Game #55: The Sands of Time by Jeff Warrender

Ok, as my session winds down, just wanted to thank everyone again for the excellent suggestions! Here is a list of the changes I’m looking to implement prior to the next playtest, as a result of your suggestions. None are earth-shattering, but they add up to a nice net reduction in the number of rules.

Turn order: Remove the card-based turn order mechanic, and just use clockwise rotation for now.

General cost: All combats will cost your current Unrest, in crops. (instead of multiplying by combat round)

Governor cost: The Governor action must be paid for with Gold.

Closing markets/Can’t attack a city in which you have a market Removed this rule.

Limit on markets Adding a rule whereby a City can’t have more markets than its capacity.

History cards to become single-sided and drawn face-down. Advance cards will remain 2-sided.

A couple of tentative changes, that I’m not completely sold on yet...

General prefect simplification: Combine the general’s subactions “war” and “annexation” into one action, with annexation occuring as a selectable consequence of war. I’m hesitant because there’s a bit of ambiguity in dealing with unowned territories, since you don’t need to fight a war there to annex them.

”Auctioning” advance cards removed I’m thinking of doing away with this for now, if only to simplify the Prefect actions; I actually quite like the mechanic. I may add it back in at some point.

Changes yet to be made:

Perhaps, a simplification of the “architect” action, with which you can currently build structures, cities, or markets. It would be nice if each Prefect could only do one “thing”. I don’t see a great way to achieve this with this ability, short of adding a 5th Prefect, which I’m disinclined to do.

An off the wall idea:

Based on suggestions made by Seth and Rene, here’s a crazy way that the prefect action selection mechanic could work, using a mechanic I cooked up for a different game. The idea is that each turn, you can take as many actions as you want, but must pay diamond tokens to take multiple actions in this way: you get one free action, the next action would cost 1 diamond, the next 2 diamonds, and so on. Here’s the thing: diamonds are not returned to the supply after being used. Instead, the total number of diamonds is fixed, and when the supply is exhausted, an “age” has ended, and scoring occurs. You have some sense (and some control) as to when this will happen. Since players start without the ability to draw diamond tokens, the first age will take a while to get through, but in the latter ages, a player may only get 1 or 2 turns before the age ends, so he must have sufficient diamond production to pay for a few actions per turn, or else risk the age ending before he’s done everything he may have wanted to do.

I don’t think it’s even remotely likely I’ll go to this kind of system -- it’s just too radical a change -- but just wanted to point out that some of the suggestions that came up sparked some different ideas for how things could go.

Thanks again to all who've chimed in! If you haven't yet, but want to, you've still got another day left!

-Jeff

The problem with it, as I see it, is two-fold. First, it seems that as players start accumulating many diamonds towards the end, there could be more of a downtime issue, since you can take several actions in a row. The other concern is that it makes diamonds pretty much a must-have, the centerpiece of the game. Moreover, the game falls apart if players choose not to buy diamonds.

The one thing it does do nicely is handles a glut in diamonds pretty effectively, since using them becomes more and more expensive the more you use them. Zaiga's idea gave a similar way to handle this, and in fact his would probably mirror my turn structure a bit more. So this may be the kind of idea I'll use should a diamond explosion become commonplace. We shall see...

-J

I think your justification is as good as any I've come up with. I think this element works well gameplay-wise, and it just goes to show that one can justify just about any mechanic!

Not sure how much of a problem this will be. I think that splitting up your empire into "pockets" will be a losing strategy in general, since any battle you lose, you won't be able to retreat to friendly lands and thus will get wiped out. Moreover, you won't really have the ability to shuttle citizens around between your territories, which may be an important capability. I bet it could work, but I think that in general, you'll want to keep your empire mostly contiguous if you can.

Funny - I thought this was a good rule to stop people having markets in their own cities. Does this just mean that the market disappears afetr conquest instead?

Actually, this was one of the main reasons for the rule -- to remove the question "what happens to the market if you take over a foreign city?" But it's not that hard of a question -- the market just disappears.

-Jeff

I’m hoping to playtest “Sands” at our Albany Playfest next weekend, and I’ve got the prototype pretty much ready to play, but I just can’t resist tinkering, so I’m contemplating a couple of changes. In a quick solo playtest, I observed a couple of things that worried me a bit:

-- The first few turns are brutal. The game system is very tight, and you just don’t have enough actions available to do everything you want to do. Especially painful is the dichotomous (?) nature of the actions: if you build, you can’t produce. This leads to some nice choices, but it may be too rough.

-- The structures that pay out achievement tokens, once built, don’t do anything else. There are some VP categories that reward the number of structures you have, but that’s about it.

