Game #21 The Wheel of Time by Scurra

Ye Gods..

Ok, I think I need a nap after reading the rules. First caveat on my comments is that I am mainly a consumer of middle-light games, so this sort of thing is not usually my thing.

Initial comments, more shall come when my head stops swimming. Numbered for easier rebuttal.

1) The produce Icon so looks like a Mushroom Cloud to me. And the Belsambar Icon with Arrow looks like a Cherry. Certainly not game rules related, but I thought I'd mention it.

2) It took me a while to figure out that the initial randomly placed production tiles are what that region produces. It is probably more evident in the actual game if not in the rules.

3) The StartPlayer Auction seems wierd to me. I would say just mark that 12Noon spot with a StartGame Dot or whatever above it and leave that initial Auction out. It seems that VP's are used for lots of things, and there seems to be no real long term benifit in being able to place that initial marker. That leads me slightly to..
4) There seems to be an odd relationship between all the resources (as defined by all the bits and bobs you use to do stuff, not just production ones). It seems really easy to gain citizens, but the only thing they do for you is let you make war. And even then you have to pay VP's to do it.

At one point, I was working on a design for a resource complex game, and ended up making little diagrams that helps. Each resource had a box and and each action had a Circle. Lines were drawn from resource to Action and back as appropriate. So you can see that say VP and Citizens are used to make War, War gives you Influence Tokens if you are successful, and these turn back into VP's under certain conditions, or whatever. This way you can see if there are issues with feedback loops or places where certain resources become difficult to gather.

5) I don't actually get a good visual of what the board looks like during play. I guess all the influence tokens for the Advances are color coded, and the regions too? But I don't see Region colors. I imagine the region boxes hold??? The unclaimed tokens, the claimed tokens??? The regions on the board obviously (after several read throughs) the production tokens it can produce, and ??? the citizens, temples, cities? Where do the unclaimed Advance tokens sit, off to the side?
Maybe all of this seems wierd, but I like to know how the board looks during play. At least for me that helps understand the relationships of things.

6) The adjustment tokens. Neat Idea, but I would reduce them to + and - in large font nicely colorcoded or something, instead of ve-/ve+. What does the ve stand for anyway?

Overall a neat concept. What I gather the major piece of the game is the difference between the Negative and Positive effects of various actions? It does certainly seem like a high learning curve, and almost will demand Action CheatSheets; as the number of possible actions is pretty high despite the number each turn is fairly low.
Certainly a cool concept, I'll post more as I can wrap my mind around it.

Andy

First, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say up front that I’m also working on a big-box Civ building game. While it’s quite different than this one, it’s still in a similar genre, and as such, I feel that my comments on your game won’t be as helpful as perhaps they could be. This is partly because of the “competition” aspect, but more because the game system I’ve developed is obviously the one I think works “best”, and correspondingly, suggestions I might make about improving your system would necessarily result in elements of your game moving in the direction of being like mine (if you chose to implement them), and that’s something I don’t think either of us want. So, sorry in advance if this is unhelpful…

That said, I'll start with the "off the wall" suggestion -- why not make this a game based on Jordan's Wheel of Time? While the game you've developed is probably sound (though I suspect it will get overhauled quite a bit before you consider it "done"), I think that a complete reenvisioning of the game by setting it in Jordan's world would allow you to preserve the elements of the game that "work" and yet steer in a direction that would make the game more fun, interesting, and most importantly, publishable. A good example is the "Game of Thrones" board game, which I really like. It's a good game system in its own right, yet part of the appeal, at least for me, is that it does such a nice job of evoking Martin's world. Yet, there's also a sense in which just by having the "Game of Thrones" moniker, that game's chances of publication and sales dramatically increased. And while sales may not be your main concern, the simple argument could be made that a player who's read Jordan would have an easier time getting into a game where the nations were Andor, Cairhien, Arad Doman, Tear, etc, than "the Burval Confederacy", and for players who haven't read the books, it's a parallel move at best.

How would you go about doing this? I think that rather than "gods", the players would be the major "factions" from the books -- the Aes Sedai, the Children of the Light, the Seanchan, perhaps even the Forsaken (?). That way, you could preserve the structure whereby players aren't identified with specific "countries", yet could still have a lot of room for flavor and atmosphere in the different players' abilities and goals. Or make it even simpler -- make each player an Ajah of the Aes Sedai. This could even work similar with your current "gods" -- Green Ajah = Battle, Brown Ajah = Knowledge, Grey Ajah = Politics, etc.

