Time Traveling Board Game, pt. 1

During my commute home today an idea came to me. It's probably nothing unique in the sea of game concepts out there, but I thought I'd explore it nonetheless. I basically want to be able to express the concept of time travel in a board game. I also want this to be simple and (hopefully) elegant enough that people can play it without the aid of a computer to manage timestreams and paradox. This is a thought process in motion, so there are bound to be some contradictions and changes of mind as things progress.

The idea is to take a simple 2d board game that's played on a grid, and extrapolate the 2d plane into a 3rd dimension of time slices. Each slice would be a duplicate board representing different states of the board as time progresses.

My first inclination was to apply this to chess. I thought of making 3d chess where the 3rd D was time instead of vertically stacked boards. I thought this might be a semantic issue, and that the vertical slices could represent time, but then a few things stuck out in my head.

First, every piece would have to be present in every slice, barring its death in an earlier timeslice. Secondly I wanted to account for branching in timelines, so a simple stack of boards wouldn't be enough. I eventually decided against using chess as a starting point, since it's already a complex game and the flatspace game mechanics should probably be as simple as possible before extracting things into the 4th (3rd?) dimension.

The Base Game
The base game I'm starting with is a super simple move/capture game. The board will be 4 x4 and each player will have 4 pieces. Each piece will do the exact same thing. The move set will include moving either 1 or 2 spaces or capturing an adjacent enemy piece. That's it for now.

Each piece in the set will also look different from the others so you can keep track of who is who when they travel through time, due to some restrictions I'll cover in a minute. There will be one black set of pieces and one white set. The pieces will be a triangle, square, circle and hexagon. One side will have a red X. This will be used to show which time slices a piece has been captured on.

Time Traveling Complications
The next step is to apply time travel rules on top of the basic rules. These simple moves can then be extended through time so a piece can move 1 or 2 (maybe just 1) spaces forward or backwards in time, or capture a piece in the same spot in an adjacent timeslice. I chose the simple route because I tried to imagine how to extrapolate the concept of 'diagonal' or 'L-shaped' moves from chess into a time travelling mechanic.

Forking
The game will feature 'forking', or splits in the timeline. A player can go back to any timeslice and choose to make a different move than one he executed, as long as the timeslice was one in which it was his turn. This will create a parallel board to the following timeslice where the alternate move was made.

There will have to be some markers of some sort that denote whose turn a timeslice represents and which directions the forks come from. There will also probably need to be some cap on the maximum number of parallel timelines to keep the game from getting out of hand, both conceptually and from a materials standpoint. There might also need to be a way for players to remove boards from play. Perhaps a player can, as his turn, remove the endmost board from a timeline where it was his turn, basically 'undoing' a move.

Another concept I had might render this pruning mechanic unnecessary, though. As time progresses, older slices of time will fall off the tree. My first thought is 4 timeslices for each player, so a timeline with a maximum of 8 boards in length. As soon as a player makes a move at the far end of the timeline, the earliest slice will be removed and all the boards will be slid backwards.

Time Travel
The game will also feature pieces that can travel through time. This part is a little trickier than forking, due to cause and effect relationships. If piece A travels back in time one step, then there will be 2 copies of A in that timeslice. This would make the next timeslice have 2 copies of A as well, since they would persist through time. The player could probably repeat this process ad infinitum until he had a whole board full of copies of one piece. This means that special restrictions probably have to be applied.

Moving Forward
My next step is to begin testing some of these first, basic ideas and see what happens. The time travel part in particular will probably have to undergo a rapidfire series of iterative playtests to see what's even in the realm of feasibility, then what subset of that is actually fun. More posts as progress is made.

Pac Man on paper, pt 1.

