Hey gang. Recently I've been toying with the idea of using real time as a resource in games. One example of this that I'm aware of is Galaxy Trucker, where players are racing against each other in real time to assemble a starship from a pool of face down tiles. Players can only grab one tile at a time, so most of the building phase is spent madly grabbing for tiles to find the pieces you need. However, there is one other action that is available to players. During the building phase, players can take time to look at the face down stacks of cards which will determine many of the obstacles their ship will have to navigate. Thus, players can choose to "spend" part of their build time to get information that will help them determine how they need to build their ships. This got me wondering how else real time might be able to be spent.
What if players could start a 30 second timer, during which they could take no action, but at the end of which they were allowed to draw a tile from a separate pool of very powerful tiles? Or, what if they could sit out for one timer cycle in order to be able to draw two tiles at a time for the rest of the round? What about "spending" a cycle to increase the power of all of one type of tile on their ship?
I've also been trying to brainstorm different tasks which would be interesting when put "on the clock". So far I've come up with building something (like Galaxy Trucker), solving a puzzle, completing some type of solitaire mini-game and rolling dice until you reach a certain outcome. I know Space Cadets has some interesting timed mini-games, but I've never played it to get a sense of how fun and repeatable they actually are. I've also considered including more than one of these tasks in order to force players to choose how to "spend" their real-time resource.
I think there are some interesting possibilities here, but given that I haven't had much of a chance to test this mechanic, I'm curious about your thoughts. Here are a few questions I'd love to have feedback on:
- Does using real time as a resource seem interesting/fun?
- Would giving players the option to choose to sit out create a negative play experience?
- How long is too long? If the reward was balanced, would you sit out of a real time game for 15, 30 or 60 seconds?
- How would your feelings about real time as a resource change if the round were a fixed duration (say 3 minutes), versus a round where the duration is limited by the pace of other players? (as in Galaxy Trucker, where any player chooses to start a timer, after which the round ends)
- What other types of tasks would be interesting to "put on the clock" in a game using this mechanic?
- Are there other games I'm not aware of which use similar mechanics?
Thanks as always for your feedback and insight!
I like your comment about substituting vs stopping. I think that might be the key to move forward. I'm wrestling a bit with the idea of slowing though. I'm just not sure how to implement that without forcing players into tedious or pointless activity. If we stick with the Galaxy Trucker example, I can't think of a meaningful way to cause players to slow down when building their ships that doesn't feel tacked on. Maybe I'm just not giving the problem enough thought. I might think more about the substituting idea and using some of the alternate activities I mentioned in the original post. With the right set of activities to choose between, this could lead to some interesting player choices.