Game: Twilight Imperium (galactic conquest strategy board game)
1. Identify the basic elements in a game of your choice (actions, goals, rules, objects, playspace, players).
Actions: players choose from list of actions during their turn, usually this entails movement, attack, use of a special ability “strategy card” (of which there are several in the areas of military, politics, technology, trade, and movement), or use of an action card. Players may also interact with each other through trade.
Goals: very basically the goal is to be the first player to have scored ten points on your turn. There are certain ways to score these points which means players have sub-goals and secret (unique) objectives which they score. Often it involves some sort of conquest of the board or acquisition of certain technologies or resources (also through conquest).
Rules: this game is not known for is easy-to-learn rules. Our first playthrough took over nine hours. Anyway, some rules include the players have a certain order depending on which strategy card they choose (they are numbered 1-8), trade is restricted to neighboring domains, and combat always happens when two players occupy the same space. There are also rules around politics in the game, including how voting is based roughly on the size of your domain. Additionally, players play as “factions” which dictate the way the game is played for that player; each faction has unique abilities, rules, bonuses, and technologies. The goals are also revealed in a certain order throughout the progression of the game, and the players can only score one goal per round of the game, meaning choices for which goals to go for have to be made in advance. If a player loses their homeworld, they may not score objectives. Many rules and basically every rule I mentioned has exceptions, often because of a certain faction ability or bonus.
Objects: there are a variety of objects available to players to achieve the goals of the game. There are the planets on the board which are obtained through conquest of the board. One planet which is very important is Mecatol Rex, which is a planet that can score you points for conquering and later for holding it. There are the military units themselves which are a tool to take and hold planets, there are the “trade goods” and resources (currencies of the game), there are the strategy cards which allow the holder to perform certain actions, there are action cards which allow the player to perform actions (but other players do not know which cards the player has), there are policies which can be temporary or permanent objects on the board, and there is the speaker token which determines who picks their strategy card first and who reads policies. Most interactions of the game happen through these objects and many disputes, debates, and negotiations are over possession of these objects.
Playspace: the physical playspace of TI is a board of hexagonal tiles, where the planets are and the military units move through. A lot of play and decisions are made through the air: discussion amongst the players.
Players: there are 3-6 human players, or up to 8 players with the expansion. There is no PvE or Gaia element of the game.
2. As a thought experiment, swap one element between two games: a single rule, one action, the goal, or the playspace. For example, what if you applied the playspace of chess to basketball? Imagine how the play experience would change based on this swap.
What if we swapped in the goal of Risk to TI? At first this sounds like it could be fun. Much less focus on specific goals and politics: pure galactic conquest of your friends’ territories. We actually tried this once (myself and Seamus, 1v1), and discovered that without the other aspects of the game, there are objectively better factions to choose for this essentially military-only version. It was shorter than expected, I suppose because of the imbalance of the factions’ military abilities. However, with additional players, the game would no doubt drag on for eons as players would gang-up on the dominant player, whoever they were at the time. Players are incentivized to leave other players alive, at least barely, so they do not end up having to take on the remaining player by themselves. We have played vanilla TI where players have been almost entirely eliminated from the game, so it is possible to eliminate players in finite time. The last time I played, I was left with three units and two planets on the board (basically nothing) (I won btw). I would have been entirely eliminated the next turn. The experience is much lower-dimensional and honestly boring without the points and politics and all things associated with that.
3. Pick a simple game you played as a child. Try to map out its space of possibility, taking into account the goals, actions, objects, rules, and playspace as the parameters inside of which you played the game. The map might be a visual flowchart or a drawing trying to show the space of possibility on a single screen or a moment in the game.
4. Pick a real-time game and a turn-based game. Observe people playing each. Make a log of all the game states for each game. After you have created the game state logs, review them to see how they show the game’s space of possibility and how the basic elements interact.
