Game #55: The Sands of Time by Jeff Warrender

Ok, after my discussion with Seth, I got to thinking hypothetically as to how the game could be streamlined, if such a thing were desirable. The most likely edifice that could be taken down would probably be the system of diamond tokens/cities/markets. So let’s say those were removed. This would simplify things, but it would leave the problem of prefect abilities probably being weaker than what they’d need to be to make the game playable. So as an alternative, perhaps players are each given three tokens, numbered 1-3. When you choose a Prefect ability, you associate with it one of these numbers and that gives the degree of the ability that you can use. (So, for example, the Governor with a 3 token could reduce Unrest 3 levels).

This may be a good start, but Seth also worried that some of the actions themselves (e.g., production) were too complicated in and of themselves. With this system, I’d still be left with the problem of defining a meaningful set of actions that could vary in ability between 1-3 uses per turn. The two tricky ones appear to be “produce” and “add citizens”. Both could be connected to number of territories (ie, the number token would give the number of territories that could produce or the number of territories in which you could add citizens), but the reason that acitons aren’t currently based on such a scheme is because it makes those actions too weak...to have a sustainable income, for example, you need to be producing from all your territories, not just 1 or 2. So you’d almost always associate the “3” token with the production ability, which would be undesirable.

Just some thoughts. Nothing I’m ready to commit to yet, but just brainstorming how the game would be streamlined, if I wanted to do so...

-J

The problem is, though, that people come into a game not with a blank slate but with some preconceived ideas of how things are going to work based on games they’ve played before. A rulebook needs to answer the most obvious questions that players might have based on this past experience, and if you’re deliberately disallowing something that players might otherwise be inclined to think they could do, you should say so if only to eliminate the confusion. I fully agree that if you write well, you can cover a lot of these loopholes and ambiguities in a compact way. Personally, I just like my rules to be thorough and as airtight as I can make them, even if they’re a little more wordy as a result. It’s just the side I prefer to err on, that’s all.

There are really three aspects to the starting ramp up -- how many territories you have (affects how quickly you can ramp up population), the number of guys you’re given (affects how quickly you can ramp up production) and the number of resources you’re given (affects how much you can pay for before you’ve started producing). We’ve iterated over various permutations of these variables. I think that in the 6 player game, 2 territories per player is ok, but with 4 or 5, it might make impingement between players a little too slow. There’s a good chance I’ll go up to 3. I do worry a bit that doing so would basically mean that a common strategy would be to keep 2 production territories and convert the 3rd to a city. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, but I think it would be better if you had to work a little harder to get that city territory...I think so, anyway.

I think the “ramp up” is interesting in its own right, but you don’t want it to last forever. It’s definitely something I’ve had on the radar for a long time, and it’s still a strong possibility that you’ll start with 3 territories. Your arguments are valid.

Each category (political, civic, cultural) has 3 structures -- a level 1, level 2, and level 3. To be able to build level 2 structures, you have to advance in the appropriate category, and again to buy level 3. Each structure has 2 attributes, and you choose one to build -- either you get an immediate payout in achievement tokens, or you get the structure’s special ability. All of the special abilities are listed at the end of the rulebook, if you’re interested in checking them out.

Yes, this is the right way to see it.

I completely agree, they will hopefully be balanced, to the extent that it will be possible given the variety of effects that they have. Each level 2 structure should be “better” than all level 1 structures, and roughly “as good” as the level 2 structures in the other 2 categories.

Very well, I appreciate the thoughtful idea, and agree that it has merit. But I don’t think that some general statement of preference I may have made at some point in the past is helpful in making me more interested in this particular idea (moreover, saying that I don’t like random elements is belied by almost every one of my games, each of which has some random element of some sort!) I really think that a player-triggered scoring round, while reducing “randomness”, has enough aspects that I don’t like that it doesn’t work for this game.

That’s not a good enough reason, to me. Moreover, if there’s a restriction to which Prefects you can use (e.g., in your suggested model, where you have to use all Prefects once before you can reuse another), there’s always going to be some tracking to keep track of which you’ve used.

Again, though, I think that “use any prefect you want” mitigates this better than a model like I proposed where the Prefects would occur for all players in a fixed order.

I do want the game length to rely on a schedule -- this is a design primitive in this case, and is non-negotiable. I see your point about how a more “uncertain” method of Historian distribution could work better. Really, the most random way would just be to shuffle them all into the deck, but then you run the risk of the game ending much too soon. My “smart shuffle” is meant to ensure the game is the right length.

