Jeff's World of Game Design

Gearing up for v17 playtest

2012-02-01T03:14:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since there was a progress update on the game, but I haven't been completely idle. I did have a chance to try out a couple of the ideas mentioned in the last post, namely (a) changed the Unrest track to 1/2/2/3/3/3/4/4/5 from 1/2/3/4/5/6/7, (b) when you choose "Govern", you get one reduction on the Unrest track for free (but may pay for others), (c) added 8 "trade route destination" spaces, valued 1-3, around the board, and (d) when a player foregoes one of the two actions he's allowed each turn, he may spend that action placing a "trade route" (a road piece from Settlers) on the border between two territories.

For (a) and (b), this change made the Unrest system seem less punitive, and gives you some additional flexibility -- you don't feel as bad about taking on Unrest -- but in practice it did seem that everyone stayed at about 3 or below, which is a bit more homogeneity than I'd like. I'm inclined to try (a) without (b), because pscyhologically, what seems to hold you back as a player from taking on more Unrest is seeing the number move up.

For (c) and (d), the intent is to separate the scoring category based on trade routes from the achievement tokens you get from trade routes, and to reduce the number of the latter that your trade routes can produce. And, to make trade routes easier for players to visualize. This change seems to have the desired effect -- you are forced to think about how to place your trade routes in a way that also connects you to other players cities/capitals, AND to place your own cities and capital in such a way to promote players passing through them. However, there seemed to be a great deal of homogeneity in the way routes were placed: basically, everyone's routes looked nearly identical. One thought I had was to instead place trade route destination spaces on the border between two territories. There are 28 territories, but 64 borders between territories, so placing the destinations on the borders makes them more of a target that can be approached in multiple ways. The main question at this point is whether to have all destinations be worth 1 (for the purposes of the "trade route" scoring category) or to have some be more lucrative than others. In either case, I think these will be hard-wired on to the board.

Finally, I am trying, though it is hard, to act as the "voice of the player", and to represent what the player wants to be able to do against the imperialistic designer, trying to suppress their happy-go-lucky fun with restrictions! And the one thing that I consistently find frustrating as a player is the occasional need for two-turn actions, where there are two things I want to do in succession, but can't because of the way the action board is laid out. Since the Generations only last (typically) 2-3 turns, having to spend two turns to do something I want to do is too time consuming. Now the action board does a good job of enabling most of the two-step combos you'll want to pull (eg Raid/Conquer, Govern/Build, Migrate/Populate, etc), and, indeed, that was why it was created in the first place. But there are some combos you want to do -- eg Migrate/Produce, to move and then recalculate production, Chronicle/Produce, to record a Chronicle and then produce the achievement tokens you'll need to pay for it, or Produce/Govern, to get the resources you need to reduce Unrest -- that the current board doesn't allow.

Now going to an extreme that lets you take any two actions you want would be a terrible idea, as it would lead to analysis overload, and would remove some of the structure associated with the combos as currently constituted. But it basically looks like there will be times that you would like to be able to use Produce with just about every other ability (except Raid, probably), and maybe the solution is simply to redraw the Action board to allow that; so, instead of a 3 x 3 grid with Produce in the center, maybe the board should simply be an octagonal ring, with Produce in the center. The structure of the outer ring would essentially be unaltered, but now all abilities would also be usable with Produce.

4p playtest and Trade Routes

2011-04-09T06:23:00.000-07:00

We had a playtest yesterday that gave me a chance to see some of the recent changes (new Structures, min Unrest = 1) in action. Everything worked pretty well; the scores were rather high by the end of the 3rd Epoch (at which point we stopped), but that could have been because the first 2 epochs were each a bit long, and certainly a bit because the low Unrest floor loosens things up. Happily, the scores were again close, with only 2 VP separating first and third place.

