Game #55: The Sands of Time by Jeff Warrender

Just to save you some thinking about at least one issue, I'm likely to not use a programmed caravan as a first pass. For now, I'm going to go with "if the caravan is in a space you control, you must move it", and probably an extra (fiddly) rule that it can't go into a space it was just in. However, you've come up with a lot of good ideas, so certainly I'll keep thinking about it, but for now, it seems perhaps a bit too complex; just having each player move it is easier, though not necessarily better.

Had another thought about trading. How about, there are 5 bins on the caravan, one for each type of item that can be sold: a Resource, Chronicle cards, Achievement tokens, Advances, and Structures. BUT, the caravan can only hold one of each at any given time. So, if you really want to sell your Chronicle card, you may need to buy the one that's already there.

There's another concern I have, and it's this: a player who wants to sell one of his Advances can just keep selling the same advance over and over. Since Advance ownership is conferred via holding that card, doing so could deplete the Advance decks artificially.

Maybe instead, the "FIFO" model is indeed a good one. Something must be placed on passed-over items to sweeten them up a bit. My thinking was that whenever an item is bought, if it isn't in the first slot, all items to the left (ie, that were placed earlier) get a "caravan token" placed on them.

The "caravan tokens" also are received:
(a) when the caravan enters a City, everyone present gets one.
(b) when you sell an Advance or Structure, you get one.

Caravan tokens represent the recognition that your culture is becoming diffused through the known world. There would be a corresponding Chronicle card that would reward you based on your caravan tokens.

The nice thing about this caravan system is that it's pretty self-contained. It feels like an expansion to me, but for now, I'll probably make it part of the game and leave it as such until it either doesn't work or a publisher tells me to drop it out...

Thanks for continuing to help brainstorm with this!

-Jeff

The latest and greatest version of the rulebook is here, for anyone interested in such things.

The major changes are the addition of the caravan system, and the removal of upgrade costs for actions -- no diamond tokens, no paying achievement tokens, nothing. If you want to use a prefect's ability several times, go for it, as long as you can pay for it (but, you can still only use 3 prefects per turn).

I'm contemplating a "guided setup" for a short version of the game. I had some fun toying around with combos of advances and structures that would go along with various "historic" empires. Probably something I'll keep working on, as it would make the game more accessible for new players. Another idea is to give each player 10 "setup points" at the start, and allow players to buy stuff, with an Advance card costing (maybe) 5 setup points, a Structure costing 3 setup points, or whatever. So, you'd still start with a few "powerups", but you'd still have creative control over it. It would be a shorter version of the game for semi-experienced players.

I have all of the components to the game here on the site available for download; just drop me a PM if you want to see any of the other files!

-Jeff

Sorry, bad link. Try this one.

Thanks,

Jeff

Thanks for checking it out!

It figures that I'd have mistakes in the bloody thing, since I've been over it with a fine-toothed comb every day for the last week making sure it was correct (I burned it onto a CD from a computer I'll no longer have access to, so edits are going to be a pain till I can get my own copy of Word). It just proves that you need another set of eyes to see some things!

These 3 bullet points are themselves the phases. I should add a line "Each game turns consists of the following phases."

Round, turn, phase. These are very hard to keep straight when describing a game's rules! Here's how I think of it: Each "Game Turn" features 3 Phases. During "Phase 2", there will be three "Rounds", during each Round each player will get one "Turn".

Right, the ambiguity is that I'm using the terms "Turn" and "Game Turn" to mean two different things, and that's obviously sub optimal and confusing. I'll think about it some more.

They're still in there; the detailed combat algorithm is now tucked away on page 6, in a section called "Combat".

Hope this clears everything up. Thanks again for taking the time to read through in such detail!

Best,

Jeff

Ah, I see the question now. Yes, you definitely would discard the tokens used in combat. I guess I didn't spell this out explicitly. (When you asked "are they lost or retained?", I thought you were talking about the rules associated with adding tokens to combat, as in "are those rules still in this version?")

Thanks,

Jeff

In case anyone is interested, I've whipped up some illustrated examples for the game, which can be found here. I also made a schematic of what the game will look like when it's all set up, and that can be found here. For anyone interested in reading the rules, these will likely be very helpful at clarifying the rulebook.

-Jeff