I have playtested today my fallen kingdom game and there is a bug where the game becomes repetitive. Not only my game have that bug, all other games that looks like mine that I got inspired from (Britania and Vinci) also have that sort of repetitive boring situation where you invade to kick people out to eventually decline and invade again.
So I was wondering what could prevent my game from being repetitive and promote a bit more of long term strategy considering that I want a political map that changes every turn.
Soime ideas
Solution A: make some rules or objectives change with the passage of time due to the evolution of the people's culture.
Solution B: Have a climax at the end of the game.
Any suggestions?
First comments to your comments:
This is the core of the game. It's the concept of always kicking people out an comming in that becomes repetitive.
Or perhaps have turn marker that says that after 30 turns the game ends.
Or - if it's even possible - add random events (like drawing event cards) in the middle of these waves.
I already have random event cards, still they are not used at their full potential. And there is also an adjustable turn limit.
wouldn't it be interesting if the first "waves" were military, but as society progressed, the next waves would be cultural invasions -- not fighting, but art and language and maybe diplomacy
Seems interesting, it has some similarities with the new idea I'll explain below.
So, perhaps the easy solution is to make your game a little shorter and everything will be fine. You could try and incorporate a semi-random ending trigger to make the last few turns a bit more exciting.
This is a solution that was proposed, but not by limiting the number of turns, rather by speeding up everyturn. I think I can manage to simplify a few things. (in the last playtest, we did not manage to play a lot of turns)
Now the new idea I got is technology. Players can spend ressource/time to develop a technology. Developping a technology gives you points at the end of the game but it gives a special ability to all players. So as technology get's developped, all the rules of the game changes. So it could be a way to prevent repeativeness since the rules are not the same.
In was thinking in having 3 ways to score points: Military conquest or surrender, technology and something else related to city controling. Then each of these categories has a limited number of awards. When all the awards of a certain type are given, each other types of awards are doubled.
OK, I have explained badly. For example, let say all the conquest trophies are exausted, the next time a player develop a technology, he will develop 2 technology instead which also double his scoring. So this have the situation where a simple move can dramatically increase the number of points you get and it speed up the game really fast to make it end.
The only problem I have right now with this mechanic is that all awards seems to be distributed evenly everyturn, which mean no award will get depleted before the others. The second problems is I don't know if the number of awards should be adjusted with the number of players ( ex: 3P=9, 4P=12, 5P=15 trophies and technologies) or if should be fixed ( 10 trophies and technologies).
The idea behind 3 way to score is to get 3 path to victory.