So, I’m considering a different scheme, somewhat more in line with what Zaiga suggested, and here’s how it would work:

First, what I was calling “achievement tokens”, I’m now calling “action tokens”, and these come in 3 varieties (still) -- Political, Civic, and Cultural. Each Prefect sub-ability (eg, Governor, Migrate) would have one type of symbol associated with it (e.g, Migrate would be Political), and to use that action, you must spend an available action token in that category. The catch is that, following Rene’s idea, after you use a Prefect, you place one action token on it, so that future uses of the prefect cost the base 1 token plus however many tokens are currently on the Prefect.

The other catch is, I think, that the Prefect ability groupings will be such that each Prefect will have sub-abilities in more than one category (eg, for the “Empire” Prefect, “General” will be Political, “Governor” will be Cultural).

So, for example, in my first turn, I want to use the “Empire” prefect, as a General; I must pay 1 Political token to do that, and I place the token on that Prefect on my player mat. Later that turn, I want to use that Prefect as a Governor; I must now pay Culture tokens, and since there’s already one token on the Prefect, I must pay two Culture tokens to take that action. Make sense?

How are Action Tokens received? I think you’ll get 1 of each type for free each turn (or perhaps 3 "wild" tokens each turn), but now, the structures that show Action tokens will pay tokens at the start of each turn. (It's an open question whether you lose unused tokens at the end of the turn, or during attrition events, or never...)

One overall advantage of such a system is that it would allow removal of the diamond economy, and possibly city-building as well, which would simplify the game a bit. I also think I could reduce the number of Prefects to 3 (but would add a 9th sub-ability by separating combat and annexation) More importantly, I think it just gives you more overall flexibility in the actions you take, making it easier to take multiple actions with the same Prefect but with a sensible cost structure for doing that. It will likely make the later turns of the game longer, but since you still need to use Action tokens to complete Advances and Chronicles, and since the action costs become somewhat self-limiting, it may not be too bad, though perhaps I’ll reduce the total number of turns if necessary.

In a sense, I think it also casts the decisions into even sharper relief: do I use these tokens to take more actions, or do I advance my Civ? It unifies this decision structure, whereas now, they’re somewhat separate due to the diamond economy being distinct from the advancement economy. But that separation may actually be a good thing. And, I think it adds some strategic scope, since the actions I'm allowed to take are now more dependent on the tokens I've chosen to produce.

I think it may be too close to this Saturday's upcoming test for me to make this big a change now (for one thing, I’d likely have to change several of the Advances and a few other things), but it’s probably something I’ll discuss after the playtest, and see what folks think. But in the meantime, if anyone has any thoughts, I’d be happy to hear them. Thanks much!

-J

Yes. The overall game turn sequence (Take prefect actions/reveal an event card) will still remain intact, but instead of everyone taking 3 rounds of actions, it will just be that players keep taking actions until everyone passes (ie, can't afford to take actions anymore). At that point, the tokens will be removed from the player mats.

Do you mean, "couldn't they all just be 'diamond tokens'"? Possibly. I like that the 3-token system kind of fits in with the existing idea of "achievement tokens", and I think could give more strategic scope to the game. ie, if you're playing a heavily military game, you'll lean towards getting Political tokens so that you can take those kinds of actions more often.

As for an action order effect, yes, I could definitely see something happening along these lines. I'm not sure whether it's good or bad.

That's a strong possibility, to be sure. I have 3 candidate groupings: one is a categorized grouping (ie, one Prefect has all 3 Political abilities, one has all 3 Cultural abilities, etc). I also considered a "symmetric" grouping like you suggest, but I think I'm tentatively leaning towards an "asymmetric" grouping, where each Prefect has 2 abilities of 1 category and 1 of another. Something like this:

Prefect A:
War (Pol)
Annex (Pol)
Govern (Cul)

Prefect B:
Produce (Civ)
Build (Civ)
Migrate (Pol)

Prefect C:
Advance (Cul)
Scribe (Cul)
Populate (Civ)

I'm increasingly convincing myself that this is a change worth trying out, but I assume there are unintended consequences I'm not seeing yet. One is a possible loss of interaction from the City/Market economy.

Thanks for your comments!

-Jeff

Well, I could perhaps save you a bit of reading and post the latest version of the rules; I'll try to do that tomorrow. My most recent post (or 2nd most recent, anyway), is the question that's plaguing me currently; it's basically a restructuring of the action selection mechanism I'm using. It would simplify the game overall, which is probably good, but it's just not clear yet whether it would make the game better or worse.

-Jeff

As always happens when you change one thing in a game, other changes that you hadn't considered bubble to the surface. In this case, doing away with Cities removes some complexity, but it has the unintended consequence of devaluing the low-numbered territories, which previously were nice as city sites, since they were cheaper to convert.

However, I have thought of a possible solution to this. It consists mainly of changing cities from something you explicitly build, to an implicit creation. A city would be any territory that contained as many structures as its capacity (so a capacity 3 territory with 3 structures would be considered a city).

