So I’m doing one that’s a full explanation, but it’s like 15 minutes of a lot of talking, so I’m gonna try for a shorter one that doesn’t explain all the fiddly stuff but shows how it plays out more. I figure that’s more conducive to video.
OK well I was wrong when I said “like 15 minutes of a lot of talking,” all of my previous efforts were at least 30+ minutes.
This is how far I managed to condense it, clocking in at just under 15 minutes. So, as requested, a tutorial vid:
Tomorrow I’m probably gonna add some subtitles here and there to pick up some things I think I missed or covered poorly. Maybe chapter markers or a timing guide so you can skip to the relevant rules sections.
It’s a start, at least!
I’ve also been thinking about potential rethemes should I decide to keep pursuing this project farther to point of “real” development, and I think this would work well as a game set in the Age of Sail. Agents of the Dutch East India Company? Rival trading companies maybe? Warships and merchant vessels and letters of marque and spymasters and shit.
It also occurs to me that there are 6 factions in this game, and 6 Chambers of the VOC specifically, so it could literally be a game about infighting among the Dutch East India Company. Less boring than yet another 4X space game, that’s for sure.
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I mean yeah, that’s partly what got me thinking about it.
I maintain it’s less basic bitch than space.
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I guess I’m just in the crazy board gaming space where both of them seem equally basic.
Besides, that’s the British East India Company, not the Dutch East India Company. Include some soused herring with every game to complete the immersion.
I really liked the video, and definitely helped contextualize a lot of what was being discussed.
I really like what seems like the pace of it. A lot of elements I enjoy from the games you draw inspiration from, without some of the bullshit elements of those same games.
And I’d definitely be on board for a Dutch East India take on it.
I’d also be up for a Viking one, with different kingdoms or groups to choose from. Can have longships!
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Yeah, I also thought about Vikings. The Thyng is a perfect analogue for the Impulse. If I wanted to be cheeky I could probably make it Egil’s saga specifically, as there’s an entire section of him warring against Eirik Bloodaxe.
Or literally just the entire politics of the Icelandic Commonwealth from 940 CE onward - you represent the goðar of each of the four quarters, or the fifth quarter that Njal created, or the Lawspeaker. You have Þingmen and hersirs (Cruisers and Transports), collect oaths (Plan), debts (Minerals), and temples (Techs), and try to outmaneuver everyone at Þingvǫllr (the center) every year duing the Althing (the Impulse).
The Bronze Age Collapse could be fun too. There was just talk in discord about how nobody depicts The Sea Peoples in games.
I think I’ll keep prospective themes in mind for future development. The basic turn structure skeleton can apply to just about any real-world inter-factional political situation, but the nuts and bolts of Techs, action balance, and so on should be driven by theme IMO.
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Bronze Age Collapse would be super cool, the marketability might be limited, but among the core demographic of board game players there’s probably a big enough overlap.
But with your knowledge of Viking world stuff I’d be really curious about how deep you could embed the themes as you’re describing and I feel like it would be really fun to play (and market!)
So I talked to @no_fun_girl about this today and they were similarly excited, so I was inspired enough to actually draw up a plan for what this would look like. I’m calling it On the Road to Þingvǫllr.
I’ll be testing the ideas using the current bland space-based 4X game as leverage, but there are some key ideas central to early medieval Iceland that I think I would be incorporating: compensation, murder, and gift-giving.
-combat is fought and resolved by paying compensation - in early medieval Iceland, killings were lawful if they were announced and if the killer (or their patron) paid the life-price of the dead. In game terms, I think I can model this by having you literally hand Wealth (probably what Minerals are currently) to the person whose thingmenn you intend to kill. There’s no question, you just pay the compensation and the killing happens, but your opponent gets richer out of it. This would take combat firmly out of the realm of random chance and squarely into “you can kill as much as you can afford to.” You get points for lawful killings.
-an unlawful killing is a murder, and murder is a strict no-no. In the Commonwealth, this would be punishable by outlawry (you lose all rights to property and protection under the law, and your death need not be compensated) - in game terms, I think I would have it work in place of Sabotage and function like compensation, except instead you discard Oaths (cards in your Plan) or lose victory points to do it. Murder destroys units and lets you steal wealth, but does not get you points. You can also murder the people who manage a farm (occupy a sector) during a feud (combat), but it doesn’t get you points directly and costs you.