One ongoing issue that I need to address is what to do when a player's bonuses from Structures and Advances authorize him to take an action for free (eg build a structure at no cost) -- how many "free" actions may he take? The easiest ruling is simply to say "you only get one free action", but it's not as simple as it sounds -- there's a valid counterargument that says that if the player has earned the right to take actions for free, he should be allowed to take as many as he can. Some of the actions are self-limiting anyway, but nevertheless, I need to think about this more.

Two ideas for possible changes emerged, one sparked by a suggestion and one by an observation.

The suggestion was to renumber the Unrest track, so instead of 1/2/3/4/5/6/7, it could be 1/2/2/3/3/3/4/4/5 or something like that -- the idea being that voluntarily taking on Unrest feels very crippling, but maybe players would do it more willingly if it increased their position on the track without changing the actual number of their Unrest. This is a pretty interesting suggestion, and one that I'll certainly give some consideration, and maybe a solo test.

The observation was that (a) trade routes are very dependent on building (since they're formed by adjacent cities), and (b) historically, trade routes were long and didn't necessarily connect to cities. To that I'll add that (c) roads networks can make it such that everyone is connected to everyone else, so everyone may have comparable numbers of trade routes. The idea this sparked was to have 7-8 "premium resource spaces" spread around the board, and have the trade route scoring category correlate to how many of these you've connected to your capital with roads. But roads would take on a different form -- instead of being a tile, they would be a stick placed on the border between two territories, creating a connection between those territories.

I like a few things about this idea. First, it separates cities and trade routes a bit -- cities certainly help with trade routes, but aren't absolutely required. Additionally, it separates the economic exchange of trade routes (although it's still quite abstract) from the cultural exchange of trade routes, which would still relate to connections between cities; it's simply that the stick pieces would BOTH form trade routes AND connect up cities (so presumably, this encourages you to place a city on or near a trade route). However, it adds some complexity and more components, neither of which the game needs at this point. It's the kind of thing that could end up in an expansion some day if it's too much complexity for the base game.

2p playtest and some changes to structures

2011-03-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

For the longest time, I've considered the game to be playable for 3-6 players. Initially, I really thought of it as a 4-6 player game, with 5-6 players being the game's sweet spot, but the difficulties of getting a big group together necessitated creating a 3 player setup. This is mostly related to getting the mix of which territories to include (and how many), and what mix of resource tiles (ie, capacities) to use, as you want the same level of tight-ness to persist across all player counts. The 3p setup I came up with was a good move, as there have been many playtests where only 3 of us were available.

And it seems to work pretty well. This past week, I decided to go further and try out a 2 player setup. Again, it's simply a matter of whittling some territories out, but it's harder the smaller you go, in particular because of the "# of territories" scoring category. Specifically, that category maxes out at 10 territories, but if the board only has 10 territories, then to max out that category, you have to wipe the other player off the board, which isn't very nice. But having too many territories could make things too loose, where the players don't need to interact too much. I tried it with 12 territories, but removed all of the capacity-5 territories, so all the territories are small, which encourages/forces you to expand a bit. I've solo-tested it 3 times so far, and it seems to work fine; in each case, players came into contact, had some battles, formed some trade routes, etc, so it seems promising.

Additionally, it is fast -- I can play it through in about 90 minutes. In contrast, 3p solo tests take me a full 3 hrs, typically. Why the discrepancy? I think it's just that I'm capable of playing at a pace of about 45 minutes per player but that third player (or the 4th, when I've done that) just divides the mind too much and each player's turn I'm forced to re-learn their strategy. There was an article on this subject recently, which basically says that the brain can juggle two tasks at a time, by setting each lobe working on a different task, but more than that is hard. I wonder if that's a consideration here.

Anyway, I've also made some dramatic changes to the structures system. I continue to be unhappy with the lack of place-specificity in the structures; ie, with most of them, if you want a colosseum, you're happy to build it anywhere, doesn't much matter which territory. And, I don't think the early-game structures actually help all that much.

