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Andrea Chiarvesio
Italy
Torino
Piemonte
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If you're familiar with my designs, you may have noticed that I make an extensive use of tracks.
I find them easy to understand and visually clear.
Coming back to the whole cubes and the bag thing (remember: cubes are basic skills of our tribe), how do we represent tribes increasing in their efficiency of doing things, and specializing? By having them gaining new cubes.
A smart and efficient way to represent that was to link a simple track to each of the six basic skills:
- warfare
- movement
- trade/economy
- building
- population growth
- knowledge
plus, we have waste and corruption that is indeed not that much of a skill, so let keep grey cubes aside for now.
Each tribe has a track for each of the six skills. Track goes from 0 to 6, and during setup each player can choose one of the skills and have it starting at rank 3, another at rank 2 and a third one starting at 1.
By using a basic technology that is called "development", a player can raise two different tracks by one square each.
If a track has reached level 4, the player can choose to bring it back to 0, and add a new cube of the corresponding color to his bag immediately.
If the player waits until the track reaches level 6, he can bring it back to 0 and gain 2 cubes.
Right now tracks end at square 6, but we may have plans to change that in the future.
Actually, setting those 4/6 levels was not easy. The bargain "2 cubes for 6 instead of 1 cube for 4" looks indeed so tempty. And, extra cubes also are worth VP at the end of the game, so why a smart player should not always wait until a track has reached level 6?
Two reasons, effecting both timing and efficient gameplay:
1) sometimes it's really crucial to have that extra cube now, instead of waiting 1 or more often even 2 full turns before getting it. Even with many players, the game usually don't last more than 5-6 full turns. An extra cube gained in turn 2 will be used immediately and in the four consequent turns. Two cubes gained in turn 4 will be used immediately and in the two next turns. You can see that that single cube is used 5 times, and the two cubes are used 3 times each for a total of 6. Things starts to look more even. End there is also reason #2
2) it's not always useful to have too many cubes in a single color. Maybe you're anxiously waiting for that single green cube to move your people around and you keep on drawing all those orange cubes from your bag, losing momentum and wasting opportunities to expand to new hexagones. Or maybe you are planning to launch an attack and you long for a red cube, but all you get are blue and purple cubes...
Bringing the "2 cubes" score at rank 7 (we tried that in several playtests) was making the 7 ranks for 2 cubes a very poor deal. 6 ranks for 2 cubes seems to work good with some strategies and 4 ranks for 1 cube works better with other strategies, and this is the results we wanted to acheive.
I am sure that after the game will eventually be published, there will be two sides: the aggressive players that never wait for rank 6 and the players looking for the extra flexibility and power in the late game that will disdain the poor ratio exchange at rank 4.
This kind of remind me of a beautiful trading card game published by a company I used to work for, where there are "early beatdown" strategy and slower "control" strategy decks... it looks like a winning design choice, after all, so why not learn the lessons from the best?
*** Edit: since this may be an obscure reference to some readers: I am hinting to Magic: the Gathering here ***
I really like when design finding this kind of "resonances" between my games and games I love. After all, no one takes game mechanics and ideas out of nowhere and the creative process is often improved by knowledge of what was done in the past, especially what proved to work very well can really be a good source of inspiration, or at least a goal to look at.
Next time, a few basic concept about the maps and the hexagons and then we can really start focusing on how the game works.
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