The question then becomes, what does a city do? I think one answer is that it could give an immediate VP payout, perhaps equal to the capacity of the territory. Alternatively, it could pay out action tokens, but since structures now do that, it seems redundant.

Just some more thoughts on how this new action system changes other things in ways I hadn't expected, but which I think can be accomodated.

-J

I'm trying to get the latest version of Sands together for an upcoming playtest session by an outside group. As I have probably mentioned somewhere, in this new incarnation, the Diamond tokens and Markets will be removed. A "City", instead of something you actively build, will be simply a territory that contains as many Structures as its capacity. Once you have a city, you get VP equal to the capacity, and you get 1 VP each subsequent scoring round.

But this leaves something of a vacuum on non-combatitive player interaction, and I'm wondering how this can be addressed. One aspect that the game currently lacks is a strong element of trade. However, since there are few resources, there's little to trade in the customary sense, and furthermore, deal-making takes time, and the game is already too long.

What to do? Here's an idea I had: there is a piece called a "Caravan" that can travel around the board under some level of direction from the players. When it hits a city, something happens. This could be:

(a) All players with citizens in the city get something -- VP, money, etc

(b) The player who owns the city can put something onto the caravan, and other players can buy it later on.

(a) is simple enough, but I'm interested in exploring how (b) would work. One idea was that the caravan could represent a vehicle for cultural diffusion: perhaps advance cards or structures (think of it as the "blueprints" for a structure) can be carried by the caravan, symbolizing that knowledge is being transferred between cultures. Probably the most straightforward implementation would be that the caravan has X spaces, and you can put something into one of those spaces, along with a marker indicating that it's yours. Then, when it comes to another city, the owner of that city can buy it from you, either by making a deal with you, or at some fixed price. Or maybe the card/upgrade/whatever is free, but you get VPs for having diffused an aspect of your culture?

However it works, it allows for some deal-making, but in a restricted sense. It also adds some interesting board position considerations. Maybe, eg, there's a "caravan" that travels the land and a "ship" that travels in the Med. I'm not sure how the caravan would be controlled or moved, either.

Anyway, just an idea for a way to permit some trading but without losing the overall terseness of the design.

I welcome any thoughts...

-Jeff

Yes, this is exactly how it would probably work. In fact, I imagine that there might be multiple caravans, but for simplicity, there would probably be only one track with the "slots" for goods/products.

These are all good ideas for the caravan AI, thanks! I was thinking it would be something like "at the start of your turn, if the caravan is in one of your territories, you may/must move the caravan." But a programmed route may work as well. Gives me something to think about!

What I like about this idea is that encourages peaceful coexistence in territories implictly, which is something I've been trying to do all along. My concern, however, is that an auction model, as opposed to a deal-making model, requires an exact valuation of what is being bid. This probably requires players to bid Resources, however, in a model whereby players simply buy from the display, a negotiation between the seller and buyer could ensue, with the involved players setting a price between themselves. Not sure which is better.

Ooh, slave trading, how non-PC. I was actually thinking about adding a unit called "slaves" that have 0 combat strength, but produce 2 resources per turn. I'm probably not going to do it, though, mainly because adding a 3rd unit may be too much. I can understand that slaves are taboo, but the fact is, they were a reality of the ancient world.

Right, my thinking was that if someone acquired one of your Advances, you would place one of their markers on that card (or else, they would get to freely mine the appropriate Advance deck and pull the card for themselves, and YOU would place your marker on THEIR card). Then, during scoring rounds, you get points for how much stuff you've given away. (probably this would be one of the Chronicle cards that you could record).

I've wanted to include a "cultural diffusion" element for a while now, and the original concept, which still may have merit, was built around peaceful coexistence between players. But this idea, the caravan as a vehicle to share stuff, is even more thematic, so I may try it out, even though it adds some complexity.

Thanks for the excellent suggestions about how to implement the idea!

The latter. You use the "Annex" action to gain control of a territory (by paying Crops equal to your current empire size), and place a marker in the territory's info box. You can only lose a territory by someone expelling you via combat and then annexing the territory out from under you.

That's not a bad thought, but it might require rethinking things a bit. Currently, the idea is that most of the buildings confer benefits exclusively to the owner (although some, like Roads, give benefits implicitly to any players in the Territory). This is partly meant to increase the importance of territorial ownership, as a way to counterbalance the fact that ownership is difficult and expensive (which it's supposed to be).

I originally had an idea of "cooperative builds" -- buildings that 2 players could build on the border between two territories, which would give both players some benefit. I liked the idea, but it seemed like too much complexity to implement. I think it probably still does.

Thanks to both of you for the thoughts!

-Jeff

What denotes ownership of territories, by the way? I forgot. Controlling interest in Citizens? Some kind of ownership token?