It does allow for that, but it simply means you must do it over time rather than at the moment that you happen to have a preponderence of peasants in your territory. The game lasts 12 turns, and no territory can have more buildings than its capacity (max 6), so there’s plenty of time to fully stock a territory, if it’s desirable to do so.

Ok, I see your point. I’ll think about it some more; perhaps the restriction is unnecessary. Interestingly, I have one or two more restrictions up my sleeve that weren’t in this rulebook but may be. I think I’m going to add a rule whereby you’re only allowed to build one of a given type of strucure (category and level) per turn. The reason being that if you’re pursuing an all-out military strategy, and you’ve advanced to level 3 political structures, perhaps all you want to do is drop multiple level 3 structures when you build, but this could give you more political tokens than I think you should be able to get; in other words, there’s nothing you give up by specializing. I want specialization -- “extreme” strategies -- to be viable but also somewhat more challenging than a certain amount of diversification, I think. I think this little rule change pulls that off well.

-Jeff

Sorry about that! Originally there were “prefect cards”, but I’ve done away with that for this iteration. I thought I had removed all reference of them from the rules, but I missed one or two, I guess...

I agree, “migrate” is a much more accurate term. I’ll make the change, thanks!

Interesting; I haven’t played Goa or read much about it. I’ll have to check it out.

Not in all designs, but yes, this one definitely has “dichotomy” as a foundational principal.

It’s true, I may have gotten a bit too self-indulgent. I elsewhere justified the two different resource types by the asymmetry between them: crops lead to “expansion”-oriented actions, whereas gold leads to “enhancement” oriented actions. I think you need a blend of the two in the game, but extreme strategies built around one or the other could also work.

I confess that I don’t have quite as good a justification for the two types of Citizens; indeed, unless one is feeling pretty military, warriors are probably less important in the game than Peasants. It may be a perfectly seamless change to go to one citizen type. I’ll have to think about.

I think that what I’m going for here is to give you the flexibility to sometimes do more in a given turn, but not in every turn. The idea is that sometimes, you’ll really want/need to attack twice in one turn, for example. The diamonds are a simple way to facilitate that. The actions and turns should still be short and snappy, but the added flexibility may lead to AP. I’m concerned that without the flexibility to “upgrade” actions, the game will just plod along a bit too slowly.

I like this idea, actually, but the sticky wicket continues to be the “Production” action; if you let players produce twice in a turn, I think that it will just be too easy to afford things. I just haven’t come up with a great variation for this action to make something like your proposed mechanic work, though I agree it has merit.

I agree, a clockwise order is best for now. An idea, like yours, to rotate start player around the table based on game state is a good thing to consider. One could even have an auction for the privelege, but I don’t really like that kind of mechanic in general...

A valid concern. When I first came up with the idea, I liked it and immediately put it in the game. It adds some complexity, but also a fair bit of cooperation, which I liked. I may not have found the best implementation of the idea yet. I do think a player needs to be able to choose which offer he takes and not just the highest, since players may not necessarily be offering resources, and a player may prefer to share advances with his friend rather than his enemy. I grant that being forced to share with your enemy if he makes the highest offer could be cute. Mainly, it would just be a question of finding a means of quantifying the offers and ensuring that a player doesn’t get hosed if only one player makes an offer, and it’s a piddly one (although maybe that’s the risk associated with the action).

For some cards, the double-sided cards are actually a very nice solution; I’m thinking of the “advance” cards specifically -- the side you leave face-up in front of you tells which advance that you’ve chosen to implement. It works there because the backs on all of the cards are the same (“Advance in [category] structures”). For the Chronicles/Achievements, yeah, they should probably be single-sided. This would also permit face-down drawing, which Seth advocated.

Currently, it’s the latter. I agree that the former could work, but it seems like it should also be possible to update “for free” if your empire grows. I wanted the “press your luck” factor, so I chose that you must pay to update your cronicle. Maybe you could pay to update someone else’s Chronicle in a case where, say, their empire shrunk...hmm...

Hey, any comparison between one of my games and PR is fine by me! Kidding aside, originally,
trade was the primary means of interaction between players. But as you noted, there are actually several systems that give interaction, so maybe unstructured deal-making is unnecessary.