-gift-giving would take the place of Refine and would also be available as a default occurrence - you give Wealth to other players to get boatloads of points, but of course, they then have that Wealth available for their own use or to destroy you. You can do it through an action card, or by having thingmenn at Thing.
Basically, I can totally represent the incredibly intricate network of feud and economic exchange in early medieval Iceland with about 80% of what I already have, and slight modifications to the rest could take it all the way there.
Instead of Techs, you’d have Hirð, specific people who help you out. I think the first two levels would be semi-generic, but for maximum flavor, the size 3 (the unique ones) could all be very specific figures in the Icelandic sagas. Snegglu-Halli and Egil Skallagrimson, anyone?
I think I’m actually kind of uniquely situated to pull this off with authority.
I’d also probably remove the voting mechanic in this version, since I have like 3 other methods of direct interactivity, but we’ll see.
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These all sound like fun interactions, and turning the killing into just “part of business” is interesting as a historical detail and mechanism for the game, while murder is like extra bad.
Also the gift-giving as a sort of basic action and cornerstone of prestige and economy seems very-much on point.
I certainly like spacey settings but it all quickly becomes a bit wobbly in made-up physics and wacky creatures; if that makes any sense. Meanwhile the historical approach is very much a point of interest and ever-compelling.
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Sure, and I’m a sucker for that shit. But for real, there’s a lot of it and while I’m more than happy to eat trash with both hands, I figure if I’m playing with game design, might as well practice doing something different.
Like every Viking game out there is all longships and killing (or the gods), so presenting the historically-accurate political maneuvering strikes me as both compelling and necessary.
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Well that came together faster than I expected.
I still want to update the size 2 “techs” with unique names for the rest of the abilities - right now I’ve got characters for half of them, but honestly, I can easily find specifics for the rest.
I plan on writing a rulebook (when I get this all finalized) that’s a combination of rules and history. Like, “here’s all the Njal’s saga characters and how they fit together” sorts of stuff.
This is really a much more coherent theme than I thought it’d be, and the mechanics flow pretty directly from the theme. I really only had to change a handful of things and tinker with some tech powers to make it work.
Maybe I was always making this game and only realized it now.
EDIT: Finished assigning characters to actions. This version contains 52 named saga characters. That flowed faster than I thought, and they all fit reasonably well with their abilities. At least, most are clear fits, and a few take one or two turns to get there, but nobody really takes a leap or stretch.
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So anyway after puttering and math and a couple of self-playtests, I’m heading in a new direction that I think is better overall. Right now, I’ve got one new major thing and one thing I learned tonight.
Parallel Play
-Voting mode is interactive and lets you take actions that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to (i.e. play any card from your hand), but obviously it’s tougher with two players and it adds a lot of stuff to the game. So instead, I’ve used a non-voting method to test the rest of the game actions:
- On your turn you can Develop the Chamber if you want, and then you pick an action from the Chamber and do it
- You gain a bonus to the Chamber action equal to the number of gates around the center that you patrol - so if you patrol two gates around the center, the action you pick is at +2
This replaces the support you’d get for your choice due to voting, and also encourages players to focus their attention around the center of the map, which is definitely something I want. It creates a setting that is ripe for conflict.
I also like that gate patrolling thing in general, so if voting isn’t too clunky for the main game (which it may well be), I’ll probably add a modifier to Dissent to say it gets stronger with patrolled gates.
The main reason for this, I mean other than some fun mechanics, is that this is how it actually worked in the Icelandic Commonwealth - godi would take thingmen with them to support them and literally vote on laws, so this is a great way to have the mechanics emanate directly from the theme I want to eventually move to.
More Flexible Development
The biggest flaw I found tonight is that, despite having fixed the card draw problem, the way Development works still meant that you could still get pretty firmly stuck not being able to change your state. The 1-2-3 in the same color just doesn’t work out well in practice.
So, a simple modification: Development costs 1 action to go up by 1, and 1 additional action if you change color when you do so. Going down is 1 action no matter how far or changing color.
This should remove the blockage while still making development paths mean something.
So, in theory, with 5 actions, you could start from a size 0 and get to size 3 by changing color twice instead of needing a specific sequence of cards. If you do have the specific sequence, you can be way more efficient.
