V reluctant about this, I’ll be honest.

Would be good to get into the weeds of that, if we can - whether one big action is better or worse than a lot of interchangeable at-any-time ones, and why.

I know we disagreed the last time it came up (somewhere in the Atlantean City dynasty?), but I didn’t push too hard on it because we were midway through the dynasty and I was aware that your preference for free actions might have been that you had a good scam lined up that a timing change would have blocked.

Commons Connection seems okay as a simple action you clearly can take directly before or after any other game action, but the current Gathering rule (a daily not-more-than-ten-hours action which also cares about the number of full days elapsed, making for a variety of Gather-React-Gather-Gather-Gather-React combos, some of which will pay out more than others) feels like being in a room full of differently ticking clocks and swinging pendulums, to me.

since Gather is an action that benefits you based on how long it’s been since you’ve last done it, it makes total sense for it to be an Upside rather than a freely-performable action imo! but i’m open to hearing Josh out, so i’ll wait until after they’ve had a chance to convince me :0

No, I’m not going to go to the mat on this one - I don’t love the centralisation of play in a single semi-random emperor-initiated action but that’s fine, I’ll just have to have a second idea.

An iconoclastic

Is the parallel timing track an inherent part of that decentralisation, or just a natural path to take to it? (Looking through the archives we disagreed over Atlantean Ousters, which were running on a separate 24-hour clock which you felt was keeping the game active by giving players a side hustle, and I thought was slowing it down because players on the main clock were sometimes waiting for the other one to finish.)

I’d still say that the proposal queue and the backchannel chat fulfills that parallel side of the game, for me. The kind of thing we’ve just seen with Open Door Policy and its discussion prompting player reactions at the gamestate level. I don’t think the main game loop needs to be anything more than a single slowish turn-taking boardgame, at about the same level as any eurogame.