The "wheel" could then become exactly what Jordan envisioned it as, a cyclical view of time. Maybe every time the wheel comes around, the Dragon is reborn, and maybe the main characters could come to life once each cycle around the wheel, and do stuff, and then disappear. The opportunities for evocative flavor are mind-boggling, and frankly, I think that building a game around a known world like "Randland" would almost certainly result in a more memorable game than one in a made-up world which has simply been created as a vehicle for a single mechanic (the wheel). Right now, you're building a game around the wheel, whereas I think there's a real opportunity to incorporate the wheel organically into a broader thematic context. It would also let you focus the game a little more tightly and hopefully get the length down, which seems to be what you want.

Hey, this is a crazy suggestion, and you're free to take it or leave it. Since it is so "out there", I'll start a separate post for my comments about the game itself.

-Jeff

Now for my comments about the "actual game" instead of some pipe dream version of the game that I may be envisioning...

I wrote out some detailed comments, but I think I'll try to summarize them broadly here in the interest of brevity (which, as you know, is not my strong suit).

First, the wheel. A very cool mechanic, but I don't know if you use it to its full potential. I feel like the wheel should convey a sense of history repeating itself, whereas currently, it's a clock and an action selector rolled together. Nice, but it's functionally equivalent to a deck of cards at the moment. My proposal would be to have the negative events be truly "negative", and to have only one up per auction round. The player who gets it places their marker on that space, and it stays there. When the wheel comes around again, that player is forced to take the negative version of the action, or perhaps must pay more to avoid having to do so, etc. The idea being that the citizens are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past unless they do something special.

You could add to this an element where every time you choose a negative action, your marker moves, thus, people will occasionally have to choose negative actions so as to move their marker and avoid the wheel "catching up to them".

Another thing about the wheel, the movement system is original, but the later epochs will be shorter, which seems backwards; the main action of the game should take place when the civs are in full bloom, otherwise early fluctuations will dominate the scoring of the game (I've learned this from experience with my own game). Also, I don't know if the notion that "difference in high and low bid determines movement" is meaningful at the level of guiding people's decisions. Do you think it is? If so, how?

As for the idea that the players are gods -- this is ok, and has been done before, but it can lead to some metaphysical ambiguities in the game. That's ok if you're willing to accept some abstraction, but if you insist on theme-mechanic purity, you're going to have to do a lot of thinking. For example, resources -- who is producing them, the citizens, or the gods? (That said, changing the focus from "each player = one Civ" is certainly a novel take on the Civ building genre, and gives you opportunity for original ground)

And speaking of that, I'm very concerned about the role that VPs play in determining your actions. It could lead to two possible problems -- the "rich get richer" problem or the "why do anything?" problem. You have a resource system in the game, yet paradoxically, the players must use VPs to do everything. I guess this works at some level -- the resources are used by the "citizens", and the VPs are used by the "gods", but I wonder if the two different economies are meaningful or useful. And as Torrent noted, bidding for start player is only good as an "advanced" rule, since in the early plays people will have no idea how much it's worth bidding. (Indeed, how important is it to be start player?)

I think scoring as a turn option is not going to work. I would say that as Temples are for "non-forced actions only", scoring almost has to be "forced action only", otherwise, if you're sitting pretty, you'll choose to score every single turn, which isn't really fair.

I understand what you're going for with positive and negative actions, but right now, it's a monstrosity of complexity, because it isn't really just "7 actions, up or down", it's 14 different kinds of actions (because the negative and positive in almost every case have completely different rules associated with them). I wonder if there's a way to make the positive and negative actions more symmetric and remove all of the "special side rules" associated with each action so that it really is just 7 actions.

The advance system seems a bit dry; advances don't correspond to anything tangible. By advancing "Military", you aren't actually affecting the military status of the game, you're just moving a marker on a track (am I right?) As such, the "up/down" aspects of the advance system are interesting but not very thematic. And the different "influence" tokens for advances and regions are a huge source of confusion in your rules. You can't call them both "influence" tokens unless you always keep the labels, "region influence" or "advance influence", together with "influence".

The combat systems seems convoluted and confusing, but my guess is it's at least in part just because of the way it's written, and if you explained it to me in person, it would make sense. I feel this way about many aspects of the game, and since I'm also writing a rulebook for a big game, I understand the difficulty!

Special player powers are nice, but at the moment, I'm not sure the game really needs them. Or at least, you should first balance the game sans special powers to ensure that the engine works by itself. Trying to test the engine and the special powers together is tough (cf my Disciples thread as evidence!)

In summary, at least for the moment, let me say that I like the concept of the game. I love games with restricted action selection, and really liked the system you came up with for WarZone. I think this one will work very well too, in the end. But, I have concerns about the overuse (as I see) of VP tokens as a game element, the opportunistic nature of scoring, and the emphasis of actions in the early turns rather than late ones. I also feel that the wheel and the advance system present opportunities for originality that haven't quite been realized yet, but could be with some gentle nudging.

