A (possible) new take on population growth

While I'm happy with the game in its present state, a suggestion emerged that I'm obligated to take seriously:  get rid of the events.  I don't object to this in principle; while they add some historical flavor, they aren't crucial to what makes the game interesting.  However, they do keep players from growing too explosively.  They are admittedly something of a kludge, particularly with respect to Unrest; they essentially force Unrest on the players, when, in an ideal design world, players would only encounter Unrest by taking it on voluntarily (i.e., by overworking their populace).  

The game's overall difficulty level can be adjusted in other ways, but the one event that's difficult to dismiss is Attrition:  when a territory is overcrowded, you (and everyone else in the territory) lose population until it's below the limit.  This has been organic to the game since its very earliest days, and the ability to overload a territory, but with some risk, affords flexibility -- e.g. to let a player amass a huge army for a crucial attack, or to massively produce an urgently-needed resource from a single territory.  The simplest solution to removing the event is to also remove the ability to overload a territory, but that changes the game in a way that probably isn't devastating, but it would be less satisfying.

Thinking about this forced me to think about the way the game handles population growth and pressure in the first place.  From the beginning, population growth has been voluntary, and costs crops.  You can only add population to territories you own, which was supposed to create an incentive to expand your empire early (which makes the empire itself more costly to manage).  This happens to some extent, but what seems a bit more common is that you just max out your population to fill the territories you own, and then you don't really grow much after that.  That's ok, but it's perhaps not entirely historically plausible.

This led me to the idea that population growth could be automatic (so you can't avoid population pressure), but infrequent (say, once per epoch).  If overcrowding didn't cause "attrition", but instead just forced you to take on Unrest, then perhaps this provides two forces pushing players to take on Unrest -- on the one hand, overcrowding may become difficult to avoid, and it may be easier to take the Unrest than to reconfigure your empire so as to avoid it; but on the other, particularly early in the game, you can't grow your population fast enough to produce enough to do what you want to, and you may have to use forced production, and accept the consequence (Unrest).

It would treat population, and "headroom" in your territories, as a resource in a way that the game hasn't previously, and it might be interesting as a way to retain some of the features that the events will no longer provide, and also to create an additional source of interesting and challenging considerations for the players.

Sands of Time in a nutshell

 I realized today that most of the posts in this blog go deep into the weeds of the design, but there isn't a basic overview of what the game is all about.  So this post is intended to provide a 30,000 foot view of the game.

Sands of Time is a civilization-building game set loosely in Classical Antiquity.  The game's action takes place on a board that emulates a Roman-era map.  The board is divided into 28 territories, and each territory produces a resource, either crops or gold, which players will use to pay for actions.  Players will fill the territories with citizens (peasants or warriors) and structures.

The Game Board

You get points in the game from Chronicle cards.  You have 7 such cards, and each Epoch, each Chronicle can be scored in one of six categories.  Each card gives the condition that you have to meet to score that card in a particular category. The higher cards are more difficult to achieve but are also worth more points.  The categories represent the sort of things you'd expect the head of a civilization to be proud of -- size of your empire, advances, great buildings, rare and precious resources you acquired access to, etc.  

Chronicle cards

However, it's not enough to just do great stuff; you also have to pay "achievement tokens" for your chronicles, which represents the idea that you must have an established reputation in a particular area before your proclamations of your own greatness will be believed.

Action Cards

The game lasts for four Epochs; each Epoch ends with a scoring phase, and each is divided into Generations, which represent the lifespan of an individual ruler.  Each Generation lasts for a certain number of turns (not known in advance -- you never know how long the king will live!), and in each turn, players have 12 available Action Cards, and simultaneously select two to execute.  If, in a subsequent turn, you re-use an Action Card, you incur some Unrest.  As previously mentioned, most of the actions cost Resources, and the cost is usually either your empire size (because a big empire is hard to manage), or your Unrest level (because an unhappy empire is hard to mobilize).  

Sample Advance Card

You can upgrade your empire by adding Structures to your territories, or by implementing Advances.  The game doesn't have a tech tree per se, but advances come in three main categories (roughly "expansion", "building", and "culture/more advances"), and when you replenish your hand, you choose which category you'll draw from, so you have some ability to specialize or diversity, as you prefer.  And each advance has a "basic" and "enhanced" side, so if you wish you can upgrade your advance to make yourself even more powerful in that capability.

