Each player is dealt or chooses a character card at the start of the game. This lists sundry background information as well as their Statistics (Running, Jumping, Wits, Strength, Swimming, Combat), their Health, and their Resources (starting hand size). A character must keep track of their Health score but the other values do not fluctuate. A character reduced to 0 Health is dead - though not permanently. On event of death (whether through loss of health or another effect) the character discards their hand and must return to the beginning of the level.
The level itself is constructed from a deck of twenty-five location cards (a different twenty-five for each separate 'quest' you can undertake) though some quests feature an additional nine-card sub-level or may have a totally different structure. These cards are laid out in a regular grid (five by five usually) with the entrance in the middle. One by one the players move out of the entrance to explore the level, looking for either an artefact or an exit to the next level. When a player discovers the artefact they must return to the entrance before another player can steal the artefact by killing them.
Some locations have more than just a name. Specific and noteworthy locations from the game (for example, the Cistern, the Colosseum or the Chamber of Thor) have some kind of challenge on the card. In many cases the exit or artefact location will require you to have either visited or survive or locations in order to proceed. Such locations are hesitantly titled Landmarks.
The mechanical basis of the game is the Test. A test is always written as a Statistic followed by a number (prefixed with a T for 'target number') and a consequence, often an amount of damage. For example: 'Swimming T6, Damage 4'. To attempt the test you roll a single D6, add the mentioned statistic, and must equal or beat the target number. If you pass, the consequence does not occur. If you fail it does. In the above example, you would roll one dice, add your Swimming Statistic, and if the total was not at least 6, take 4 damage (lose 4 health). Other consequences include the occasional instant death (rolling boulders, pits full of spikes, etc) having to move against your wishes and not being able to move.
Creatures are a special case. Their game text reads as a normal Test (for example 'Combat T6 Damage 2' on a Wolf) but in addition to taking the damage as a consequence, you must also take the Test again. You must continue to take the Test until you pass it, taking the damage again each time you fail. This represents you fighting against the creature until you kill it. One Test against a creature is cheekily referred to as a combat round. Some particularly large creatures (Flesh Demons, Tyrannosaurs) can survive being defeated once, and therefore specify that you must win a certain number of combat rounds to kill them. These combat rounds all take place immediately until you or the creature is dead.
Tests almost always take place when another player plays a Creature, Trap or Barrier on you. This occurs during your own turn, before, during and after you move. Any of the players can play any number of cards, though Barriers can only be played during your move. A failed Barrier Test results in you not being allowed to take your desired move, in which case the players may play even more traps and creatures on you.
Equipment cards are always put into play as soon as you pick them up. In earlier versions it was necessary to pass a Wits test to play certain rarer items (large medi packs, shotguns) but players quickly tired of the even greater amount of dice rolling this brought.
At the end of his turn each player draws two cards. The maximum hand sixe is seven, but you only discard at the beginning of your turn, giving you a chance to unload excess traps and creatures during your opponent's turns.
The game is designed for and works best with four people. More than this and waiting for your turn becomes tedious. Less than this and the fun of the game disappears as there is less chance to pile hordes of creatures into a single player.
The chief problem as the game stands at the moment is that of balance. In a collectible version there would be no point playing Bats when you could just play Bears which work under the same circumstances and are far more dangerous. Conversely, the Tyrannosaurus Rex is hopelessly powerful but can only be played in the Lost Valley (one out of twenty-five locations, and only on one of the quests) making it virtually useless.
At one point I experimented using a 'hazard value' which you scored as a counter pool for beating the traps and creatures. These hazard points were necessary to play equipment cards afterwards. However, the system was never implemented properly and the reactions to the idea of having to keep track of even more numbers (the characters have a grand total of eight statistics already remember) were resoundingly negative.
At the moment the game is played using a communal deck, which solves any and all problems of abusive deck construction, and also the problem of whether people should be allowed to play lions in Peru, but removes half of any card game's interest value. To alter to contructed format, the only method I could think of was to make certain cards mandatory, an idea inspired not by Young Jedi as you may think (I avoided the game with religious fervour until I had seen the film) but the very ancient Warhammer Armies, the army lists within which required you to field certain mandatory regiments before you could splash out.
