Hey again. As promised, I will try to post a new episode regularly. This one will address the game I was first designing, what it has become now and what concerns and visions I have with it.
You can find the last episode (000) here.
In episode 000 I stated that this is the first game design I came up with. However, this is not exactly true. In reality, my first concept morphed severely into what now is my second design. Except for the theme they do not have much in common anymore.
To make my whole thought process more understandable, I think it is good if I started with this first design and then to transition to the present draft.
I started with the one aspect of 4X (or, as I like to call them, Civilization type games, though these two terms do not necessarily mean the same – I will likely go into detail about this in a later episode) that upset me the most. Imagine this: You are the leader of an uprising nation. Which time this play is staged in does not really matter, at least not to me. You yourself do not build city walls or defensive laser turrets, you yourself do not plough fields or erect hydroponic gardens. You as a leader have a certain amount of funds you can spend to make someone do this work for you. You divide your money into several parts and dedicate that money to a certain subject of state policy. For example, the U.S. government spent 698,3 billion $ on military and 19 billion $ on NASA from an estimated 3,818 billion $ total budget. While these numbers are a winking hint on what I think about todays states priorities, it also shows the concept I longed to implement into a board game. The US senate or the president do not pay some construction workers to build a new dam, they order some person or committee in authority to distribute the budget they deem fit for military, infrastructure or research. This means, you have to plan building a new city, and later-on this city will be placed on the map. Or you will order to have more craftsmen be educated so the ore and stone you get from your mines and quarries can be made into more valuable stuff before being traded away, so your minister of economics provides every craftsman's apprentice with a free shelter to stay in and with an option once he has finished his education. This makes the craftsman's job more attractive to young people, so over time you will get more craftsmen, more citizens in your towns and more wealthand a happier population, provided you have the resources to keep them all in labour. But this takes time, so your actions today would often show results a few rounds later.
My focus was (and still is) research. There it is even more risky to spend funds, because even though you might focus your funds on military technology, you cannot be sure you will get a better siege weapon from it, although you ordered your scientists to develop one. It might be that instead they come up with a better design for your city walls, with artifical fertilizer instead of better gunpowder or even with nothing, especially if your military is state-of-the-art while your economy limps behind everyone else's. Additionally, if your nation develops something new, opponent merchants will likely get an impression of it soon enough, tell their scientists and it will get cheaper and faster for the opponent to develop the same thing – if he does not steal it via espionage in the first place...
These ideas I put in a world of hexagons similar to Settlers of Catan. In the beginning you would just have some peasants that could be made farmers and would spawn new peasants over time as long as they could be nourished from the land they occupied. The land urrounding each starting area would be unexplored, but would be in a mediterranean layout by default (80% water in the center, 80% land on the edge of the map). You would have to develop ships to get over water areas, you would have to explore a route to a neighbour to begin trading. By trading the commodity would increase in value as what other nations have to offer would not be known to your civilization.
Okay, I think that suffices for what my first design was meant to be. I have at least fifteen sheets of paper with notations and scribbles concerning possible mechanics and iconography. The main problem I ran into concerning this design was that it was hard to keep track of your investments. Did I invest in agriculture two or three turns ago? I juggled with many ideas to keep track of time when play rounds might take up to half an hour later-on (similar to Sid Meier's Civ or Advanced Civ). The more I thought about it, the more it became apparent to me that I did not want to design a game that went on for hours after hours with big downtime. I want players to be stay invested and sit on the edges of their chairs rather than take a nap in between their actions. Thus my game took a daring turn. I decided to bring something to the table seen mostly in party games:
a timer and parallel play!
Both concepts are widely used only in party games (hour glasses in quiz games, parallel play in e.g. Ligretto, Ubongo) and, as of lately, in coop games (since the use of smart phones and apps becomes more and more popular, though I am not fond of this trend), and maybe in some other games. If you want, you can comment on what other games with these mechanics you know.
Let us first have a look at the timer. Time-critical games usually have some deadline mechanic. Either the deadline is implemented via hour glass or via the other players; whoever is first says so and the other players either need to stop immediately or have like ten seconds grace time.
This is not how my design works.
