BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

So if you’re the last to move, you only get three moves?

I still don’t see why someone doing all their moves at once is inherently a bad thing.

edited to hopefully fix that last mover problem

This seems reasonable. We do gotta make sure with any sort of interactive stuff you both aren’t too incentivized to move first (which rewards the hyper online players who can respond as soon as a race goes up) or to move last (which will drag the dynasty on a bit) but I think we can make it work!

Is “at least three greater than any other Snail’s” intended to be read as “any single Snail” or “every Snail”, here?

eg. If the move counts are 3/2/1/0/0/0, can Snail #1 move?

“every Snail” was the intention, edited

But I don’t know which one would be better

“Every Snail” means that any two Snails can agree (in advance, or ad hoc) to speed to the finish line together, which might undermine any on-track interactive gameplay we try to build.

“Any Snail” would mean we were roughly turn-based, albeit with timing issues where the quicker players would get to react to stuff first.

if two snails want to agree to speed to the finish line why not let them?

needing to wait for every other snail to go will likely slow things down a lot and give us the same sort of turn based gameplay we’ve already seen a lot of other times

If we’d be happy to let two Snails finish the race that quickly, we may as well just keep the status quo where one Snail can do that, and focus on making the “roll all your dice in one go” game interesting.

I agree with Kevan here. I had proposed a slow down earlier, but Clucky made me realize that it would be more interesting to explore the trade off of making a flurry of moves at once vs pacing them out. I’d rather keep the dynasty going in that direction at this point.

And if we’re worried about a timing issue, make it so that acting early or at a certain time risks missing out on a benefit that could happen later. Maybe random benefits show up mid-race? One of the slugs acts beneficially at a random time of day?

Or a Move action that can only be used a certain number of times per race, so there could be possible rewards to a more measured approach to using Move actions.

I think there are still ways you can create that tradeoff between burst moving and slowing down without turning it into “wait for everyone to move”—like even without adding extra rules other than choosing what moves to make, burst moving to finish still puts you at a disadvantage because everyone else will know what they need to do to catch you and thus know if they need to be more aggressive or if its better to play it safe

Per my last comment, that this isn’t meaningfully different from the status quo.

in favor of https://blognomic.com/archive/move_tax

Same (hopefully with fixes soon)

“If it doesn’t pan out, it’s easy enough to remove.”