Deck of Many Things

I've taken a slight break from Cutlass and Compass to work on several card games with my partner in crime Allen White. This takes me back to some seriously deep roots, and I was pretty excited to get some ideas out.

The first game comes from the concept of time travel. I've always been fascinated by the paradoxes and cascading effects of time travel shows, books and movies. To my wife's frustration, I'm always yelling things at the screen like "why don't they just go back to the beginning of the episode and redo it?" Now I had an opportunity to explore all my crazy ideas.

All games are a series of cause and effect, and the time element creates a neat representation of the state of play. By changing a cause earlier in the timeline, the effect of their change would ripple down the line to modify cards further in the future. Because you're all time travelers, you can see the effects of a particular timeline and count up the bonuses at some future date.

I've gone through many iterations at this time (hundreds of destroyed note cards) and there are some really important things learned along the way:

We originally had a single timeline that each player could hop into and alter. They would do so by modifying one of several historical figures. When you modify it, you count up points (like suits) along the timeline to get a final value. It had some good moments: you could turn Einstein into a king, but it took too long to calculate the values and that part wasn't fun.

Tracking items in a line can sometimes lead to having to track multiple numbers in your head. People can't really track more than 3-5 numbers at a time, and you could easily mess up the value and get an entirely different outcome. At that point, you relied on other players to catch you and pay attention, which is not how I wanted it to work.

To fix there problems, we separated the timelines and reduced card effects to only affect adjacent cards. Clearer labeled values (colored pips) on each card help players more easily visually identify their current values.

With these changes, the game runs much smoother, and player can focus more on their strategy, and crazy histories rather than the mechanics.