The theme and feeling of the game is very organic, and we wanted the rules around how and when players can take these actions to feel organic as well. (The new game has, respectively, "Town" and "Camera Trap" actions.) It's important for players not to do the town action too often because it slows the game down if one player has too much new information to consider at once between other players' turns. The next challenge was how to handle what in The Search for Planet X were called the research and the target actions. What we ended up doing was giving players two different types of search actions, each with its own pros and cons, as opposed to the single survey action that is available in The Search for Planet X. We weren't happy with this lack of player interaction, so we dropped this action. Since you weren't listening for a specific animal type, the other players could not deduce any information from the action you announced. The action worked, but it did not afford enough player interaction. We tried an action called "Listen" in which you look in a specific area, and the app tells you every unique animal type found in that area and in adjacent areas. We wanted to give players something new, but we didn't want to stray too far from a basic deduction system that we already knew worked well. A big debate we had at the beginning of the design was just how similar the main deduction system should be to The Search for Planet X. The next consideration was the actions that players would take. The final map for The Search for Lost Species You always have to take into consideration not just where you're going to search this turn, but where you want to end your turn to position yourself for the next one. If you head north to search the northern end of the island, well, you know that certain parts of the island (in the far south) will be off limits on your next turn. In The Search for Lost Species, parts of the map are off limits to you on any given turn because they are too far away you can't reach them in just this one turn - but you get to control which parts of the map are off limits to you. There's nothing you can do you just have to wait for the Earth to move. In Planet X, half the sectors are off limits to you in any given action because they are on the other side of the sun. There is one big difference, though, between this and the sun board in The Search for Planet X. The larger map we ended up with (sixteen areas instead of nine) also allows the map itself to function similarly to how the sun board (with the Earth rotating around the sun) works in Planet X. A couple things to point out about this map: First, it featured point-to-point movement, which we later changed to a more fluid hex-based map and movement system, which allows players a higher degree of refinement of their searches.
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