Emphasis

A recent playtest of the system discussed in the last post was a mixed result. 

On the one hand, the "tech trees", the idea of locked actions that become "unlocked" with advances, and the shorter number of turns were all received generally favorably.  On the other hand, the game was more difficult, and more complex. 

A particularly problematic source of complexity was the expanded role of caravans.  While in principle this seemed favorable, in practice the different meanings of the different trade good colors that your caravans touch was just too much; additionally, needing to combine sources (caravans +  heritage bonus) to see whether you advance or score a chronicle (but slightly different sources for each) was too taxing.  

We agreed that an improved system would be to have a single heritage track for each category (political, civil, and cultural), and you get to increase on a track when you (i) touch a trade good with a caravan, (ii) touch a city or capital with a trade good, or (iii) score a chronicle in that category.  Then, you just compare the heritage track to the chronicle value (if you're scoring) or your unrest (if you're advancing), so it's always easy to see whether you're allowed to do what you want to or not. 

One of the players suggested that the turns in a generation would be more engaging if there were more opportunities to create synergy between them, ie to invest in some sort of short-term boost that lets you be really effective in just one area for just this turn. This sparked an idea that I think I like.  In addition to the Action cards in your hand, you also have "emphasis" cards, probably one for each category.  An "emphasis" card costs a turn action to deploy, and it stays in place for the whole generation and does two things:  first, it "unlocks" all of the locked actions in that same category (eg, "political" emphasis lets you unlock aspects of the Raid, Conquer, and Muster actions that are otherwise locked); second, it gives you +1 on the Heritage track in the same category IF you complete a combination of 3 actions and/or buildings in that same category this generation. 

This makes you care more about generation length; ie a short generation in which you deployed an emphasis card would feel like a waste.  Long generations force you to reuse cards or produce, taking on Unrest, but there isn't currently a downside to short generations, so these "emphasis" cards would add one.  Although, since you don't really control generation length I'm not sure how much this matters.  

Maybe there should be, instead of the "generation" track, which is the same every time, a "lifespan" card, which has a generation track, and the numbers are different on each card.  That would give some variability to the expected generation length, and you may be more likely to invest an action in emphasis if it looks like you have a healthy ruler with a long life ahead of him. 

Detour

Tests of the new population/unrest system went well, but a playtest several months back revealed the possibility for exploitation by a player who maintains a small empire and low unrest.  Tightening a couple of rules and weakening a couple of advances seems to have mitigated that problem, and different strategies should again be well-balanced, so the game felt pretty much done for real. 

 

However, .a playtester that I'm obligated to take seriously expressed several lingering concerns, namely, that the game has too large of a footprint, that it takes too long, and that the early-game scoring ramps up too slowly.  Curiously, this playtester pinpointed the Advance system as the root cause for these problems:  each player's display takes up significant table space, and it requires time and mental energy to keep track of what everyone can do.  While this playtester advocated removing them entirely, I am keen to find a compromise solution if possible. 

 

Separately, after the last session, players pointed to the caravans as an area for improvement, saying that they felt like an afterthought, and that they don't really integrate well with the other systems.  This concern is valid -- after all, they were originally inserted into the game specifically to fill the role of "something to do when you don't have anything else you want to do." 

 

My latest change is not necessarily a keeper (yet), but it weaves together a comprehensive solution to both of these problems. 

 

First, instead of individual player advances, advances would be arranged in series of "advance trees" at the center of the table.  There are six "trees", two for each category (civil, political, and cultural), and each tree has two branches, one on either side (it's really more of a tech rope than a tech tree...).  You put your marker on any one tree at the game's beginning, and then the advance action lets you either move your marker to a higher level along the same branch (retaining access to the advances at lower levels on the same branch, of course), or to place an additional marker.  When you reach the existing end of the branch, you get to draw 2 cards from the next level and pick which one is added to the end of the branch.  So, the trees grow as the game progresses, which gives some game-to-game variation.

 

This has forced me to only retain those advances whose functionality could easily be expressed graphically, so that it's always easy to visualize what you and anyone else can do.

 

The second, and related, idea, is to cluster the "trade good" spaces into 4 regions, with each region having its own color of trade good.  You still deploy caravans and touch these trade goods, as well as other players' cities and capitals, but these take on new importance:

 

- The number of different colors of trade goods you touch with caravans determines the number of advance markers you can place

- The number of a single color that you touch with caravans gives the maximum chronicle you can record. 

- The number of cities and capitals you touch, plus your heritage bonus in a given category (from previously recorded Chronicles), must exceed your Unrest for you to advance in that category.

 

Additionally, many of the action cards now have a "locked" section, which requires having a certain Advance in order to use.  For example, "Raid" lets you move and then steal resources, but the "steal resources" is "locked" unless you have the advance "Aggression". 

 

The astute reader will note that this removes the need for Achievement tokens and the extremely astute reader will notice that this leaves the combat system in the lurch, since it previously involved a closed-fist bid of achievement tokens.  In the new system, each player is given a die, which they set on whatever side they wish, and then reveal simultaneously.  Each pip gives +3 to the combat strength, but the victor must increase his Unrest by the number of pips.  It's somewhat akin to the system in Cosmic Encounter/Dune, but bidding Unrest rather than Units is (hopefully) an engaging twist.

Solo testing so far has been challenging, because the game requires very different thinking now that all of those actions are locked, and now that you have to build a caravan network to advance and to score points.  I think it gives the feel of choosing to acquire greater flexibility, or to charge ahead "sub-optimally" to try to max out in a single category.  Lopping off an epoch, the three remaining epochs do give the feeling of a nice three-act play.  Live testing will tell whether this detour is a favorable one in the long run.

 

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.