I don’t think I want to add a 9th Prefect ability, so adding trade would require restructuring some of the other Prefects, which may be a valid choice. One idea I’ve toyed with a few times is allowing trade only between players who coexisted in at least one territory, or maybe alternatively, building a market in another player’s city gives you the right to trade with that player. But yeah, for now, trade may be something I’ll “turn off”, keeping it as an option if the game isn’t interactive enough. It seems that having only 2 resources, the impetus for trade would be low, yet there have been times in tests where you just can’t get enough of whatever resource you need and will trade the other resource for it -- this is enhanced by the loss of production of cities. There may be other things you’ll want to trade, so it may be necessary.

I agree with the “timesink” concern. Originally, deal-making was a huge source of the game length problem. Getting rid of it can only help!

Well, sure, but then I’d be left with “Gheos”, and that’s already been done! In all seriousness, I see your point and agree there may be room to whittle some stuff out.

Yes, this GDW session has been most helpful to help me clarify the motivation for certain rules. Some I can justify easily, some have been more questionable. But as I said to Seth (I think), I’m going for a pretty rich and varied game experience here; I want that to be built on a simple engine, but still have enough substance that a wide variety of empires can emerge. And a certain amount of complexity is necessary to make that possible, so it becomes hard to identify what constitutes “complexity without making the game better”, but that, I suppose, is the art of designing games!

Very helpful! Thanks again!

-Jeff

Yes, as you've seen with the Disciples board as well, using the edges of the board to correlate cards with board spaces is something I've been using a lot in my designs lately. No clue if such an idea would make it into the "published" version; that would be their call to make.

It's a fine thought. The board is currently about 23" x 23", so it could probably be a little bit bigger. The spaces shouldn't be too much smaller. Basically, for my prototype, having the extra boards isn't a problem, as long as there's always enough table space. Even a pad of paper would be ok for scoring; it only happens 3 times during the game.

Ah, now I understand your question! The counter for this resets each time you use the General; so, the first battle initiated in a turn is 1xunrest, the second battle is 2x unrest, but the next time you use the General, it starts over. More likely than not, I'll do away with this altogether, and just have each battle cost your Unrest level. Thanks for the question, and sorry for the confusion on my part!

As we've previously discussed, it's all about the decisions! I hope this game will give the player some interesting ones. Here's a fun excercise I've sometimes undertaken to convince myself that the game works. In your first turn, what 3 Prefect abilities should you use? The answer is, I'm not sure there's a single answer. I'm pretty sure that all 8 Prefect abilities could be used in the first turn as part of a valid strategy. That's one of the things I like about the game; there really should be multiple strategies available to you throughout the game (once it's balanced, anyway...)

Yes, I'm hoping there won't be very much downtime at all to speak of. I do think the game will be long, as I've said, but I'm also hoping that once it's done, it will really give you the feel of developing with time. As I've said before, I really like the game Vinci, but one of my complaints about the game is that in the times I've played, it really feels like you're basically having the same turn over and over. There's some board changes that make each turn different, but the game doesn't have a narrative "arc" to it. I hope that Sands will have a true beginning, middle, and end; maybe not precisely defined as such, but just that the game will feel like it presents you with new options and new challenges with each passing turn. We'll see if it really does this, though!

Thanks again for your comments,

-Jeff

Think of it maybe as a “gypsy empire” mechanic, where you can spread out all over the world but not have political control of the territories in which you have a presence, yet you still have an effect on them.

Game mechanically, this is a nice mechanic. It gives you the ability to produce without having to spend a “production” action, yet at the risk of being attacked, and at the penalty of not being able to build or populate in the territory. It’s just a different way to do things than the standard “only one player per territory”, which almost every other game has, but I think it works well.

Fair enough. My personal preference is to keep warriors in for now. You are quite right; warriors primarily mean giving up production for improved ability to make war. Plus, two of the advances let you “upgrade” your warriors, but not your peasants. Of course, in a 1-citizen-type game, you could still have these advances, and then it would just be that if you wanted to be warlike, you’d invest in those advances.

This is a good point; Warriors do have a defensive function, as well as an offensive one.

It was certainly where the design started from, to be sure.

I see the concern now. We’ll just have to see how it plays out in practice. The diamond tokens also have a function in combat (don’t ask me to justify that one thematically!), so they may deplete more towards the end as the game becomes more combative. But it’s possible they’ll flow a little too freely. We’ll just have to see how the playtests go. One change I mentioned to...Bill, I think, was to have the # of markets allowable in a city be restricted to the capacity of the city. So, if you build a city in a 3-territory, you can only have 3 markets (assuming other players build them there), for a max of 4 diamond tokens in that city. Maybe I’ll even adopt your rule that you have to build a market in your own city in order to get the diamond token.