So, I've added some new structures that give you token boosts (eg the Monument, that gives a Civil token every time you build in an adjacent territory), added language to many of the structures that applies their effects to adjacent territories, and added a couple of structures that require certain terrain (eg the Quarry that must be built in the mountains, eg). And I shuffled some of the existing structures around so they're available later in the game. I've tried this new framework in a 3p test and the 3 aforementioned 2p tests, and I really like the changes -- the early structures now feel like they let you lock in a strategy from a much earlier time in the game, and the extra tokens make it easier to implement Advances, which had historically been rather difficult.

The final change I've implemented is to add space "1" to the Unrest track, which up to now had started at 2. This also loosens things up. So overall, the game is a bit easier for the players, but still doesn't feel too easy, as I haven't seen scores that are downright explosive. The caveat is that I've never been an explosive scorer to begin with, so it will have to pass muster with some of the game's playtesters, most of whom are better players than me. But so far so good.

2011-02-20T05:26:00.000-08:00

I had a chance to play about half a game with the new approach I described in the previous blog, and that seemed like enough.

On the one hand, it does a couple of things well. Because Monuments are lucrative, and you can only place one per territory, it makes territorial conquest and expansion more important. There are some nice timing decisions -- score now, or wait until I can meet the conditions of one more category on my card? And the decisions about what medium to use to record your Chronicle can be somewhat interesting (or would be, with some additional tweaking).

But overall, it changes the core emphasis of the game in a way I don't like. First, your primary goal becomes meeting as many conditions on each scoring card as you can, as quickly as you can. To move on to the higher cards, you reach a point where you can't keep making progress on multiple categories, and you're naturally forced to specialize -- this is good, but not what the game's focus originally was on. Although specialization is supposed to be viable and lucrative, it's also supposed to be possible to cobble together a composite strategy, eg "Trade Routes and Territorial Expansion", but in this version, if you can't pursue both at the same rate, you'll only be able to score for the category that you're moving fastest on.

There's also a built-in rich-get-richer problem that would be hard to balance out. At some point, it will become hard to meet the conditions of the next card, and your ability to score additional chronicle cards will stall. But, as long as you still have monuments from previous epochs, you'll still be pulling in points, until someone forces you to lose control of a territory (and this is hard); so, the game will really be about scoring quickly and then protecting your scoring machine, rather than going on to try to accomplish greater and greater exploits. And that's really not what the game is about.

So, as predicted, this was a brief excursion, and while I like some aspects of this new idea and may think about it in the background, for now I think my original scheme is vindicated and I can move ahead with bringing it to completion. The next step is to try some new Structures, which should improve the pacing and the territorial specificity of the map. We'll see if it's successful!

What if?

2011-02-16T06:38:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons that Sands of Time has been in development for quite a few years is my willingness to indulge “what if?” questions. At almost no point in the game’s development has it been genuinely broken, and at any point I could have left well enough alone and balanced the game in whatever configuration it happened to be in. But for whatever reason, I’ve instead had no compunction about pulling up significant systems by the roots and planting something different, sometimes dramatically so, in their place. Many of these transplants have grown into core systems that have stayed with the game, so I guess I can’t fault myself too much for being a tinkerer.

My latest foray into “what if?”-land may be brief. One of the features most distinctive to the game, and central to the game’s idea, is the Chronicle system. This has gone through various iterations but the consistent theme has been that there are cards that have a category, a threshold condition in that category you must meet, a VP payout if you meet the condition, and a cost in tokens to pay for the card. A corollary to this has been the idea of “heritage”, that after you score a card you get some tokens each subsequent turn in the same category as the scoring card.

The new idea turns this on its head; now, each token is worth 1 VP. Recording a chronicle is now free, and lets you place a marker on your heritage card, entitling you to tokens in subsequent turns. But, you get to choose the medium you wish to use to record your Chronicle, and this affects the way the payout is received. You can choose to write your chronicles on scrolls; these provide an immediate, modest payout (paper products permitted detailed recording, but didn’t last very long). Or, you can use Coins, which provide a small payout each turn and a bigger payout at the end of an Epoch based on how many trade routes you’ve formed (coins are more durable, and could easily travel far and wide, but convey less specific info about your empire). Or, you can use a Monument, which provides a bigger payout each turn, but is placed in a specific territory, and the payout ends if you lose the territory, and decreases if someone builds a monument claiming a superior achievement in the same category. You have 7 chronicle cards, and the thresholds of each become progressively more difficult, and you can only play each card once during the game, but you can claim as many of the 6 categories on the card for which you meet the conditions.