Related to this, the game doesn't assign players to a specific historical civilization; rather, your selection of starting territories, and the advances that you choose to implement, will steer you towards certain chronicle categories, and by maximizing your achievements in those categories, you'll be entitled to score the highest chronicle cards and get the most points.  Because there are six categories, and because you frequently want to score in more than one category at a time, the possible range of viable strategies is enormous, and the diversity intrinsic to the system allows you to implement many strategies in more than one way.  (As a simple example, a "building" strategy can be executed by building a big population to produce lots of gold, or by using warriors to raid neighboring players' territories for gold, or to implement advances and structures that reduce your building costs to practically nothing, and so on...)

I think the game has several distinctive features, which I don't think I've seen these in other games previously:

1. Emphasis on history-making as the vehicle for scoring.  You have to accomplish great stuff, but you also have to brag about the great stuff you did if you want it to be remembered for posterity.  This is amplified by the "heritage" system -- after you score a chronicle in a category, you're entitled to draw some achievement tokens in that category for the rest of the game.
2. Unrest level sets your action costs.  Makes thematic sense.
3. Circular board projection.  This prevents players from "hiding" at the edges and walling themselves safely away from the world, AND it promotes player interaction; most likely, even in a 5p game, your empire will be in physical contact with that of every other player in the game.  The game encourages this with the "caravan" system -- each of your caravans that touches another player's capital or city entitles you to receive an additional achievement token during the "produce" action.
4. Nifty turn mechanic.  This game has been through numerous turn mechanics, and the one we settled on does a good job of reducing the down time to just about zero, and keeping the overall game length reasonably short given the game's scope, while still giving you great flexibility as to what you accomplish each turn.

Done.

Well, almost done.  I have been playing around with "option 2" from the last post:  for action selection, each player now has a deck of cards representing the 10 actions in the game (Conquer, Raid, Populate, Produce, Chronicle, Govern, Build, Advance, Migrate, and Caravan), and all players select two simultaneously, face-down, then execute in turn order.  I've solo tested this a few times, and while it does explode the decision matrix, it also gives you tremendous flexibility, and has been a solid success.  It still needs to be tried with a live test group to see whether it actually helps with game length.  But if we allow, say, 3 minutes for players to select their actions, 2 minutes total to resolve them, and one minute for bureaucratic stuff, then that's 6 minutes per turn, and the game's ~30 turns should take about 180 minutes for any player count, and probably much less for quicker players or smaller groups.  So, the finish line of this being a 3 hour game is definitely in sight!

I've added a few new advances, and pruned one or two out, and made some other minor tweaks, and as long as the next couple of live playtests go well, I think I'm ready to call the game done.  There are a couple of little things I'm still looking at:

- Setup:  Currently players start with 2 peasants and 1 warrior in each territory.  This was mostly for convenience -- ie, take a decision out of the setup, and it speeds it up -- but because everyone started with 4 production in each category, it also didn't matter much.  Now that production is calculated on the fly at the start of the turn, starting out with 2 in each territory means that if you have 2 territories producing one resource and one producing the other, then you'll only start the game with 2 of that other resource, which isn't enough to do anything.  So to give you more flexibility, I was thinking of changing the setup to placing your peasants 3/2/1 in your territories instead of 2/2/2.  It adds a decision, and some people will agonize over it, so maybe it's not worth the trouble -- just let players get into the game and get them playing.  The low production is only a "problem" in the first turn anyway; after that, you can easily move your peasants around, add new ones, etc.  So this is something I'm thinking about but am unlikely to change.

- Length:  The game currently lasts a minimum of 28 turns and an average (statistically, anyway) of 31.2 turns.  That may be a bit too long, and may lead to scoring that's a bit too "high".  I want it to be a real struggle to get to the highest value Chronicle cards, ie if you're going to go for the biggest card, you're almost certainly going to have to eschew just about anything else.  A longer game makes it a bit easier to get those high value cards, so clipping off a couple of turns might balance this out.

- Token glut:  In some situations (esp when there are a few short Generations in a row), players can end up with more achievement tokens than they can realistically spend.  This is good in one sense:  tokens can be used in combat, so extras may promote more combat.  But too many tokens could lead to "turtling", and anyway, it's supposed to be a hard decision to commit tokens in battle, since you need them to advance and to score Chronicles.  I can find more uses for tokens, or perhaps clip out a couple of the sources for tokens.  But it just needs more tests to see whether this is actually a problem or not.