This is definitely something that will have to be seen. I think that the production hit you take in order to be able to get diamonds make it less cut and dried than you think, but it could be that they will indeed flow too freely. I could always go back to my earlier iteration, in which cities gave 1 diamond, period, and there were no markets.

First, “auction” is perhaps the wrong word, since it isn’t really a matter of “high bidder gets it”; it’s more that each other player can make an offer and the active player can accept one, if he wants. The main motivation for the mechanic is to allow you to share advances you have in an easily implementable way given the current advance implementation, that cards display what advances you have. I’m not just “calling it cooperation” -- it is cooperation! One player gives up something (a turn action) and gives something to someone else in return for something he perceives to be of value (depending on what is offered, I suppose). It’s deal-making, which is the quintessential cooperation mechanic.

I had a chance to look at the Evo mechanic earlier. Let me see if I’ve got it right. There’s a track on which a marker advances each round, and when it reaches the last few spaces of the track, you roll a die; if the result is above some threshold, the game ends. That threshold decreases each space the marker advances. If you reach the last space on the track, the game ends (the die automatically hits). Now, this really isn’t that different from what I have currently. Let’s say it’s turn 4. With each passing round, it becomes more likely that a Historian will emerge. Should turn 6 emerge without having had a Historian yet, then it’s a sure thing that this turn will be a scoring turn. Basically the same thing as Evo, except there are fewer turns over which the uncertainty is...uncertain; and the probabilities are different as a result.

Here’s a more complicated algorithm that would give more uncertainty. You shuffle a Historian in with 2 other Event cards: these 3 cards correspond to turns 4,5, and 6. Then, you take the card that corresponds to turn 6, and shuffle it in with the cards for turns 7,8, and 9 (of which one is a Historian). So now, from this shuffle, you have the cards for turns 6,7,8 and 9. Now you take turn 9’s card, and shuffle it in with the remaining events (of which one is a Historian). In this way, it isn’t actually a sure thing that turn 6 will be a scoring round if turn 4 and 5 weren’t. And since you’re always moving the cards towards the bottom of the pile, the overall game length still will be at least 9 turns. It’s more complicated to describe, but gives the higher level of uncertainty that I think you’re looking for.

Quite so. Currently, updating costs the same as recording, so the idea is that in most cases, you can probably get a better payout to record a new Chronicle (assuming you’ve achieved something noteworthy in that category) rather than bumping your marker up one or two clicks on an existing chronicle.

Right, you’ve correctly analyzed the thought process a player might go through with this kind of decision.

I do really think that Libel (heh, or recording someone else's chronicles for them) is a terrible idea for the game... paying to reduce another player's score seems very out of place in this game, especially with all the talk of cooperation. That said, it would be incentive to keep up on your civ even after recording your chronicles. I don't know if that's the design intention, or if you're supposed to be able to move on to something else after recording one thing.

I don’t think I’ll really do it, but it did sound like a funny thing to be able to do.

-Jeff

I absolutely agree.

Absolutely! As I may have mentioned, the reason I called them “diamond tokens” is that the first iteration of the game had a way to upgrade buildings with “Wealth Tokens”, which had diamonds on them. When I jettisoned that function, I had the tokens leftover, and I’ve used them to take care of this functionality. But sure, a better name would be great! Any ideas?

Incidentally, the original game also had something called “Goods tokens”, which just had a “G” on them. I’ve also jettisoned their functionality, and guess which GDW game those tokens are now being used in! (Hint, what other word starts with “G”)

Certainly a possibility, but I think I like the simplicity of peasants just producing, period, with no special requirements or protocols.

I think that if I was going to do this, it would run the risk of making markets “unnecessary complexity”. I think that just having your peasants in other players’ territories produce basically does the same thing, but more simply. I think markets are tied to the diamond economy, for better or worse...

No, you can currently build anywhere. I think it needs to stay that way, or else city-building becomes “doubly necessary”. I’m trying to shape the strategies in the game around actual history, and one strategy that I want to work is the “Mongol horde” strategy, which probably shouldn’t require city-building to work. But there probably will be a Chronicle that specifically rewards the Structures you’ve built in cities, so that would motivate building in cities.

This is cute! But...currently, the “upgraded production” action is that you just get a bonus resource per Diamond token. The model you’re proposing may make resources flow too loosely.

There’s still some uncertainty in the “almost deterministic” model in that you must move your forces and declare combat in two separate actions, so someone could potentially move their own forces and foil your combat before you could initiate. The die roll would give uncertainty, but there’s something attractive about saying the game has “diceless combat”. I’ll start with that for now, and if it’s too bland, try the other way.

