For those who don't know, GrimTunnel is an abstract dungeon crawl. Each round, players create rooms of guards for an opponent to invade. The rooms form a tunnel. Losing a battle means backtracking to the last room with an exit. The goal, which I'm not fond of, is to create a tunnel of a certain length.
Grim Prospects is sort of like GrimTunnel with a press-your-luck mechanic. Rather than taking one's chances with the next battle, players can choose to stop, immediately score their tunnel and begin another. For those who fight on, longer tunnels are worth more. (The theme involves some kind of mining rather than dungeon crawling.)
Another important change adds deduction and planning. The Shop phase has been removed. Instead, players give their opponents cards. These cards must be used if their new owner plays a matching faction. Otherwise, they remain for the next round. Whether or not they are beneficial depends on what the opponent plays.
I'd show pictures of the BYOND interface, but it's mostly empty grids at the moment. Here's a mock-up some cards instead. It includes the buffer used by the cutting machine so pretend the edges are trimmed off. I suggest clicking to enlarge the image.
There are three factions. I call them Bunny, Rat and Mole.
GrimTunnel had grids of varying numbers which intimidated players. In Grim Prospects, this has been simplified. Each faction symbol is also a power rating. A card with two symbols at the top has double the power. One and two are the only values.
Power still varies when fighting different factions though. Each plus and minus sign comes into play when an opponent plays a matching faction. If there are more plus signs, the card's power gets added to its owner's total. If there are more minus signs, it gets subtracted.
A downward arrow next to a faction symbol means that the power goes to whoever has the least of that faction.
A black rectangle under the power usage means the owner's discard pile gains a card from the opponent's deck. If it has an X on it, the card goes from the owner to the opponent instead.
The tunnel segment stats are in the gold section. GrimTunnel's glory and security scale has been reduced to a binary choice. Diamonds mean that the segment is worth double when the tunnel is completed. A shovel means that earlier tunnel segments are safe if the tunnel collapses.
PS: My CSS now uses a transparent pixel so my background shouldn't be interfering with images anymore.