Proposal: Sleepy Snails
Add a new dynastic rule, titled “Sleep”:
Snails are so lethargic that they must sleep for 23 hours a day to maintain the intense energy demands of the Race. Every non-Slug Snail has a publicly tracked Waking Hour, which is either blank or a number from 0 to 23 and defaults to blank.
If a non-Slug Snail has no Waking Hour or there is no Ongoing Race, then that Snail may change their Waking Hour to any valid numeric value.
A Snail is Awake if the hour of the current UTC time matches their Waking Hour.
Append the following paragraph to the rule “Races”:
A Racing Snail is a non-Slug Snail who is Healthy, on the Track, and before the Finish Line.
In the rule “Plays”, replace “At any time, a Snail may Play” with “At any time, an Awake and Racing Snail or a Slug may Play”. Also, replace “Unless they are the only Snail who would otherwise be able to Play” with “Unless they are the only Racing Snail”.
In the rule “Races”, replace “If there is an Ongoing Race but no non-Slug Snail can Play, any Snail or the Jury may perform the Award Ceremony.” with “If there is an Ongoing Race but no Racing Snails, any Snail or the Jury may perform the Award Ceremony.”
In the rule “Predators” and in the descriptions of the Slug of Death and Identity Crisis Ian, replace all instances of “24 hours” with “25 hours”.
In the rule “Predators”, replace “any Snail or the Jury may Spot Danger” with “any Awake Snail or the Jury may Spot Danger”.
Recently I’ve become convinced that Kevan is right about the entirely asynchronous gameplay being a bad idea. It’s quite annoying to have to be constantly checking in to play optimally. This changes the action system to be a hybrid of turn-based and asynchronous elements. The idea is that everyone picks an hour of the day that they can reasonably expect to be online and can only make Plays during that hour. This way everyone will know when and in what order their opponents will be making Plays, blunting the advantage of being always online. The hours change from 24 to 25 keeps one Snail from getting a monopoly on Danger Spotting/Slug movement, since they won’t be able to be Awake to do it two days in a row.
Habanero:
This is more for gauging interest than anything. I think it breaks Slugs (and possibly a few other things, I can’t be bothered to comb through the ruleset and check and this is already long enough). Some fixing will need to be done if it passes, so feel free to be against if it’d be more trouble than it’s worth and the current way of doing things is good enough.