I like the idea because it puts the history-making more front-and-center. The decisions with the current Chronicle system pertain mostly to selecting a chronicle that you can pay for and whose conditions you can meet, and this works well. But I like how this new system would make you think about how (ie, what medium) to tell your story, and when it makes sense to go public with a Chronicle. It puts the emphasis less on getting yourself in position to score, and more on identifying the opportune time to score; so it’s less about maneuvering and more about deciding, which I think could be a good thing. I also think it would be more interactive, because as you see other players recording Chronicles, you may feel pressure to do so yourself to keep up. On the other hand, the current scoring system is very well balanced, and this will almost certainly have huge balance problems, at least initially. So, there’s a good chance, for that reason alone, that it could crash and burn.

I’ll probably try a few solo tests of this scheme next week and see how it goes.

3p solo test

2011-01-11T03:21:00.001-08:00

I played through a 3p solo test over the weekend; the final scores were 52/51/50. I think it's a good thing that the scoring seems to be consistently pretty close. The only major change I made was to remove the Disruption tokens. I liked the idea that you could retain control of a territory but not be able to do anything with it because it was "out of control", but in looking for ways to cut complexity, this seemed an obvious one to try. Practically speaking, the only real change is that regaining control of a territory now costs crops (to re-annex) as opposed to gold (to govern). It didn't come up too much in this game as there was little to no combat, so it remains to be seen how it works.

Moving ahead, there are only a couple of things that I'm monitoring at the moment. The first is that the game doesn't just reward advanced planning, it requires it -- if there's an action you want to take and you're not in position to take it configurationally, it can take several turns to set it up, and this can be frustrating. It's not necessarily a "bad" kind of frustrating, but it may be advantageous to loosen the game up a bit.

Second, I'm still not perfectly happy with the spatial elements of the game; there's a a certain equivalence to the territories that may not make the geographic aspects of the game as interesting as they could be. For example, if I need a crops-producing territory, I'm as happy to get Libya as Judea; there may not be a strong reason to prefer one to the other. But my bigger concern is with the structures system; the structures are supposed to modify individual territories, so you're supposed to care about where you place them. But in practice, as long as you have a Colosseum somewhere it's fine; same for a Wonder, etc.

All along, the board has mountains and rivers drawn on it but these are just decoration. However, my thought is that these could become active elements of the game in concert with the structures system, by having a couple of structures take maximal effect when placed on certain features, eg a quarry in the mountains, irrigation on a river. Tying the effects of a structure to its immediate environment, ie by having the structure's power affect only the territory in which it is placed, or its neighbors, could help emphasize this. If some of the structures also "boost" one or more actions, this could be a way to reduce the "advance planning" problem mentioned above (sort of -- you still have to advance-plan to build the structure!).

3p test and the receding finish line

2010-08-16T04:55:00.001-07:00

We had a good 3p test last week; I will post a report in the game's DropBox folder. We had a player who followed a building strategy and scored huge points from his building accomplishments (we think that scoring category may be a bit loose), but I hit on a quirky combo of advance cards that brought him back a little bit: using "Replacement" (remove a structure from a territory and put another in its place) and "Altruism" (you may take a build action in another player's territory), I was able to tear down his valuable Cities and replace them with much more innocuous Storehouses and Amphitheaters. We couldn't decide whether this combo was too powerful or in the spirit of the game, and we do have ways to soften it if need be, but it was fun to see it play out.

