I love high player count games. Not because I need 8 players squeezed around a small table – but because I love setting up a game for four and knowing there’s still room for an unexpected guest to join in.
Unfortunately, as you increase the number of players at a table, you also increase the waiting times between turns.
There tends to be two solutions to this problem:
- Give players something to do on other player’s turns (a la Settlers of Catan); or
- Let players resolve their turn simultaneously.
For the most part, Aethermon has opted to have players complete their turns simultaneously.
This approach does however struggle when one player’s decision is dependent on the actions of other players. Aethermon faces this problem when determining overworld movement.
Consider a variation of Naughts and Crosses where players make their moves at the same time. The game would be full of fighting to go first, and “If you go there, then I’ll go here” “Oh in that case I’ll go here” conversations.
This obviously would not work. Again there are two typical approaches to solve this problem
- Players make their decisions in secret (a la Diplomacy); or
- The game segments temporarily into a non-simultaneous game
Here, Aethermon borrows a little from each of the above solutions. Players must choose their movement card secretly; upon reveal players conduct their movement phase sequentially beginning with player who played the lowest movement card to the highest (with ties broken by a roll of the dice).
Players then simultaneously play out the rest of their turn.
That’s all for now. Next week we’ll follow on from this, taking a far more abstract dive into the advantages of acting first and acting last.
Keep in time AetherRen