Boardy Games

Yes please to games with no waiting. (What do we want? TO NOT SIT AROUND WHILE OTHER PEOPLE TAKE THEIR TURNS. When do we want it? CONSTANTLY.) I don't yet have anything developed to say about threaded games, just some slightly connected thoughts about turnless games that I'll number to make them look more methodical:

1. A pile of different playspaces that move around the board; you take your turn and pass them on. Like the choosing-cards part of booster draft Magic. There would have to be some penalty for letting them build up for too long, and perhaps more playspaces than there are players. Or one fewer, and whenever you finish with yours you pass it to whoever's free: some waiting, but less.

2. Make the turns more entertaining and/or interactive. In debating you can interrupt with a point of information: maybe with Scrabble you could interrupt with a letter of your own to complete a growing word and steal some points. Charades. Pictionary. Lots of parlour games. This is why trivia games with a mechanical voice to read the questions are worse than Trivial Pursuit: it's one less thing for people to do during their down-time.

3. Existent non-turn-based games: Ricochet Robots, Set, Icehouse, Light Speed. In all of these there's a lot of emphasis on doing stuff really fast, which is fine but does make for one very specific feel. It would be nice to be able avoid down-time without having it be a big urgent thing.

4. A lot of Ludocity-style games don't really have down-time, and everyone is trying to achieve their goal constantly without it being a constant slap-this-card-down thing - but that's mostly because the playing area is huge. Other contributory factors: interactions that can take place between any two-or-more players at any time (in Bohnanza, why should trades have to involve someone whose turn it is?). Having to fulfill certain physical preconditions ("get to Trafalgar Square") before you can do something - you could certainly have a board game where everyone has a stack of cards and you can only talk to the Emperor if your house is at least four storeys high, or something like that but less rubbish.

5. Pass the Parcel is a bit less boring than it should be because there's the constant WHEN WILL THE MUSIC STOP stress. Game with some sort of randomised timer; if it goes off during your turn then that's bad. Take your turn as quickly as you can, therefore. Not actually turnless, though.

6. The main game is turn-based; there's a subsidiary game played by people whose turn it isn't, to - decide whose turn it is next? Or what sort of thing is available to do on the next turn? Or something?

7. Players are allowed to cheat as long as nobody notices them; therefore, when it's not your turn you watch others and/or try to smuggle some extra victory point counters off the table.

James Ernest used something of a "queues" approach in Brawl and Fightball (which are, I think, both pretty much the same game); players race to slap cards onto several available piles, with certain combinations locking that pile. I don't remember if the queues had any "output", though, or if they were just scored en masse at the end.

The game Space Dealer deserves to be mentioned here. It goes with sandclocks, and each player has two of them representing their robots - put one on top of a "mine" card, and you get a resource of the specified typ when it runs out. Put one on top of a building card from your hand, and you get to place the building on your planet when it's done. I wouldn't say it's perfect, but it's actually not as stressy as it sounds. The clocks have just the right amount of sand for you to make your decisions when both of them are running, but not too much since you are almost never idle. The entire game has a soundtrack of 30 minutes, so when the music stops, the game's over. I like it, and I think it's a working model if done right.

I'm sure there was a board game that used dozens of tiny, custom sand timers as pawns - you turned them over every time you moved them, and couldn't move them again until they were empty. All I can find online is Tamsk, though, which only has three sand timers per player. Maybe it was that and I'm misremembering.

Kevan,

Whether or not that game ever actually existed, that's a really interesting idea.

I wonder if there's anywhere you can buy sand-timers in bulk...

All I have to say at the moment is that I love the idea of passing around tokens. You get the build token and build a house, then pass it to the next player. Then you get the war token and move your troops a space forward. You notice the guy who has the build token now built a theater. Is he trying to take control of Culture? You'll have to wait until you get the assassination token before you can teach him a lesson, though.

A possible problem would be scaling to different numbers of players.

Scaling could be handled in a similar fashion to Bang! Depending on the number of players, you could have a different number of tokens. In a smaller game, maybe you wouldn't even HAVE then assassination token, and in a larger game, you might have two war tokens, etc.

Kevan, do you remember what the theme of your apocryphal multi-timer game was? I'd be interested to see what we could create if we started from the same place and extrapolated.

Jonatan, that sounds like a great way to reduce the gather-and-build part of your standard RTS computer game (always the most interesting part, to me) to a board level. When my board game budget refreshes from obtaining Attika, I plan on looking around for a copy.

Simon and Wolfe: yes, this is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of! The civilization-control theme is probably a good one to start with. It would be interesting if, as Simon hinted with his theater idea, you were all working on a common city or empire rather than building multiple competing ones; that also opens the door for the multiple-simultaneous-winners and cooperative-but-competitive mechanics we discussed in another thread.

So say the game takes place in a city about halfway through its accelerating decay. You and your fellow players are people who have some power over the course of events, but only indirectly--you know the guy who knows the guy, etc. The goal is to stave off total collapse and get the city back on the path to self-sustenance, but in addition to all the "good action" tokens, there's a "disaster" or "decay" token that you have to pass around (for some reason; maybe your tokens go in a single queue and you have to pass it off to get to the next one at some point). What would the other tokens be? Maybe Construction, Commerce, Intrigue, Policing, Utilities...

I'll admit, the time between turns can get glacial, but personally (and especially now, with the whole brain tumor/damage thing) I like being able to take as much time as I want on a turn. Almost any attempt to make a game turnless forces me to start relying on my reflexes, to start relying on my ability to think *quickly* rather than think *well*. Any time limit where people can breeze through where I have to sit there and keep thinking is worse than the glacial impatience that comes with the time between turns. The only turnless board game I can think of, right now anyway, that doesn't force reflexes is Diplomacy (well, sure, it has things called turns, but not of the kind we're talking about).

