This is a playtest report for my Game Design Workshop game, The Sands of Time. The latest rulebook is here
We had a smaller turnout than in the past at our Albany “Playfest” yesterday, but it gave us more time to explore the various games. As I had hoped, I was able to put “Sands” on the table, and so after a rules explanation over pizza, we plunged into a 4 player game.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints (ie, the game is looong), we only got through 4 turns, and when the historian emerged in that turn, none of us had actually recorded any chronicles, so there was no scoring to report here. We all clustered around the med, leaving Asia wide open for expansion, and I think it was likely that myself and/or Tom were well-positioned to capitalize on that had the game lasted longer. Each of us built a city, but none had, at the game end, any markets. Gil moved into Mike’s Sicilia with an intent of building a market, but Mike chose to militarily expel Gil from the territory so as to pick up a couple of political achievement tokens that one of the Achievement Cards awarded.
Overall, it’s actually hard to say much about the session in a narrative chronicling who did what. We all took the kinds of actions that the game allows -- building, producing, expanding, etc, but it was just too early in the game for us to have differentiated ourselves from one another very much. For myself, a couple of the tough decisions I faced and found satisfying:
-- At one point, I needed to add another territory to make room for more citizens, but doing so would increase my costs for reducing Unrest, and as I was gold-poor, this was a tough choice.
-- In order to gain an advance I needed in the present turn, I needed to convert a territory to a city, but as I already had one city, a 2nd city was going to cut my production long term.
Basically, the point I’m at design-wise is deciding whether to implement the revised action selection mechanic I discussed the other day. The gist of it is that the city/market/diamond rules would be removed, and actions would be selected by paying an Achievement token in the category of the action you wish to take (eg, Build would be a “Civic” action), with the caveat that to reuse a Prefect in a given game turn, you must pay an additional token for each time that you’ve already used that Prefect this turn. The other big change would be that buildings produce achievement tokens every turn, rather than at the time of building only.
I think this will make the game more strategic, since the buildings you build will guide the kinds of actions you’ll be taking. And, I think there will be an enhanced incentive for militarism, since acquiring territories with production abilities can be very useful.
The one thing that the game will lose is the cooperative nature of the cities/markets mechanic. I think that I’ll reword cities to be such that a Territory with as many buildings as its capacity is a city, and it pays out VPs according to some schedule (maybe capacity of the territory). Perhaps, in addition, you, and other players in the city, will get VPs each historian phase; it would make city-building a primary VP mechanism, which I suppose is appropriate thematically.
Overall, I felt that the session went well; the game was fun to play, and the other players seemed to pick it up pretty quickly. So, in that sense, it was a success! This game, due to its length, is tough to test, but I hope to get it onto the table again soon to try out the alternative action selection mechanic.
-Jeff
I think it lasted in the vicinity of 90 minutes. We probably had a good 2 hours or more to go to finish. I think that inexperience was a factor, but surprisingly, there were quite a few times when people were surprised by how quickly their turn came up again, and weren’t prepared to act. So I think the game can be played quickly, but it will take a committment to heads-up, aggressive play on the part of the players. Casual play will make the game longer.
Another observation I’ll make is that in this session, I never intended for us to play more than to the first scoring round. When 4 designers get together, it would have been most unfair of me to hog all the time with a long game like this, so we were going to stop at that point regardless of the time investment it took...
It’s not as thematic as the current rule; obviously, if my citizens are producing, it makes sense that they can’t turn around and build. But my concern is that the current rules, while thematically good, are mechanically too restrictive; you just don’t have enough actions to get up and running quickly enough. That, and that buildings currently are too transient a commodity. This rule change solves both of those problems at once, though you’re quite right that it’s thematically flimsy. There may be a hybrid of the two systems that would be possible.
The alternative would be to do away with the cost increasing mechanic, but what you’d have then is basically 9 different prefects. One of the things I am very pleased with about the prefect system is the “this or that” nature of decision making. The “increasing cost” changes that a bit, but still keeps some of the flavor.
The action payment mechanic is really meant more to solve the “tightness” problem than the game length problem. To be honest, I’m not yet convinced there is a game length problem. I think that 5 experienced players could easily set up and play a game in 3 hours. Obviously, playtests need to prove this out, but I hope Gil, Tom, or Mike could corroborate the observation that the turns themselves are short and punchy. If people are committed to playing quickly, the game can be played in a short time (relatively speaking, of course...).
I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to make it shorter without hacking stuff out, and it’s already been pretty whittled down at this point. I think now it’s in the players’ hands as to how fast it can be played. I do think that it’s going to be a substantive 3 hours, with almost zero downtime, so it hopefully justifies its length, but people who don’t like 3 hour games may not really like the game. Although, the typical "German games fan" probably isn't the target audience for this one so much as fans of big-scope 8 hour games who only have 3 hours available...
-Jeff