As for game length, I am finding that my "2 hour civ" takes about 3 hours as well, but I'm becoming more comfortable with that. A good game that is engaging throughout can justify some extra length. My big concern with your game, though, is that the use of VPs to pay for everything will in some sense prevent you from making "slow and steady progress", and as a result, it will be difficult to identify whether the winner really played the best over the 3 hours or whether it all came down to a couple of "big turns". Games where you try to "make the most money", and money is a commodity in the game (Acquire, eg), just don't have the substance to hold together as a 3 hour game. So, my gut feeling (though I could be wrong) is that the game either needs to be streamlined to 90 minutes (and that will require some gratutious hacking, I'm afraid), or the role of VPs as the main resource of the game needs to be reconsidered. Since you already have a good resource system in place, I believe you could rework the action cost system appropriately, but that's of course your prerogative.

At any rate, thanks for sharing this very ambitious and very well thought-out game. The components are beautiful, and made me want to learn how the game works, and hopefully play someday in the final form. I'm very impressed. Good luck!

-Jeff

I like the general concept of the wheel, but I am having a difficult time understanding the base structure of the game, probably due to the fact I have nothing tactile to touch and organize as I read. You little intro page seems, to me t o explain the game so much better than the official rules. I wonder if there's a way to flush that out more.

What does the player own? It appears that citizens are shared amongst everyone. Is that true? Do players have their own influence counters?

At the start of a round, is there no tokens in any of the 7 advance tracks? WHen you put your token in that track, where does it start?

I'm so confused, even though I really want to understand it. What might be helpful is some sort of quick overveiw of how the game works, and what the goal of the game is (The player with the most VP wins. VP are obtained in many ways, including placement of player influence tokens, building cities and temples, etc.)

Is this really true? I believe that the turn sequence is simple enough, and I think you explained it pretty well. But the actions themselves...you have 14 different actions, each of which has several subordinate actions. Does it really become "instantly obvious"? Would the other playtesters say that it did?

In some sense, it doesn't matter. For a 3 hour civ game with a lot of rules, I think one needs to have some tolerance for a little bit of complexity, and expect that there will be a learning curve, and this is fine. What I'm afraid of, though, is that you're perhaps trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. For example, you said that you skimped on the rules a bit because the length was already daunting. First, a 6 page rulebook is not that bad (really!), but more importantly, you just can't do that. Take Mare Nostrum as a case in point. People got excited about a Civ game with 4 pages of rules, yet in the end, the overwhelming consensus was that the rulebook should have been twice as long; that it had sacrificed clarity in the interest of brevity. And I sort of feel the same way about the gameplay itself here. It's ok if the game doesn't become "instantly obvious the first time you play." Call me a skeptic, but I just can't believe that a game with 14 actions can be internalized quickly, and my fear is that while you may be going for a game that is "quickly internalized", you may not in fact have one.

Of course, we are just looking at the rules, and I'm sure having you explain them to us, with the game in front of us, would help a lot. And there really doesn't seem to be all that much going on in the game. Yet, at the same time, it seems that the actions have enough detail and subtlety that I would just have to think there's going to be a learning curve. And that's perfectly ok, I think it's just a reality of the game. I could be wrong, of course...

Also note that you scale alot of your prices (Cities is what comes to mind) based on the Epoch. And with the fewer actions in later epochs, the number of VP's stocked up (I think...) will diminish or atleast not grow as large as expected.

As for my suggestion to have a secondary resource, I don't expect it would be represented by bits. I would think it would be a track of some sort, numbered with markers per player.

On the graphics/Board perspective. I know you said that the advances boxes have plenty of space for the influence markers, I would still suggest having a dedicated circle/box/whatever for them. This might help the questions about putting influence into the track (which I admit I thought too the first read through)

With the regions there are essentially two representations of them. One in the group of boxes and one on the map. I assume the boxes is for the influence and crown markers and the map for production/cities/citizens. With all those little markers, the names will get obscured (especially in the citystate). Especially for early plays the Names (and symbols you mentioned) are all that allows you to coorespond the box to the map. I don't exaclty have a good suggestion. Maybe remove the boxes, enlarge the map, have nice distint borders on the regions, and pile the stuff in the map. If the markers were thin-ish disks they might stack nicely.

Andy

Maybe people have a lot more patience or a knack of reading the rules and understanding things, but I had a difficulty really getting a feel for the game by reading the rules.

I would like to comment, but there is just so much stuff to digest. Can I make a couple of suggestions?

A picture showing how everything is set up (where the tokens go and cards) would be a great help.

Another really helpful element is by having maybe a page showing a fictious game where players are playing (a big example of how it is played). This would greatly help in understanding how the game is played.

I understand you did provide an overview, but maybe you can include it in the actual rules.

Right now it is way too much for me.

--DarkDream