"Historical" CDGs and timescale

Hey Steve,

You are not alone in wrestling with abstraction versus simulation. I often find myself adding rules to flesh out "simulation" at the cost of the design's simplicity and effectiveness. I have yet to find a case where stripping these rules hurt the design.

For what it's worth, when I read your design summary, my first thought was, "Why not let each event card have a 'time cost' that tells you how far the timeline advances when the event is played?" While I imagine this is too simplified, it does give an intuitive way to scale time and envision the timeline, without forcing turns into lock step.

A system like this might have some interesting variations. For example, imagine if different kinds of events could take place simultaneously? Maybe economic events differ from political events, which in turn differ from military events. Think of them as "green," "blue," and "red." Each color advances its own timeline, with the overall timeline being the one furthest along, but all timelines must be within 2 units of each other. This would prevent players from advancing, say, a purely military agenda because economic and political events would have to "catch up" if the military timeline got too far ahead.

Here's another variation: players have "action points" they can spend in response to events. The number of "action points" depends on the length of the event (longer events generally award more action points -- but not necessarily in direct proportion to the length). Dunno...could be interesting.

Anyway, the main point here is: don't be too tied to the simulation. When I get too bogged down that way, I try to reduce the design to a single core mechanic that captures the feel of the system I'm modeling, then see how fun I can make that lone mechanic.

Good luck!

The problem is that if you make the timeline *too* strict, you run the risk of causing the game to be forced--and players are simply either following a script or reacting to events in a known manner. Either way you end up with a game that ends up not really being a game.

(Personally, I feel these games *should* be an approximation of how things *could* have been, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that. I know historians like to parse textbook events into detail, but in the grand scheme of things I think "events" are granted too much weight; it's all of the accumulated forces of society, government, religion, etc. that cause/react to events, not the events themselves. But I digress.)

You can approach this in a number of ways:

1) Depending on the time frame, you can break it down in however many "turns" you want. You could have Turn 1 events, Turn 2, events, etc. This necessitates a set number of turns, of course, but there's no reason you can't. You lose a lot of flexibility this way, however.
2) Use conditions in your events: Event A can't be played until Event B happens, or until a player controls province C (or whatever). Twilight Struggle does this to a minor extent, but you can make this as extensive as you want. However, you'll have to come up with a mechanism that allows players to burn off events that can't be played, and you don't want to do it too much or you'll have players who can't play the majority of their hand.
3) Use triggers for the different eras. Instead of having a set turn in which the "Middle Game" or the "Late Game" starts, do it when some overall condition is met: when a player controls X number of supply centers or converts Y cities to your side, or some other sort of condition.

Chances are, given your reservations, you may want to use a combination of all these, and depending on the nature of your game will determine how you go about doing it. "Minor" events that conceivably could be played at any time should be able to flow free, while creating some "anchor" events that are effectively scripted into the game. Finding that balance will be the challenge.

I have been working on a game that has a deck "unlocking" system you might be able to use.

In terms of your game, there would be 3 decks; Early, Middle, Late. A player would need to play X Early cards to unlock their access to Middle; Y Middle cards to unlock their access to Late and/or Z Early & Y Middle cards to unlock Late.

Each deck is shuffled so you are still adhereing to the "late developments come late and are random" requirement.

If you want to prevent situations in which one player has an amazing draw of cards and advances quickly, you could add a timing requirement. For example, the game starts at year 1. You need to play X Early cards to unlock your Middle deck, but you can never unlock the Middle prior to year 10.

Alternatively, you may allow a sliding requirement for unlocking decks. For example, In Year 1 you would need to have 10 Early cards in play (which won't happen) but in Year 12 you would only need 2 Early cards in play. Somewhere in the middle, the players will strike a balance between actively moving towards later development and letting time pass.

Good luck with your design!