The main component will be a clockwork. If you ever were in a indoor pool made for competetive swimming, you might have noticed a clock with four hands. These hands all tick second-wise and ar in a 90 degrees angular distance to each other (that is, two of them are opposite on the clock, respectively). I have added a picture of such clock (see at the start of the page). This is in principle how the clock in my game works. One hand shows the present time point, the other three are just used for easier, faster counting.
Players have a hand of action cards on their hand. They each stand for a certain technological achievement the players' nation has already come up with. They each have a category (for now they are 'economical', 'civil', 'warfaring' and 'cultural'), costs in resources (food or goods, occupied or 'used' population) and a duration value. The duration tells how much time it takes for the action to be done from the starting point. Not every second on the clock is one time step; rather every five to ten seconds (I'll have to find out one or more good values via test plays; different numbers could make the game faster or slower) one step is over. These steps are also denoted visually on the clock – I'll maybe do a sketch of it shortly. While a game round is running, there is no stopping the clock, but a round will only last maybe 2 – 3 minutes. After this time, some round end mechanics will be triggered (like supporting your population, trigering events etc.) and there will be a short pause for people to plan their next round and generally regenerate and have a chat.
All of this might sound pretty stressful and hectic to you. I have different mechanics in mind to relax the game. First are of course the pauses inbetween rounds. Second are the limitation to essentially two resources, limitation of number of actions you may take in parallel (two seems to be a good number to start with) and number of cards you begin the game with (4 to 5). I have gotten rid of the board idea, it will be more like 'Through the Ages' in this concern. A good graphical design that makes a player take in all the necessary information in one look also is essential. I will write a blog about this as well, though there already ought to exist many blogs and discussions about good, clear material design.
Let me give you an example: We have a game with 5 second time steps. We are at step 8 of 24 of the first game round. Dennis, the blue player, has just gotten back his 'hunters and gatherers' card. Fifteen to twenty seconds ago he had laid this card down in front of him, putting one meeple (denoting population) and one food marker on the card. He then had put down an 'economics' marker of his (blue) colour four time steps from the (back then) present time step, because the card denoted a duration of four. All the while, his 'new idea' card is still lying in front of him. It has a rather large duration of 10 steps, but it will trigger two steps from now and then Dennis will be able to choose a new tech card from the supply. Since Dennis has not developed a form of government yet (after all it is still the first game round) he may not have more than two cards in play simultaneously, so that is all his nation could do in the last four rounds. Dennis had the last fifteen to twenty seconds of time to think of what he can do once his 'hunters and gatherers' card comes back to his hand. Since he sees that Laura (yellow player) develops a new military technology, he decides to play it safe and use his 'camp guard' card, that turns one of his population into a defending unit in two time steps (put one of his military markers two steps from now on the clock), using the meeple and one food (putting the tokens down on the card). That way Dennis has an early defensive bonus and makes himself a more unattractive target for aggression in the case that Laura (or any other player) should try to play the brute game. Furthermore, once he develops his new technology in two rounds(which will be 'hut building'), with the food he got from 'hunters and gatherers' he will be able to increase his population and maybe develop an additional technology, before the round ends.
There is of course more to it, but I hope this gives you a feel for what I plan to design. Sure there are more mechanics and rules to it, which I will address in a future episode. Personally, my biggest concern right now is the clockwork itself. I will have to look first whether I could possibly get a cheap clockwork, ideally with just a seconds timing, to set up a prototype for the first couple of rounds.
It will be a big challenge to make this game more fun than stress, but until now I am reasonably confident that it is possible. The rest of the mechanics, the things you 'do' with your hands need to be as minimal in order to give players more time to 'think' about what they will want to do.
In my opinion, the tension created by this style of game could be a really good thing for a game. We all have seen games where a single player calculates everything through every time it is his turn, taking a quarter hour, while the rest of the players have their plans roughly established and just chat. By fixing the time a game round can take, you are aslo able to better estimate the game length prioir to playing. If you have just an hour of time, you maybe will play just to age three or just ten to fifteen rounds. If you have more time, the game can get more complex, but whatever end game condition there is (and I am not sure about this yet), you will be able to better estimate how long the total game will be.
I realize there is much I have not talked about and what I have talked about needs to be visualized in order for you to understand it, and I will do that someday this week. Until then, I would like to have feedback from you. Tell me what you think, tell me your concerns, visions, experience with more or less similar games, and generally whatever you want to talk about.
Sincerely,
Dagar
