Team Tracy Mod — A Thunderbirds House Rules Modification

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