This button is only available when the game is active and it is your turn.
Start: This begins the game, provided that you are the game host and the game is not active or completed.
Pass: Spend an action staying in place. This is only available when it is your turn and the game is active.
Join: Join the game. This is only available when the game is open, you are not already in the game, and you are not an unregistered spectator.
Leave: Leave the game. This varies depending on your role and the game's state. If the game is active, then it is only available on your turn, and by doing this you resign the game. On the other hand, if the game is open: If you've joined the game, you leave the game with no further consequence; if you're the host, the game is deleted. Finally, if the game is completed, it is, of course, too late to leave it.
This section provides essential information about the state of and activities in the game.
The move log shows players' actions in regular text. It also shows secret messages that are addressed specifically to you; these are shown completely in italics.
Of the messages shown above, other players can see the small text (showing whose turn it is), and they can see that James has moved from Zeta to Gamma, or that he has played a card. Those messages have italics, but they are not completely italicized; any italics you see are only for emphasis.
On the other hand, the messages about discovering Jason in Gamma, and the distance of the Mole from Zeta, are secret messages. They are entirely italicized.
Messages are listed in reverse-chronological order, so the newest messages are always at the top, and each message in turn is older than the previous one,
Below the move log, we have the player list, which shows, in order of movement, who all is involved in the game, their current locations (in underlined text), the number of cards they have in their hands, and whether they are the active player or not.
Finally, we have the clue section. Each line shows the name of a clue (a person, place or thing, which, when you find them, will provide you with cards), the region they are associated with, and their current status.
There are four statuses, three of which are visible to the player:
1 & 2) Unknown: You haven't moved into the clue's territory yet, or you have moved across a territory that a clue is in, but your turn hasn't ended yet; information about clues is revealed every time you spend two actions, which is the normal length of a turn.
3) Discovered: You've been notified that you've discovered a clue, but you haven't left the region yet or drawn your cards yet.
4) Revealed: You've drawn your cards, and everyone's been notified that you discovered the clue and received your cards.
Using the map's features
The map is defined as the picture you see showing the landscape when you are playing the game.
Territories on maps are identified by a label and the player position square, which is in the color of the region it is in.
There are two types of links between territories, two-way links and one-way links.
Two-way links are typically colored black or bright yellow, and are depicted by lines drawn between the two territories.
One-way links are typically colored light blue and have a line with an arrow pointing towards another territory.
You can determine whether a player is at a territory, and which player it is, by looking for a line. The color of the lines will change from black to white depending on the color of the square that they're on, so that they are always visible. A vertical line represents the first player, a horizontal line the second player, a diagonal line going from top-left to bottom-right the third player, and a diagonal line going from bottom-left to top-right the fourth player.
When multiple players are on one territory, their lines will intersect, and can form various shapes, such as a plus for the first two players, an X for the last two, or an asterisk for all four.
What's the version history?
v1.0.1, which came out May 4 2024, included a change to how the 'Flight Check' card works, a fix for a fault with rendering lines on white and black territories, and various tweaks to the GUI and documentation.
The Hunt went through a long time with no official version number. During the post-release time, there were likely numerous minor tweaks.
v1.0.0 is the (retroactive) designation for the initial release.
James, you're terrible at making manuals/I still have questions/you need to clarify something/you need to rewrite everything.
I suspected as much.
Like many other things I write, this is subject to editing. Look at the tutorial first, to make sure that it doesn't answer your questions. Then, if you're still at a loss, get in touch with me at the usual address and we'll try to sort the problems out.
Please try to be as specific and detailed in your criticism as possible. If you only say, 'I don't understand thus-and-so', the best I can do is to guess what your problem is. But if you have some idea why you don't understand it, and can tell me, that'll go a long way towards helping both of us out.