I do wish we’d been able to play this one for longer- I had a sheet of each day’s actions so that I could create an army of Barges in the minimum amount of time possible, and I’m sad I didn’t get to make it happen. I think the nature of Timed Actions slowed down the game to an unsustainable point, even though I did enjoy having them.

It’s been the curse of several dynasties where players have actions but with too much downtime of nothing to do in between while they are waiting for either their actions to have their effects or other players to take their turns/actions. Players who are easily distracted will simply forget that they have more action opportunities coming up if they just wait a while.

We’ve had a lot of dynasties recently where there’s been a clear Imperial vision that’s proven difficult to translate into rules – the dynasty idea seems fun to play but the resulting ruleset doesn’t.

I agree with JonathanDark that timing issues are a common reason for that to happen, but I don’t think that it’s the only reason; the more fundamental problem is that in addition to the vision, you also need a clear gameplay loop that can function on its own. That doesn’t necessarily have to be in the dynastic rules (it can happen in the core-rules gameplay or in the agreements between players), but it has to happen somewhere.

In the case of this dynasty, the core gameplay loop wanted to be about using ships to gather and trade resources, whereas the vision wanted to be about trading rules with other players and being affected by a changing ruleset as the ships moved around. Although those aren’t in contradiction, in order to make the dynasty to work, we’d probably have had to be laser-focused on trying to get those two strands of the dynasty to work together and aggressively getting rid of anything in the dynastic ruleset that didn’t directly work towards that aim – and doing that would probably need all the players to agree that it was a good idea and actively cooperate on it. I’m not sure whether this sort of “theme that requires a unified vision” can work at BlogNomic.

More generally, “meta” themes, where messing about with rules and other nomic elements are a substantial part of the gameplay, seem to have a tendency to both be very popular when players think about how they’re likely to play out prior to the dynasty, but to not work well when attempted in practice. On the dynasties I remember where it mostly worked (Metadynasty V, ais523 & Josh, and to some extent Wakukee I), the core gameplay loops were incredibly simple and close to uninteresting as games, and what made the dynasties fun were all the rules-based nonsense that was going on on top of it. Another thing that all those dynasties had in common is that they had mechanisms for producing badly-written or subjective rule-like constructs which ended up driving interesting core gameplay in addition to the uninteresting dynastic gameplay.

As such, in retrospect, I think we should probably have been trading rule fragments that we tried to assemble into personal rules, rather than generating resources and Praxis, even though that isn’t what the original vision for the dynasty was. But I don’t think I’d have figured this out without seeing how the dynasty vision played out in practice.

I idled out of this dynasty partly because of it leaning into repeat-your-action-on-the-dot timing stuff at a time when I was busy (which I didn’t want to push against amending too strongly if the group and Emperor liked it), but also the unidling of the second of BlogNomic’s two main Slouches (I didn’t want to sink time into a dynasty where two players would be uncritically echoing early votes on proposals, and making chops more likely to happen by not playing the dynasty - chops that they would then uncritically amplify the early votes on).

I thought the loop vision was clear enough. I’d read Josh as intentionally changing the earlier scam-friendly “players trade literal ruletext paragraphs” idea from the Drafting dynasty to a more conventional boardgame “some game objects have abilities” version. (Maybe to win my vote on the Draft, as I was demurring on it over the issue that you mention, that a powerfully wild ruletext-manipulating mechanic can turn everyone into a Sniper.)

I’m going a bit cold on Revise votes, a few dynasties in. The emerging etiquette that we should politely wait for the proposer to personally iterate on their idea feels like it’s putting the queue onto parallel rails a bit, and I think we’re losing some of the forward momentum that we get from pass-and-fix.