We all agreed after playing that mechanically, the game seems more or less complete; we couldn't think of any major structural flaws in the game, although there were a couple of good suggestions for ways that things could be done slightly differently. One particularly interesting idea is to make each chronicle card pay out the same value regardless of which of the six categories you're using it to score for. Currently, each card has 6 categories on it, and gives a threshold and VP payout for each. The concern is that this could be too much information for new players to process, and a more unified framework would make the game easier to learn. I'm worried about scoring homogenization but I think it's worth a try.

So I think that for better or worse, the game has entered its fine-tuning phase. But it's unclear exactly how much fine-tuning it needs. One player made the simple yet alarming observation the other night that, perhaps there are too many territories on the map; perhaps the distribution of territory sizes is incorrect; I added another later: perhaps players have too many peasants (25). I've held most of this stuff fixed throughout the development, and hadn't really thought about changing them. But fine-tuning the game might indeed require adjustments. While adjusting these handles is easy, it's unclear what the "correct" balance will be.

Part of it comes down to what sort of experience the game is trying to create. At present, the game is slightly "loose" -- you mostly have access to as many resources as you need to do what you want to, and you mostly can avoid combat with other players. This is partly because combat is expensive, but also because it's not especially necessary. But what makes adjustment challenging is the possibility for unintended impacts on other systems. For example, reducing the number of territories will put players in closer proximity, but that could also make it easier to form Trade Routes, increasing the number of Achievement Tokens that each has available, which will loosen the game up even more.

Bottom line, it will just need some thinking, and some trial and error. I'd love to punt the tweaking to a developer as I suspect I'm too close to the game to do a really good job of it. But to get started, I'll at least start by removing the "6-capacity" territories and replacing them with 3s, and if that goes well, maybe reduce the number of peasants each player has from 25 to 20.

Balance

2010-07-05T17:26:00.000-07:00

Two solo tests and another live 4p test have led to some further progress. The change, suggested by a playtester, to replace the common decks of Chronicle cards with an individual deck for each player has proven successful; not only does it have the intended effect of making it harder/less valuable to bring another player below the threshold of his scoring card (because cards are now placed face-down), but it also puts all of the scoring information right in the players' hands, making it easier to play.

Our live session lasted 3 epochs and while it was still anyone's game, we chose to quit due to the hour. The scores were fairly high for the end of the 3rd epoch, with the leader having 40 points and other players in the high 20s and low 30s. This was due, we believe, to two players having Democracy (helps you keep Unrest down inexpensively) and the other two had Emulation (lets you use an ability that another player holds), so everyone was able to keep their Unrest low.

We found that a 3 epoch game is not unsatifsying. I could see making a quicker-playing variant in which you choose any one of your initial 3 advances and implement it for free, and then just play as usual for 3 epochs instead of 4.

One of the players brough up the question of balance, specifically with respect to luck of the draw with the 4 structures tiles and 3 advance cards that form your hand. He suggested that having a hand of structures wasn't exactly interesting or important and these could just as well be drawn freely from the supply when you build. I tested this through and it does indeed seem fine. He also noted that there can be great disparity in the initial deal of advances. As I thought about it more, I realized that there are essentially 3 types of advances in the game: ones that are always useful and powerful no matter your strategy; ones that are more focused but are useful enough that you can build a strategy around them; and ones that are useful if you happen to be in a certain situation. To smooth out the luck of the draw, at least to start, I proposed dealing each player one "always useful" advance and two "strategy-specific" advances. This ensures that everyone gets one and only one powerful advance, and no "situational" advances, which don't really matter till later in the game.

It's encouraging that after each of the last two sessions, the changes have really been related to refining the way existing systems work, rather than re-envisioning entire systems or making big, sweeping changes. I think all that remains is to balance the advances a little bit to soften a couple and strengthen a couple others, and then it should be very close to done.

Perfect planning

2010-06-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

There are some good discussions underway about the potential for perfect-planning in the game, particularly with respect to the scoring system. Although some people like games with a high degree of analysis, perfect planning can bog a game down which can really extend its length. There are 3 aspects that I'm watching:

-- Because each scoring card requires you to meet a specific threshold of "whatevers", players may take a long time deciding which card to take, as they calculate out the exact number of "whatevers" they can get before the next scoring round.