There are other things I’m poking at but those two things are the big structural changes.
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Tonight’s self-playtest went well! A 4-player game took 2ish hours including setup and me being indecisive, posturing, and making notes as I go along. I want to cut that play time in half (ideally 15 - 20 minutes per player), which might mean making the flow more efficient, or maybe just dropping from 30 points for victory to 20 or something - I just need to make sure that the final score allows for a satisfying game.
The change to Development helped a whole bunch. The Techs and Sectors wound up being developed and used as much as I intended. Good sign that works.
Some actions got passed over or were used mostly to start chains of other actions, and I think that’s OK? Not every path needs to be the hotness every game. I wound up almost never using the Plan action itself to add cards to my Plan - the pace of developing the Chamber was sufficient there. Might get more useful after I screw around with color distribution and such.
Trade needs help still, I think, but it’s hard to say if that’s just because I was never in a position to power it up, or if it’s truly a less attractive option.
One thing I noticed is that we got into a glut of Elements - a bunch of hoarding of high-value cards meant that the game slowed down. Cards wouldn’t leave there fast enough. In theory that’s what Delivering MInerals should accomplish, but it’s too hard to pull off as written (because if the center is locked down you can’t do it).
I thought of a variant way to do that in Thingvellir - whenever your Freighters/Stewards end their move on the center, every Freighter/Steward on there can sell (discard) one Element/Wealth for one point each. Not the most efficient way to get points, but in a race to victory, getting points right the hell now is a big deal. I’ll play around with that and see how it affects flow.
I’m not sure if it’s too easy to eliminate a player or not. In my game, White very nearly won by getting to 27 points after two consecutive high-value plays. That part felt right - the almost winning, and the buildup and shenanigans to get there. They were stretched thin to do it though, so the next 3 players in turn were able to push themselves out there and eliminate every White ship from the map before they could act again. It’s kind of a fun narrative - someone got close to winning, the rest of the gang coordinated to destroy them, then turned on each other and destroyed the rest of the galaxy.
It felt right, and very 4X.
Neat, but is it what I want? Do I want the story of trying so hard and getting so far but in the end not even mattering? Or should White’s single 12-point play that took them from 15 to 27 points have ended the game?
I think that’s a question that only playtesters can answer.
I think I’m on to something here, though. We’ll see.
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After some more self-playtests I think the answer, at least when everyone takes individual turns, is to stop at 20 points. Pretty sure it’d play out differently if we were all voting, but that might just be a matter of variants.
I think I’m about ready to pack up Pulsars 'n Politics and call it “done enough.” The series of modifications have led to a game that is stable and reaches a consistent end intentionally, and I’m no longer interested in pursuing the theme far enough to make it into a better game. My goal was to make Impulse less bad, and after the most recent couple of rounds, I think I can comfortably say I’ve done that, at least to my tastes. I’ll probably solicit some playtests of what I consider the “final” version, and maybe down the road slap together a more “final” design using open-source artwork. I could see keeping it around for when I feel like playing generic pew pew space trash.
From here, I’m going to take this game and continue developing it into Road to Thingvellir, which is a game I am actually interested in developing into something better. I’ve been using PnP cards to test prospective rules, but will need to make a separate set of assets for that game because I’ve changed stuff like color balance and what not. At some point I’ll be starting a new thread for that, linking it from here, and once I’ve fully wrapped up PnP, I’ll be shutting this one down.
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And then today some random BGG user DM’s me to say they thought this game was cool and they’re planning to print it.
lawl
Maybe I will actually get back to finalizing this with some art or something. I’ve been so deep in Iceland that this honestly seems quaint in comparison, but hey if someone out there is into it, I guess that’s technically a game design win?
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Most of my goal here was to put my design ideas into components from my likely manufacturer - increasingly, as I look at the logistics of design and publication in the tabletop industry, I think I’m going to be going with a print-on-demand storefront through The Game Crafter. Margins are small but honestly, I have a day job and don’t want to do the work to try to get lucky enough to land on something that’s a smash hit.
So this was me testing out their components and putting my ideas into the real, and hey! Not too bad for a first go! I need to do some adjusting of text and icon overlays going forward, and I definitely need to be picky about component materials, but it’s a fully-functional prototype of an actual game I actually made. I’ll call it a win for now. 
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