Gecko

Alert

Support

Resource

Info

Type

Power to Insure

Insures Enemy Ships

At the start of any invasion or after any arrival, you may use this power to offer “insurance” to any actor(s) until upkeep, other than yourself. For each actor, you may offer to insure one of the following: their power (if active), their ships, or the pods in their cache. If choosing pods, the actor must name specific pods they will insure. If your insurance is accepted, manifest one of your marks in your nexus. You may only insure each alien once per phase.

Insured powers cannot be zapped or deactivated. Insured ships become impervious. Insured pods become electrified.

At any time, you may vaporize one of your marks in your nexus to gain a boon.

Legacy: During arrival, actors may spend 1 lucre to insure either your power, or pods.

Due to sharing a similar name and appearance, the Geckos were misidentified long ago as another race with a powerful insurance industry. Many eons later, the race they were thought to be has long since died out, and these slippery lizards have taken over as one of the most dominant underwriters in the known galaxies.

Any: Warpfall or Arrival

Optional

Wild Flare

Whenever you would lose a base, you may discharge this flare to make one ship on that base impervious until the end of upkeep.

Any: Any

Super Flare

During any arrival, you may target another alien to request insurance. If the alien agrees, you may insure your powers, ships, or pods.

Any: Arrival

Modifications

Original alien is named Lloyd, referencing a different insurance company. Mine references GEICO instead.
Original Lloyd can be used at any time, requiring the bio to specify that it must use its power before powers, ships, and pods are lost. I changed the power to activate during warpfall and arrival, allowing the power to be used to protect nearly every power while keeping the power timing flexible. It should make the power less annoying and avoid it slowing down the pace of the match with too many insurance requests.
Original Lloyd may offer any or all options to insure for each actor. My version only lets the target actor choose one option per phase, allowing it to insure up to two per phase. I added this distinction to make sure Gecko always gets one mark for insuring one aspect, and also to make the decision more interesting as a choice for other aliens.
Lloyd is a legacy power from the Eon Era that originally only insures ships. If the target alien does not lose their ships that invasion, they pay Lloyd’s fee. Otherwise, they get to keep their ships at no downside.
Original Lloyd can insure each alien any number of times each invasion. While they would naturally refuse to insure the same thing multiple times, they could insure different pods.
Gecko’s legacy allows another use for lucre, allowing aliens to spend lucre in advance to make themselves immune to zaps, compensation, or losing ships. The legacy can be very effective for aliens like Mercenary and Merchant who can obtain a great deal of lucre, as well as aliens who can gain extra free resupplies or backer boons. Original Cosmic has no legacies.

Tips

Gecko’s marks operate similar to lucre, allowing Gecko to wait to revive ships or add pods to its cache when needed. This aspect lets Gecko protect its pods from compensation or other aspects that would attack its cache.
While Gecko builds up marks slowly, giving it too many will allow it to get as many pods and ships as it wants. It is important to balance how much you help yourself vs. how much you are helping Gecko.
Pay attention to who insures what during an invasion. You don’t want to accidentally zap an alien who protected their power or aim for compensation against an alien with electrified pods.
While ships are the most common aspect in danger of needing insurance, aliens that are highly vulnerable to zaps or aliens with precious pods may want to insure those just in case.
When insuring pods, Gecko provides a small information advantage to all aliens, since those pods have to be revealed in order to insure them.