When I went to the GDC earlier this year, I got to attend the 2 day game design seminar during the tutorial sessions. One of the cool exercises we did was to replicate an existing digital game with a paper game of some sort, be it card, board, whatever. The idea was not to simulate said game, but to analyze the aesthetic of the game and strive to capture it through the mechanics of the paper game. Another takeaway was the concept of prototyping rapidly, iterating as fast as possible and playing with the game as soon as you had anything that could be considered functional. The idea was that you'd find out what was fun or not earlier and 'follow the fun', culling out useless rules and paring your design down to a lean machine.

The team I was on worked on a Mario Kart 'port'. I thought it was pretty successful and will probably post the details of it here at some point. After I got home, I started working on Pac Man. The first thing that sprang to mind was the flow of the game. The whole premise is this tenuous balance of managing your distance from the ghosts while eating as many pellets as possible. The more pellets you eat, the emptier the board. The ghosts on the other hand are trying to corner Pac-Man, but are also each trying to be the one to score the kill.

The design I came up with is a 4 player board game with 4 tracks, each radiating from a center point. Pac-Man is at the center since the whole world is relative to his position anyway. The bottom track represents the pellets in the maze. The other 3 are for the ghosts. I could have made 4 ghosts and may still, depending on balance issues. This is a preliminary design, and hasn't been tested enough to make anything final yet.

The Board
Each ghost starts at the end of his (or her) respective track, and the bottom track is filled with pellet cards randomly drawn from a stack. The stack will exclude blank pellet cards at first. Pac-Man's goal is to eat all the dots in the stack without losing all his lives (starting with 3). The ghosts' goal is to take all of Pac-Man's lives, with the most kills determining the victor.

In the 4 player mode, each player has a choice of action cards to secretly choose from and play face down. All cards are revealed simultaneously and the results ensue.

Pac-Man's options

• Evade
  All ghosts in play are moved back 1 square. The next dot track card is discarded
  
• Dots
  Take the next card in the dot track, place an empty dot card in the discard pile. There are a few different dot track cards with different effects.
  
• Advance
  Move 1 ghost 2 spaces closer

Ghost Options

• Advance
  Move 2 squares towards Pac-Man. Only one ghost can do this per turn, determined by rock-paper-scissors
• Flee
  Move 1 square away from Pac-Man
• Team
  Move 1 square towards Pac-Man along with other players that played Team. If no others played Team, don't move

Dot Track Cards

• 1 dot
  1 pellet. One of the many Pac-Man must eat to finish
  
• 2 dots
  2 pellets.
  
• 3 dots
  3 pellets.
  
• Power Pellet
  Changes the rules temporarily. If Pac-Man hits a ghost, the ghost is moved to the farthest point on its track. The power pellet lasts X turns, tentatively 5. Some added bonus might be added if Pac-Man eats a ghost as well.
  
• Cherry
  Pac-Man keeps the cherry cards, and can turn one in along with 10 dots to get an extra life.
  
• Tunnel
  If Pac-Man takes this one, all ghosts move back to the space of the farthest ghost from Pac-Man.

The Cards
At the end of a turn, when all movement is resolved, the dots in the bottom track are moved up with a new one being placed at the end. If the draw pile is empty, the discard is shuffled. The idea is that the pellets will be thin near the end, allowing for more evasion and fewer opportunities for Pac-Man to get those last remaining pellets. Not sure right now if this will be an appropriate feedback loop. Another idea was incorporating walls into the dot cards. There would be 1-3 walls, and these would shield Pac-Man from those directions in the turn that dot card was on 'top' of the dot track. This would have to be played with to see if it would keep things balanced or not.

Fewer players would mean a slightly different ruleset. With 2 players, the ghost cards would be randomly drawn, and the ghost player would get to assign them. Solo play could be accomplished with the cards being randomly drawn and assigned.

I have a couple of alternate ideas for rules to try out. One is the victory condition. It could be like Pac-Man Vs in that players trade out PacMan each time he's eaten and play for the highest number of dots. Another is that some of the cards (like Flee) are state based, and do different things based on whether or not a power pellet has been eaten.

I will make subsequent posts on this as I test it with more people and modify the rules accordingly.

Cards
Board