Yeah, that detailed example has changed a lot of times as combat resolution has changed. I’ll check it out. The “Wallenstein” variant isn’t actually part of the true ruleset; I put it in mainly so I’d remember it. I’d like to try it out a couple of times; if I tried to pitch this game to Queen games (publisher of Wallenstein), it could be a selling point.

The problem with this is that it would require defining two different paradiagms for combat: combat between two coexisting players, and combat against a neighboring Territory. I suppose I could just disallow combat in a territory in which you coexist, but really, I think it still would have the problem of players “locking up” territories by filling them to capacity.

Possible, but perhaps makes production more fiddly than it currently is. Personally, I’m not yet sure how much of a problem overpopulation will be. Again, better than 2/3 of the events actively penalize this. And since movement is somewhat costly (requires a special action), reorganizing your empire won’t be cheap or easy, so it won’t be viable long-term to overpopulate. If someone else is overpopulating your territory in a way that will cause you to experience Unrest increases or attrition, it may be a motivator to attack that player.

I expect I’ll change the rules so that when adding new citizens, you can’t overpopulate a territory; but, I’ll still allow overpopulation to occur during “migration”.

It’s something I’m willing to consider if necessary. The nice thing about not having this is that currently, in the first turn, you can annex a Territory with only one “General” action. Whereas if you had to fight a battle against neutral armies, you couldn’t annex till the 2nd turn. I think I’ll keep it as is for now, partly because other games have done “neutral armies” just fine. As you know, I really like to explore new aspects of a theme whenever possible. But this may be a necessary bit of borrowing. We’ll see.

Thanks again!

-J

I think that attrition and unrest will encourage wars due to overcrowding, since the owning player is most adversely affected by overcrowding.

That’s pretty much how it is now, except it basically removes any consequence of winning a combat other than the other guy losing 2 guys and you lose 1. Or rather, it forces you to choose an extra action (via a diamond) to gain the victor’s benefit.

This could probably work ok, but there’s still the ambiguity of how to annex an unowned territory. I guess it would just be that you wouldn’t have to fight a combat prior to that annexation.

I’ll think about it some more.

It’s really just X per warrior (where X =2 + {0,1, 2} if you have certain advances), and 1 per peasant, plus 1 if it’s in a city.

Yes, I can relate to this as well. It does seem odd that the consequences of a 3-on-1 battle are the same number of casualties as a 20-on-14 battle. It seems like the number of casualties should scale more. Not sure of a good algorithm to achieve that.

Thanks again for your comments!

-Jeff

Now you're thinking strategically! Hey, you're probably already better at this game than I am...

I'm still not sure there's a thematic oddity. Think of farmers farming crops in foreign territories as "squatters". The owner can choose to assert his ownership and try to kick them out, but other than that, they can farm if they want to; there aren't walls around the arable land. I think it's ok.

No, because they're the same Prefect, the "Works" prefect I believe. With that Prefect, you either produce or build, but not both. The peasants can contribute to either action, but not on the same turn.

That may be true, good point.

I don't disagree. I think I'm just adopting more of a "wait and see" policy. If diamonds are too plentiful, then the mechanism by which they come out will have to be evaluated. I think that there won't be "diamond overload", and that if there is, there will be a severe resource crunch. But I could be wrong. I simply don't think we can really tell without testing the game out.

That was all I meant to say; that between the time you move and the time you attack, the defense could change on you. But you're right, you can have a sense for how much it could change by...

I'm not 100% sure you're right in general (or that you're wrong, either), but at any rate, in this case, the commonality between my game and Wallenstein isn't a mechanism, it's a component -- the "cube tower". The way I propose to use it is different than the other two games they have that use it already. In those, each player throws cubes of his own color into the tower when fighting, and the winner is the one with the most cubes that come out (but some get stuck in the tower). In my variant, there are only two colors -- one for Territory owners, one for "invaders" (although the owner may be the one initiating the attack). I like the mechanic better than a die roll, but because it's an expensive component, I'd never design the game around it unless I was sure I was never going to try to publish the game.

Yes, that's how it works. But you were saying combat could be to "get someone out" of a territory. What I thought you were referring to was the situation where one player has filled a territory to capacity with his own citizens. In that case, if territories couldn't exceed capacity, then no one else could get in, and thus, a new combat would have to exist. This is the main reason why I couldn't have capacity being a hard and fast limit -- because it would make isolationism unrealistically powerful as a defensive strategy.

The game has this currently.

-Jeff