If anyone that hasn’t played before wants to join, I recommend reading that thread - it has the whole tutorial in it from the “launch manual”, and a complete game for reference. Don’t worry if you need time to do so, I’m in no hurry to start this game.
So, this is to gauge interest, see how many players we have, and to talk about character selection for the next game.
The 12 characters we used last game are recommended for new players, and one option is to use them again. If we get 5 or more players, more than 12 characters will be used, and I can pick additional beginner-friendly characters if people prefer this option. Another option is curate a different list of characters to use, and the final option is to completely randomize the selection.
I don’t think I’ll start the game until we have at least 4 players, and no-one is scrambling to join, so it might be that we wait until September for RossM and yashima to be available.
Another possibility that just occurred to me is that I could deal myself in. Similarly to the way I have done for the Twilight Struggle PBFs, it is possible to image capture private hands and send them by zip file so that I would never see them. Unlike the TS module, there’s no way for me to do anything with the private hands, so kompromat would have to stay there indefinitely. Not a huge problem. Either way, we’ll still need at least a fourth player.
EDIT: I might actually program in something for using kompromat just in case.
Another possibility is to throw one or more bots into the mix.
Each bot is revealed from the start, has use of all 8 cubes (6 assigned at start), has a bonus power, is immune to kompromat and bribes, and has boosted scoring. But they are also nearly all deterministic with a fairly complex but fixed script. Makes for a more puzzle-y game. Could even have a human team versus bots.