- Events:  There's a good mix of Events that work very well, and going to only one Event per turn, drawn from a deck of Event cards, has been a great way to reduce the complexity of the Event system.  But the game may need one or two more events per Epoch to really make the players struggle a bit more, but without the game becoming too punitive.  I have a couple of ideas for how to accomplish this if the game needs it.

v17 playtest, and game length

We had a successful 4p playtest of v17 on Sunday that was designed to assess two main changes: stretching out the Unrest track, and adding "trade route" pieces (Settlers roads placed on the border between two territories).  Both were successful and well-received.

The trade routes created some terminology ambiguity, but functionally they had at least two nice effects.  (a) Since you place a trade route when you pass one of the two actions you're usually authorized to make, it adds a nice decision point as well as gives you something useful to do even when you don't want to take both actions.  (b) It separates the scoring from "trade routes" (which now pertains to how many "star spaces" your trade routes pass through) from receiving achievement tokens from "trade routes" (which pertain to how many foreign cities your trade routes connect to).  Previously, the scoring and tokens were the same and pertained to how many foreign cities your own cities were adjacent to.  In practice, this resulted in big, explosive trade route networks that were pretty homogeneous across all players.  This new scheme will create more differentiation from those who want to score in this category and those who want to set up to get tokens.

Several helpful changes were suggested, including getting rid of the production tracks and just calculating your production at the start of each turn, and removing the +2 Unrest penalty for failing to record a Chronicle.

The "problem" with the game is that it's still long.  It took us about 4 hours for a 3 epoch game, and I suspect the last Epoch would have added another 1.5 hours or so.  That's still just a bit too long, and nearly all of the bureaucracy-induced length has been cut out of the game by now.  There aren't a ton of decision points, but there are many options at each decision point, so it just takes players time to evaluate their course of action.  Players can plan their actions on other players' turns, but this doesn't always happen.

So, I have two possible ideas, both revolving around players' selecting their actions simultaneously.  The motivation is simple:  if each player takes about 3 minutes to take his turn, then if you could have all of that decision time happening simultaneously, you could probably cut the game length by a factor of 2 or 3.  There's some risk that one player's actions would disrupt another player's planned actions, but a rule to let you change your planned action (maybe at the cost of +1 Unrest?) should be able to handle this; most actions don't directly interfere with other players, so this should be a somewhat infrequent occurence. 

The first is probably more of a suggestion than a hard rules change.  Players would write on a piece of paper which two abilities they plan to use during their turn, and what specifically they plan to do with each -- eg where they plan to build, or where they plan to attack, or whatever.  Then, when their turn comes up, they simply do what the paper says.  The down side of this approach is that it interfaces somewhat clunkily with the existing action selection board, with its 3x3 grid of actions.

The second approach is to (once again) rebuild the action selection mechanic from scratch, but retain the core principle of the current scheme, which is that you get to take two actions each turn.  Each player would get 12 cards representing his available actions, and each turn, players would place 2 abilities on the table in front of them simultaneously.  If, on a subsequent turn in the same generation, you want to reuse a card you've already used earlier in the generation, you have to gain 1 Unrest.  And, the "Produce" action has a built in Unrest, while others have a built-in achievement token.  (Maybe you also take an Unrest if you use two actions that each pay out a token). 

Probably, some of the actions would be simplified -- eg Advance and Build would just be "play a single card/structure" instead of "as many as you want and can afford", so that there's less of a problem remembering what you planned to do once your turn comes up.  Maybe you even write out your intended action, as suggested in the above scheme.  (Maybe you're provided a white board to write this on).

The upside of this is that it gives you even more flexibility than the current scheme.

The down side is that it slightly disincentivizes specialization in a way the current version doesn't.  But that may not be so bad.  A bigger down side is that it gives players explosively more options, since 12 x 11 = 132 combos (!) are available.  Maybe to reduce this somewhat there could be 6 double-sided cards, with one action on each side; but this reduces the number of available choices, but not necessarily the complexity, since you still need to remember which cards can potentially be played with other cards. 

This explosion in options is a big concern:  the current board has many options, but few enough that a new player can simply pick one each turn and go with it.  This explosion in options could lead to paralysis, since new players may not immediately realize which actions naturally go together, something the board originally scripted for them. 

I like this second idea enough to solo test it (I have no option to the first option but it's not any different in a solo test than just playing out the players' actions), but its true test will be how it holds up with newer players.

(*) One for each of the 9 current actions, 2 for "add a trade route", and 1 "x2", letting you take an action twice.

Gearing up for v17 playtest

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

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

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.