The original incarnation of this game, made in late 1997, was a technically brilliant, mathematically masterful and utterly lifeless game. The character cards and tests were there, but rather than a two-dimensional map and cards to draw, the creatures and traps were arranged in a stacked deck representing the Tomb Raider levels. The Tomb of Qualopec deck, for example, consisted of the Caves section (eight cards), the City of Vilcabamba, the Lost Valley and the Tomb itself. The players, during their turn, worked their way down the deck turning each hazard over in turn and encountering it. Their turn ended when they either died or failed a Barrier. On such event the character either remains there, or (in the case of dying) returns to the next level marker up (the beginning of the deck if only in the Caves, for example). The character card was inserted into the deck, and it was the next player's turn.
There was a deck of events to play on yourself, and later a few events to play on the other players too, but it quickly became evident that you may as well be playing a solitaire game for all the difference it made. Slapdash rules for attacking and ambushing each other did not add anything.
In early 1998 I played an ancient game called Hacker. This involved setting up an 'internet' of companies, in a two-dimensional map, and moving around it. Arrows indicated where you could move on and off each card, and an exciting mazelike structure quickly evolved.
That sounds good, I thought, I'll try that. However, it soon turned out that unlike Hacker, where you could (logically enough) enter and exit the internet at any point, trudging down a corridor at the rate of one card per turn when some fool had gone rushing off into the distance was exceedingly boring. The limiting arrows only made dungeon construction more complicated as it sometimes resulted in players being trapped, the target room being inaccessible, etc etc.
The other change that was made at this point was the moving of the creatures, traps and barriers into the event deck (renamed the 'other' deck). Now the players drew cards and played them during their own turn, and kept creatures and traps to play on their opponents. Many traps and creatures were also integral to the locations, so that you had to fight/avoid them each time you entered that space.
The problem of the restrictive arrows was easily solved by removing them and allowing movement in any direction. That authentic I-can't-find-they-way dungeon feel was retained by adding blocks (black lines prohibiting movement to or from that edge) and barriers (a line of text along the card edge requiring you to make a jumping/climbing/whatever roll in order to move that way). This then was the game mark two and a half.
Though it was a lot more enjoyable (the frenetic dice-rolling involved when all three other players decided to empty their hands of velociraptors and swinging blade traps onto you was undeniably exciting) it was still more of a chore to play than a joy. I went as far as building complete decks for the Tomb of Qualopec and Tomb of Tihocan here, and planning Egypt, but there were still major gameplay problems.
Many of these were fixed in the next version. The first was the length. A 'zone' (country) in Tomb Raider (eg, Peru, Greece, Egypt) was represented by the same number of 25-card map levels as it was in the game. To recover Qualopec's piece of the Scion, you had to work your way through four levels. Tihocan's required five. This took a long time. Three hours per game was not uncommon, and two hours in half the players were asleep. I know, I know, but we've all had games of Risk like that too. This was eliminated by condensing each zone (or quest in game terms) into a single main level with a nine-card sub-level representing the Tomb of the Atlantean dignitary in question. The entrance to the inner tomb was located somewhere in the main level.
The second problem was the blocks, barriers, traps and creatures integral to the location cards. These added very little to the game other than increasing the number of dice you had to roll during your turn. Totally removing them helped. The blocks also had the unfortunate side-effect of occasionally making the exits unreachable, an intolerable problem. The 'standing' traps were still used occasionally but only on special locations memorable from the game (for example, in the Arena you may encounter a gorilla or lion each time you enter).
The final thing to do with the third version was add pictures, painstakingly taken from TR and printed out in glorious streaky poor-quality black and white. The game was complete. Except of course, it wasn't. The chief problem was now that when one player recovered the artefact, the game degenerated into a frenzy of move-attack-roll dice-one player dies-move-attack-roll dice-etc. This part of the game occasionally took longer than the initial searching.
I had just started working on a fix for this (adding secondary combat features to every event card allowing special movement) and also managed to convert the game into a usable collectible format, when my copy of Inquest Gamer (the old title was better...) brought me tidings that Precedence had obtained the rights to the game.
Now I'm a playtester for the "real thing".