-- Because there are 6 different scoring categories and 7 scoring cards, new players, who haven't locked in to a particular strategy, may spend a long time selecting choosing a card that best fits their empire and will give them the most points.

-- Because the scoring cards are held face up and are drawn before they are scored, player X could spend a long time perfect-planning a way to get player Y's holdings below the threshold of the card that Y holds so that Y can't score his points.

I think my plan at present is to monitor problem 1 for now to get more insight into whether it's very serious, and to address problem 2 by perhaps providing more strategic guidance to new players when teaching the game. For problem 3, a suggestion was made that would allow players to select Chronicles face-down in such a way that you'd know what category a person was going for but would not know the threshold or VP value of the card they've selected. This imperfect information might make the scoring rounds more exciting, in addition to (possibly) mitigating the third problem, so it might be worth a try.

4 player playtest

2010-06-10T07:59:00.000-07:00

We had a lively 4 player session the other night, to test out the new action selection system. The game wasn't significantly shorter as hoped, but several of us are slow, deliberate players anyway, so it's difficult to say for certain. The new mechanic was a success and was well received. The ability to choose two abilities creates interesting situations. For example, I know I can initiate up to 3 combats each generation, but only once each can I pair combat with the migrate (lets me move warriors AND peasants), raid (lets me move warriors only, and loot resources) and produce (grab bonus resources from one territory) actions. That means each use of the combat action will give me slightly different abilities, and I have to plan carefully if I expect to need to fight multiple times in a given generation. And most of the abilities, especially build and advance, have similar considerations.

Overall, the session was a good success, and the final scores were very close (44/41/33/32), with the winner determined by the game end bonuses. I anticipate only two small changes prior to the next session (no Events in the final epoch, and don't reshuffle the Events until the deck is fully depleted). The newly rebalanced scoring cards seem to be producing fairly close games, and none of the payouts seem too generous or too stingy so far.

One concern a player brought up: since Roads homogenize the trade route landscape so much, does "Trade Routes" make sense as a scoring category? Will players be very differentiated in this, or can any player basically score the same as anyone else? Something to watch for.

A report on the session has been placed in the DropBox folder.

Solo testing and some changes

2010-05-15T17:55:00.000-07:00

My wife has been away this week and I've solo tested the game several times to try out a new action selection system. Instead of the prefect abilities laid out in a 4x2 grid, they're now arranged in a 3x3 grid (Raid and Conquer functions are now split over 2 prefects). Instead of choosing one action each turn, you choose two, but they have to be adjacent in the grid. It speeds things up a bit, because naturally related actions (eg populate-produce, or migrate-conquer) are placed together in the grid.

I've also managed to streamline some of the bureacracy, by giving each player an abacus to track resources, by having achievement token payouts hard-wired into the action display, and by cleaning up the way events work.

And, some of the fiddly rules are removed or relocated. One of the biggest culprits was the definition of a "trade route". Now, it's simply a city or capital adjacent to a foreign city or capital. The details about citizens in an isolated city or foreign citizens in your capital is removed, BUT the effect is still present in this way: when you produce and receive achievement tokens for your trade routes, if another player has a citizen in one of your cities or capital, he gets a token too. Several other systems have similarly been cleaned up.

My solo tests seem to be taking about an hour per epoch for 4 players, and that's with me playing all 4 positions. Real players in all 4 seats might be able to go much faster. An hour per player isn't too bad but 45 minutes per player would be even better.

Yet another 3 player playtest

2010-04-29T09:30:00.000-07:00

It seems like we can only ever find three of us at a time to play the game. Anyway, we tried out a new rule whereby the cost to build structures is your Unrest + the building's level, instead of the product of the two. The goal was to prevent easy building of everything in your hand, but also to make high levels of unrest less crippling. It more or less worked, but a couple of events made the overall vector of the game a bit screwy. I'll post the session report in the game's DropBox folder.