(I've never been a fan of real-time games. For instance, my favorite implementation of the real-time-shooter is Frag, which seems to make it fun because it takes away the real-time, twitch elements to the whole thing.)

I'd rather see a game that had activities that could be done on [i]every turn[/i], but that kept turns. So in Turn A (which focused on player 1, so it would be "his turn", player 2 and player 3 would have certain tasks, etc. - tasks that could be accomplished at their own pace). I'm not sure if any game out there does something similar.

I guess the metaphor would be :architecture is great, but please don't forget us people in wheelchairs!

Well, Puerto Rico is kind of like that. For those of you who haven't played it, it goes like this: on her turn, each player chooses a role. That role's phase is then carried out by all the players, so if the Captain was chosen, all players get to load their goods onto the ships. However, the layer who atually chose the captain gets a bonus of one extra victory point if she loads anything at all.

Not turnless in any sense, but the turns are incredibly short and mixed together - essentially it's "okay, I load one sugar onto this boat." "Well, then I load two Corn onto this one". "Okay, now the boats are full. I choose the Builder phase and build this building here." "Then I build this building." And so on, with very little waiting.

Alexander, I don't want to avoid addressing your point, but I am not sure it's possible to create a board game that meets everyone's preferred style of play. I recognize that Catan is a famously well-designed game, for instance, but I don't have fun playing it because I'm just not great at doing side deals.

I do think the best way to design this hypothetical game would either set out explicit paths for the tokens to pass along, or somehow mandate that two players can't form a closed cycle and just rack up points by monopolizing some of the tokens. This would not only be basically good design, it would ensure that the game's speed is basically controlled by the slowest player: tokens would build up in his or her queue, and play wouldn't be able to continue until at least some of them were released. This does sort of indicate that such a design doesn't truly solve the "why do I have to wait for other players' turns" problem that gave birth to this thread, but it does break it down a bit, which was the goal to begin with.''

Kevan, did you catch my question about the theme of your timer-game? Anyone else, if we're interested in continuing with the city- or civilization-control theme, what do you think would be interesting tokens for representing areas of control? (Speaking of which, has anyone read Archer's Goon?)

I think the timer game was an abstract checkers-type thing, so it probably was just Tamsk.

Token buildup for the slowest player is good. This happens in Paper Telephone if you're playing multiple sheets at once; the slowest player accumulates a queue of unfinished sheets, which shows everyone where the bottleneck is, and encourages the slowest player to pick up the pace.

Could always try an extra rule of "if anyone has more than two tokens piled up, skip that person when passing things along" if you want to penalise or discourage slowness more harshly in-game (while also decreasing the social pressure to speed up). Would need to make sure that the game didn't break if one token is permanently out-of-action, though.

I think a city would make a neater theme than civilisation in general. For tokens - you know when you get two circles of cardboard, one on top of the other, clamped together but able to rotate independently of each other if you push them? And there's a gap in the top one to reveal something on the lower layer? How about those? No particular reason, but maybe there are different actions you can take shown on the bottom layer, you twist to reveal the one you're going to take, take that action, then pass the token along and the next player can't take the same action as you. Or something.

(I have read Archer's Goon. By that model I suppose the tokens would represent people in charge of Thing X, and you'd be asking a favour of them rather than taking an action?)

I was actually just thinking of the model in terms of civic management--electricity/gas, crime, law enforcement, transport, commerce, water, and education. I have actually been thinking of this as an exactly-five-player game, though, as it sets up four nice orthogonal routes for tokens to travel along (clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise-star, and counterclockwise-star). I guess with seven tokens you'd always have a slight oversupply, which would keep things moving if one player got stuck. But then again, you could also pare them down to four pretty easily and thereby give players time to actually observe what other people are doing.

I like the token-wheel idea! If you wanted to avoid manufacturing issues, you could even just have cards with a little lump of poster putty indicating which action you'd taken. "Take any of these actions except the one I just took" is a good mechanic.

So with that as the basic game engine, I think we need to come up with how it actually generates complexity and scores. I'm going to split this off into its own thread, so people can use this one to follow up on the other ideas presented earlier (sand timers, hot potato, simultaneous turns, etc).

One thing we've maybe overlooked here, regarding turnless games in general, is checking whether moves are legal. Booster-draft Magic and Paper Telephone both have very, very simple rules, and any accidental or malevolent abuse of them is confined to trivial things like "taking an extra card" or "not drawing a picture", which other players will spot and trace back to you.

If a game has complex rules, a turnless game is much harder to keep tabs on. Games like San Juan appreciate this - while some of its roles are simultaneous, they're always the unambiguously simple ones ("everyone draws a card, except the guy with the Viaduct, who gets two"). More complicated roles like the San Juan builder ("I discard four cards to build a Library; two less because of the Builder privilege and my Quarry, and then I get to draw a card from the Poor House") would be easy to cheat or fumble if everyone was doing their own thing, at the same time. I suppose you could work that into the game, though - allow "cheating", have a punishment for being caught, and allow players balance their time between taking their own actions, and carefully following those of other players.

Brendan: FWIW, I suck at doing side deals, yet I enjoy (and am pretty good at) Catan; I kind of disagree that they are necessary for the game at all. But I agree with your point in general - I wasn't saying "design around me." I was just saying "don't forget that there are us people with low reflexes over here that need to think things through, please remember us." You can remember us and say "okay, we will not design for you." That's totally possible. (though a card game, I feel that Jungle Speed falls into that category)

[This is not whispered since I think the points, while addressing Brendan's comments in particular, might be of greater interest?]