Team Tracy Mod — A Thunderbirds House Rules Modification

We felt that these modifications allowed the entire Tracy family to participate in the game, as they usually do in the TV show. And by allowing the turn order to be flexible and responsive to the current situation, we felt it better reflected the TV show's theme of teamwork -- hence the name, the Team…


Update: TL:DR — we were using the Dis­aster track wrong.  Details at the end.

Last night was our groups first play­through of Thun­der­birds. We’d played vari­ous co-op games, and spe­cific­ally Matt Lea­cock designed games, before. We knew we were in for a chal­len­ging yet fair co-op gam­ing exper­i­ence in the Thun­der­birds uni­verse. Fun!

Well, maybe.

The first and second games ended rather quickly. We under­stood the rules, but the char­ac­ters we had were unable to coördin­ate quickly enough to avert them.

So, in the interest of sal­va­ging the even­ing and get­ting back to hav­ing fun, we decided on the fol­low­ing modifications:

  1. All Char­ac­ters are par­ti­cip­at­ing in the game, no mat­ter the num­ber of play­ers. In our case that left two char­ac­ters without human play­ers. Every human play­er con­trols one char­ac­ter, but extra char­ac­ters are con­trolled by the group.
  2. We altered the Turn Over­view. In our game, Turn order var­ies dur­ing a ’round’ depend­ing on the strategy the group decides is going to be executed for that round. As each play­er takes a turn, they flip their char­ac­ter card over so we can remem­ber that play­er has played. The same applies to group-con­trolled char­ac­ters. Once all char­ac­ter cards are face down, the round ends and the char­ac­ter cards are reset, and a new round begins.

We felt that these modi­fic­a­tions allowed the entire Tracy fam­ily to par­ti­cip­ate in the game, as they usu­ally do in the TV show. And by allow­ing the turn order to be flex­ible and respons­ive to the cur­rent situ­ation, we felt it bet­ter reflec­ted the TV show’s theme of team­work — hence the name, the Team Tracy Mod. Also, it made for a much more fun and involving game.

Update:

Well. It seems we were doing some­thing wrong.
You know the dis­aster track at the bot­tom of the board? The one where the cur­rent dis­asters all pile up and even­tu­ally over­whelm you? Yeah, that one. Well, it seems that we were using that wrong.

As we drew a new dis­aster card, we placed it NEXT to the exist­ing dis­aster card, in the slot HIGHER than the pre­vi­ous one. We should have been slid­ing all the exist­ing dis­asters down one slot and pla­cing the new card in the FIRST SLOT. The way we were play­ing it, every new dis­aster assumed a high­er pri­or­ity than the pre­vi­ous one as we had to reduce the total num­ber of dis­asters to stay alive.

Played prop­erly, we could take two or three turns to map out a mul­tiple res­cue strategy and elim­in­ate dis­asters more effectively.

/facepalm/

We’re enjoy­ing the game much more now 


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