We played 3 epochs (we chose to forego the fourth since the eventual winner was obvious and it was getting late), with each epoch taking about an hour. This seemed acceptable but one of the players brought up the issue of downtime. I've begun to think about how to address that. I have come up with a fairly substantial change that would rework the turn structure. I'm running it through solo tests now and it seems interesting so far.

3 player playtest

2009-10-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

We had a 3 player playtest with 3 experienced players. The game was odd in that 6 of the game turns were 5 actions or more, which is statistically very unlikely. The game was relatively close between 2 of the players. Once again, the "production explosion" was a factor, with players having such enormous production that they could easily bottom out their Unrest and then build out their entire hand of structures. I don't think this promotes the tough choices I want to be central to the game. Despite that, it was a fun session. A detailed recap is posted at the game's DropBox folder.

3 player playtest

2009-09-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

We had a 3p playtest on Labor Day in which 2 of the players set up a lucrative network of Bazaars in the Med, connected by Roads. This led to a network of Cities, and from there, to many points. The recap, and some potential (small) changes, have been posted in the game's DropBox folder.

New rulebook uploaded

2009-07-18T07:44:00.000-07:00

I have uploaded v15.4 of the rules and the latest Advance cards to the game's DropBox folder. This latest version removes the "Discovery" cards from the previous version and groups the Advances into three decks, by achievement category. It also adds 3 new Advances, bringing the total to 24 unique Advances.

3 player playtest

2009-06-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

Last night, we had a 3 player playtest that took a more militaristic turn than previous sessions have. It was enjoyable to see the game go in that direction, and it still held together just fine. I've posted a full session report at the game's DropBox folder.

The Goal

2009-06-25T18:24:00.001-07:00

A while back, I posted a comment to a
blog article by Shannon Appelcline that captures what I think a civ building game ought to include. I'm posting that here as a good summary of the overall goal of this project:

I would say that the following are elements that a Civ game needs to provide to really communicate the right feel:

* Growth: The player's empire gets larger both in its footprint on the board and in its population. Population growth creates additional capabilities but also brings pressure to expand. Territorial expansion also brings benefits but results in interaction with a player's neighbors, which can lead to conflict as space becomes scarce.

* Enhancement: The players have ways to receive additional abilities or upgraded forms of existing abilities that they do not possess at the game's beginning; their civilizations grow and progress as the game proceeds, and players can steer that progression.

* Differentiation: The particular set of enhancements that a civilization acquires is different for each player and, ideally, different in each playing; it isn’t necessarily forced upon the player by the game.

* Specialization: As players progress down a particular path of differentiation, it becomes either easier to continue down that path or more difficult to switch to following a different path.

* Multiple paths to victory: The scoring system accomodates the different cultural paths that players will follow, and allows a variety of paths to lead to victory. These allow a player to attempt to emulate different historical civilizations as well.

* Cooperative interaction: Generally implemented via trade, but the idea is simply that players can interact in a way that results in a mutual benefit as opposed to a diminishing of one player's position by the direct action of another.

There are a couple of additional elements that I think are important to the theme, and that haven't been incorporated into any game terribly well yet (which is why I'm trying to incorporate them!)

* Self-aggrandizement: What we know about the ancient world comes primarily from historians who wrote about what they observed or heard about, and from rulers who boasted about their accomplishments. By making sure that much about your civilization is recorded, you can insure that tales of your greatness will survive the test of time.

* Political control: Growing an empire involved conquering territories, but then the real work of managing and governing began, and some empires succeeded at this better than others. The idea that a smoothly-administered empire will be more successful should be communicated by the game in some fashion.

* Cultural diffusion: The idea that your culture can "rub off" on the foreign civilizations you interact with.

Welcome

2009-05-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

I've created this blog to discuss progress and updates on my game design efforts, centering mostly on my civilization-building game The Sands of Time. Most of these updates will consist of announcements that new files -- rulebook revisions, playtest recaps, etc -- have been uploaded to the game's DropBox (http://www.getdropbox.com) folder, which some people have been invited to access.