Warcrow Adventures, from the team behind Infinity, rethinks how dungeon crawlers work

polygon.com:

In a role-playing game, initiative — that is, the order in which players and enemies take their turns — is one of the biggest factors in setting the tone, and the stakes, for combat. Traditionally, initiative order takes the form of a list that moves from top to bottom, activating player characters and enemies along the way, then resetting at the “top of the order” on the next turn.

But traditional initiative order can be a little boring. That’s especially true for a subset of RPGs known as dungeon-crawler board games. Like Diablo, this action-oriented genre of games, including titles like Gloomhaven and Descent: Legends of the Dark,empowers players to move quickly from fight to fight. Combat can be high-stakes, and once you’re locked into a fixed initiative order, that can put some players at a disadvantage. Developers at Corvus Belli wanted something more exciting for their upcoming game Warcrow Adventures. What they came up with isn’t a list or even a line. It’s a circle, and players actually get a say in where their character falls on the edge of that circle in every round.

“We developed an initiative system for Aristeia, one other game that we published five years ago,” said Alberto Abal, game designer at Corvus Belli. “We knew that it would be more interesting if the initiative wasn’t the same every round, and we wanted something like that in Warcrow.

“We started to work with a simple track that had numbers from one to 20,” he continued. “When you go through the track, then you start again from [position] one. We start to think about this, and then someone said, ‘This is like a circle!’ So we implemented it as a circle.”

That simple alteration to the shape of the initiative track suddenly unlocked a host of