Cutting the Bile — Zero-Friction Setup & The 89-Card Overhaul

The streamlined Carrier box with the Encounter deck, Starting Gear and Supply cards laid out on a table — The new streamlined build — one Encounter deck instead of four separate piles to sort before every game.

The Pre-Game Sorting Nightmare

Every major playtest teaches you something humbling. In our earlier iterations — what we'll call Version 2.0 — getting a game of Carrier to the table felt like managing inventory before you could actually play.

Because every player had to start with 3 Supplies and 3 Samples, the host had to:

Dig through the box to separate the 42 Supply cards and 42 Sample cards from the rest of the decks.
Count out exactly 3 Supplies and 3 Samples for every single player — 84 cards purely for setup.
Make sure everyone had the right cards before even touching Character or Allegiance cards.
Spend several minutes tediously sorting and resetting all 84 cards back into their piles after every match.

When you added up the entire box, the bloat was staggering:

Starting Gear (Supplies & Samples): 84 cards
Characters & Secret Roles: 51 cards
Disasters & Special Conditions: 14 cards
Encounter Deck & Support Kits: 49 cards

Total: 198 cards spread across multiple separate piles. We were spending more time sorting and resetting cardboard than actually playing. It was friction where there should have been immediate tension.

Supply card design — Simplistic Design for 'Supply' — a fixed setup card given to the players at the start of the game.

1. The 30-Second Setup: Deal, Deal, Shuffle, Play

We eliminated starting gear and separate supply decks entirely. Supplies, Weapons and Samples are now shuffled directly into the single 65-card Encounter Deck.

The entire setup and reset flow is now three steps:

Deal Characters (Public Roles).
Deal Allegiances (Secret Roles).
Shuffle the Encounter Deck and start the game.

Setup time dropped from several minutes of card administration to under 30 seconds. Resetting between back-to-back games is now completely frictionless.

Along with this, we removed Support Kits — Supply Drop, Demolisher, Decoy Drones. Instead of diluting the draw pile with situational one-off cards, we baked that utility directly into stronger, more impactful Character abilities.

Encounter deck with a Bloodhound encounter and an Armaments supply drawn from it — Supplies can now only be found through the Encounter deck. Players draw directly from it, so it's entirely up to chance — with bad luck, they may face Encounters before securing any Supplies.

2. Replacing "Escape Tokens" with Live Samples

Previously, victory relied on collecting abstract "Escape Tokens" scattered across the deck. We've retired them completely and tied the win condition directly into the core survival loop: the group must find and secure real Samples to formulate the cure.

The Escape Requirement

The final escape party must hold at least 3 Samples in their collective inventory to win. Reach extraction without them and you lose.

The Dual-Edged Sabotage

Samples aren't just passive items — they carry real tactical risk during encounters. In the hands of a hidden Carrier, playing a Sample contributes a -3 Damage Sabotage, letting them quietly derail a fight under the guise of helping collect the cure.

Samples card showing the Sabotaged effect at minus 3 damage — Samples now replace Escape Tokens, and are also found in the Encounter Deck. This removes the previous 'Hard Limit' of 12 fixed escape chances. Instead, everyone gathers Samples — and drawing one doesn't require revealing it. This gives a Carrier deniability, but since Samples also empower the zombies, a Carrier can also use them to sabotage Encounters.

3. Dynamic Party Sizes & Weapon Tiers

In V2.0, encounters forced an artificial, rigid player count — "choose 4 players to participate". Under the new system, weapons scale by damage and rarity instead:

Tier 1 Weapons — 1 Damage (20 cards)
Tier 2 Weapons — 2 Damage (10 cards)
Tier 3 Weapons — 3 Damage (5 cards)

Because damage output is tied to weapon quality rather than a fixed headcount, encounter party sizes are completely dynamic. The party leader makes the call:

Armed with heavy explosives and high-tier weapons? Send a lean 2-person strike team and conserve resources.
Carrying basic tools and low-tier weapons? You'll need to rally more players to combine enough damage to beat the horde threshold.

3 Tiers of Weapons, offering various damage values. — With this, our hope is to give the Leader more strategic options — bring 3 players with explosives, and you can beat even the toughest Encounter in the game. Under our old system, this choice simply wasn't possible.

4. The "Run" Mechanic: Mitigating Early Bad Luck

Without guaranteed starting supplies in hand from turn one, an unlucky opening draw could occasionally trap an under-geared team. To address that, we introduced the Run / Runaway mechanic.

The leader can choose to temporarily evade a drawn encounter, up to 3 Runaways per game. Fleeing doesn't delete the threat — the leader can return and tackle that parked encounter later, once the group has scavenged better gear.

Running Limit — Running from Encounters has its downsides, adding Danger to the next Encounter. A [+1] might not seem like much, but that could mean the difference between winning the Encounter and failing it. Use [Run] sparingly, or you will find yourself in a tough spot.

5. The Math: 198 Down to 89

By eliminating separate starting piles, token systems and redundant kits, our card footprint dropped dramatically:

Deck Component	Version 2.0	New Streamlined Build
Encounter & Loot Deck	49 + 84 + 14	65 Cards
Characters & Allegiances	51 Cards	24 Cards
Total Card Count	198 Cards	89 Cards

Targeting a final production box of around 100 cards, cutting down to 89 gives us roughly 11 cards of healthy design headroom — room to experiment with new mechanics without re-introducing bloat.

What's Next?

Setup is now instantaneous, the table footprint is clean, and every card in the deck serves a direct, active purpose.

With this 89-card layout locked in, we're printing fresh prototype sets and heading straight back to the table for our next wave of playtests.