Hi Ken, thanks for joining us! Here are my questions:
What was the biggest challenge in developing the starter kits? How did you distill that monster into manageable chunks?
Well writing the rules was chore but not a "challenge" per se. iT had it moments though. At its base ASL is a simple game (not that I play it very well)...
I think the biggest challenge was maintaining the vision. It was very innovative when it came out. Short rules, self contained boxes, paper boards, TH charts that are non standard, etc...
We really wanted to do something specials so the scenarios had to be balanced very finely as well and that is hard for an experienced player to do when the audience is theoretically non experienced players.
The other thing that was hard was dealing with tall the negativity that surrounded it from the traditionalists.