BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

If people want to play an item-led game then that’s fine, but as written, the Crystals are a stunlock: they have a meta-effect on all other Items in the game, you can use them as soon as the race goes up, you get 24 hours to play them before anyone with non-Crystal Items can use theirs, and they’re not blockable except through the aggressive use of other Cystals first. In effect, this means that the first Snail online after the Race goes up gets to use their Crystals to hose down every Snail who didn’t have the fortune to be the first Snail online. If you can’t have a reasonable presumption of being online when the Race goes up then you really don’t need to think about Items at all, as they will have been stolen or deleted by the time you do get there.

Timing gates are generally bad; we usually try to consider avoiding action systems where the quickest reactions are rewarded, and the Community Guidelines call out forcing people to stay online during narrow windows to avoid incurring disadvantage (“The rhythm of a dynasty of BlogNomic should not be less than 24 hours - which is to say, the ruleset should usually not require players to check the game more than once a day”). This change allows players to quickly spend their non-Crystal items and size up the field before the meta-effect Items come into play.