Fischer Blog – With diet timers a design can maintain this

With diet timers, a design can maintain this power without having to balance a timer on the faces of players or put them in the role of the player to limit their potentially endless twists. When a game is based on intuitive decisions, it’s not just about hiding a certain amount of information from your players, but also about how much time they have to make their decisions. Players will generally find it much easier to accept them, because they’re just “part of the game” and, of course, they’re integrated into the gaming experience. Or, if a company becomes too complex, this calculation process is interrupted at some point, limiting the time available to them and allowing them to make a design decision they shouldn’t make. Since the moves themselves are a very limited resource due to a resistance system, and you still don’t have information on how the game world will be structured, choosing a location too early can be very suboptimal for your future path. If you do not share the game world with other players, your magic circle will be attacked. Minos Strategos and Wequer are two of the few solo games that have dared to implement a target timer. We often talk about an “illness”: some people will simply not be able to make decisions within a reasonable period of time! But it’s more of a system crash. This approach to investing over time has great potential and many game ideas yet to be discovered. Each actor must find “his” own interpretation of this implicit social contract, which inevitably leads to an unfair distribution of the “period of reflection” of the source. Minos Strategos is one of the few patience games that uses a driving timer. My Own River Rogue is a jam-playing experience designed specifically to illustrate the concept of a dietary timer. In turn-based games, however, it is customary to have a decision-making phase that lasts as long as you want until you explicitly decide to finish your turn. The trick: The game world “flows” continuously and leads the player to a “Game Over”.