Development Notes

I made sure to distinguish Wild Gecko from Wild Zombie due to their similarities. Wild Gecko only protects bases, while Wild Zombie protects ships. The Wild Gecko flare does not help at all when acting as invader or sponsor, making it less flexible. Wild Zombie doesn’t help to protect your power, while Wild Gecko basically makes your power indestructible while you have the flare.
Even though the original alien isn’t bound by any “once per invasion” clauses that require remembering past information, I ultimately decided to limit the power to two specific phases for clarity. In Lloyd’s power, it specifies that it cannot use its power when the powers, ships, or pods are being lost. It has to activate them in advance, to fit the theme of insurance. I decided to split the timing of Gecko’s power to the start of warpfall and arrival, two key moments where it can insure as many things as possible. Warpfall allows Gecko to protect as many powers as possible in an invasion, with the exception of powers like Bandit that activate during orientation. Arrival allows Gecko to have more information about the invasion and protect aliens in advance of the upcoming encounter, where most of the action occurs. I think limiting the power to these two phases keeps the power simple for programming and prevents an endless stream of interruptions where Gecko keeps asking people for insurance non-stop. It makes the power seem more like Telemarketer, and I want to keep the two powers separate in theme.
Visually, I imagine there being an icon for each type of insurance an alien can obtain. For insuring pods, the symbol would also show the specific pods being insured beside it, requiring no one to remember any past information. A great benefit of a digital format is the ability to completely customize the UI.
I like the design idea to require aliens to name specific pods to insure them. It gives the power minor crossover with original Aura, but my Psychic doesn’t share that same aspect. Having an effect that reveals information to everyone can certainly be leveraged, and it somehow seems fitting for a creature that lacks eyelids.
I considered if I wanted the ability to choose what to insure to be Gecko’s decision or the target alien’s. There could be a situation where Gecko wants to offer to insure an alien’s pods but doesn’t want to protect their power. In such a situation, it could offer to insure either pods or ships, and the target alien could want to insure ships instead. I think the original power’s “double confirm” design works best that requiring Gecko to always make blanket insurance offers. Even though it adds complication to the power, I think that’s fine for a yellow alert alien.
I also considered if I wanted to let Gecko offer multiple insurances at once. Original Lloyd always gets one mark no matter how many things get insured, which matches its ability to use the power as many times as it wants at any time. I think it’s more interesting to make it a choice between three options, rather than the simple decision to take all three if prompted. Since my version of the power activates two different phases, aliens can potentially insure up to two of the options per invasion, but Gecko will get two marks in exchange.
Original Eon Lloyd only gets its “fee” when it doesn’t actually have to use the insurance. It’s a neat idea since it reflects how insurance companies have to pay themselves when an actual disaster occurs, but I don’t think it works when the power also protects powers and pods. Destroying ships occurs naturally by winning encounters, but no one’s going to waste a Cosmic Zap on an insured power just to prevent Gecko from getting one boon. They’re not going to waste an encounter by playing compensation on an alien with insured pods either.
The original alien name Lloyd is derived from an English insurance firm called Lloyd’s of London. It was founded in 1689 in Lloyd’s Coffee House, a popular location in London where a considerable amount of business was performed. It was a central hub for discussing shipping insurance for sailors and merchants. When considering the theme for this power, my thought was to invoke a more modern reference that I could put some imagery behind. The Geico Gecko is one of the most recognizable mascots for American insurance companies, and I can easily tie the theme to the animal itself to make the reference work.
A gecko is a small nocturnal type of lizard generally found in warmer climates. They are mostly known for their loud vocalizations and mating calls, and they have the largest diversity of species out of any type of lizard.
As with Insect, I wanted to make sure the theme of Gecko and Dragon are distinguished from Lizard, as a Gecko and Dragon are types of Lizards. When it comes to such powers, I want to tap into what provides power to the specific concept in reference, allowing it to stand out on its own. In the case of Dragon, it is the creature’s fire breath and prestige in fantasy settings. With Gecko, it is mostly relying on the reference to the existing insurance mascot of Geico, Martin. The reason that GEICO has a gecko mascot is because the acronym of their company’s name (Government Employees Insurance Company) sounds like “gecko”, and people would often mispronounce it as such. They came up with a gecko mascot and made a commercial involving him telling people to stop calling him thinking he was the insurance company.
While geckos aren’t particularly known for protecting things, they do possess a common lizard defense mechanism known as tail-dropping, where they detach their tails to escape predators. The tail wiggles for a bit to distract the predator and allow them to escape. I can imagine Gecko employs a similar strategy to insure enemy resources, by creating a similar substitute to misdirect enemies. I gave the alien design a rather tacky color scheme to reflect how it can use its bright colors to distract enemies.
I invented the term “electrified” for this aliens to refer to pods that are essentially impervious. I think it works great as a term on multiple levels, since it reflects how the pod automatically recharges itself if scrapped and also why aliens can’t snatch it from your cache. It’s notably different from the behavior of flares, since those automatically recharge after being discharged.
Assuming Gecko can use its power to help other aliens misdirect enemies, it is worth considering why only Super Gecko can use the power itself, even requiring permission from another alien to do so. Given these two factors, it is clear that the power doesn’t work like Ninja or Tanuki, where it can fool the enemy into targeting the decoy instead of itself. I think instead, Gecko is affixing its tail to the target objects, allowing them to absorb the damage and detach so that the target object is unharmed. It still doesn’t explain why Gecko cannot affix these tails to its own ships, so I can only conclude it is more of an issue of practice. An insurance company doesn’t generally insure themselves, but it can do so for more complex risks via reinsurance. Gecko gaining the ability of reinsurance reflects it becoming part of a larger enterprise, and it still needs to make someone else an insurance agent to justify using its power on itself. It reflects the idea that Gecko’s power is both economical and biological in nature. I think the combination of the striped tie and tail reflect the idea well.