Oh, good point, I had forgotten about the zero-sum victory points. The extent to which the other parts are zero sum depends a lot on how large the game board is relative to the number of players, so it could be adjusted.
I was thinking about having a time limit instead of a round limit, to encourage the play to move quickly, but maybe that’s too stressful. If you want the players to choose to end the game, then you’d want to build in a mechanic that works against all of them more and more as the game progresses, so that at some point continuing becomes counterproductive...
I like time limits because time constraints are what make negotiation difficult (imperfect compromise), though just having a single shared time limit lets players filibuster. If players have separate time limits it’s basically still a round limit, but good point to remember to impose a time limit.
Separate clocks would be a pain to manage in a board game, but in principle “the game ends once 50% of players have run out of time” seems like a decent condition.
Oh, good point, I had forgotten about the zero-sum victory points. The extent to which the other parts are zero sum depends a lot on how large the game board is relative to the number of players, so it could be adjusted. I was thinking about having a time limit instead of a round limit, to encourage the play to move quickly, but maybe that’s too stressful. If you want the players to choose to end the game, then you’d want to build in a mechanic that works against all of them more and more as the game progresses, so that at some point continuing becomes counterproductive...
I like time limits because time constraints are what make negotiation difficult (imperfect compromise), though just having a single shared time limit lets players filibuster. If players have separate time limits it’s basically still a round limit, but good point to remember to impose a time limit.
Separate clocks would be a pain to manage in a board game, but in principle “the game ends once 50% of players have run out of time” seems like a decent condition.
In practice what I was going to do was just say that each turn is limited to like 40 seconds or whatever.