1 I'm proud to say that I understood what "Peccavi" meant.

2 That's because you're a military history fanatic. (As am I. I got the reference, too.)

3 Pixy, did you receive the email I sent you? I need some help.

4 Steven - yep, sorry, had some major system blowing-uppage at work yesterday and got a bit distracted.

1

Sometimes when this kind of thing happens I find myself hating the hacks. But other times, and this is one of them, I find myself feeling a bit of admiration.

It's like that plague in WOW. That was genuinely awesome.

2 I don't know why people call this "XSS" when there is no other site involved. There's only a failure to escape the content.

3 Good point Pete.  Corrected.

1 Sounds like it's got some interesting concepts, but it's also open to some outright griefing.

It's also difficult to reconcile the paradox system with gradual advancement. Sure, you can work like a beaver, getting various tickets and gaining access to more/better cards and pieces... or maybe you can just time-loop stuff irrationally, create as many paradoxes as possible, and wait for the Big Shiny events to occur. You're not really trying to play the normal part of the game, so negative events that get in the way don't bother you much there... and since you point out the design philosophy of BvS ("you never lose more than a day or two of progress"), it's unlikely that Big Shiny will be counterbalanced by Big Stinky. And if it's doing odd things to the game world, eh, so much the better...

Now multiply that by dozens of players. Suddenly the odd events you envision are CONSTANTLY going off. Players will be lucky to get from Town A to Town B without having one or the other warp across the game world while they're in mid-transit.

Trying to put together beneficial combos will be of limited utility, especially at the world level; the higher chance that it's useful, the higher chance that some high-level player will play a random crappy Foul just to knock the interesting stuff off the map.

It sounds like the sort of game I wouldn't mind sitting down and playing as a board game, but playing it with random internet asshats? Griefproofing it would be awful hard.

2 Your points are well-taken, but I probably need to clarify a couple of things here.

Just as there are three levels of play, there are three sets of cards.  Each player has a deck that they build up over time, each city has its own deck, and the world at large has a deck.

Normally, each deck can only have one of each card; I'm considering allowing trading of duplicates, but you won't be able to put found (as opposed to time-looped) duplicates into play.

Now, the normal run-of-the-mill player cards only affect you personally.  City cards affect the city, but there's only one of each card per city, so they're a lot harder to come by.

And there's only one of each world card for the entire world, so getting your hands on a full hand of world cards is really, really hard.  Well, supposed to be, anyway.

So it takes a lot of effort to manipulate the world as a whole, and one you've done it, the hand you used to do it is discarded and you have to cycle through all the remaining cards in your deck, reshuffle, and then try to draw another such hand before you can try again.  And the more players active at that level, the scarcer world cards become, and the more wheeling-and-dealing you need to do to actually assemble a workable hand.

Also, it's intended that the world cards have a greater impact on higher-level play.  A World Foul that switches the season (for example) from Summer to Winter might only give Book 1 players a +1 Turn penalty for travel and leave them otherwise unaffected; Book 2 players (the ones running cities) find themselves suddenly facing a whole different set of production bonuses and penalties; and Book 3 players find all their Fire cards at half effect and their Frost cards doubled.

Another thing is that to play a successful foil or foul, you have to beat the opponent's hand.  So you actually have to have a strong hand to even attempt it; if you lose, your end up foiled yourself, or in the case of a foul, your hand gets forcibly discarded.  There are ways to exploit that too - if you have a bad hand (deliberately or through random chance) and fail a foil, the penalty can actually improve your hand, but which cards and how many are affected is random, so you takes your chances.

And the other other thing is that time travel is also accomplished through cards - you need Clock, Time, or Eternity cards (depending on the scope of the action you're attempting) to do it - and the cards are discarded after use and can't be used again until you've run through your entire deck and reshuffled.

Overall you're quite right though; balance and gameplay are my main focus at this stage of the design.  I definitely want to have a meta-game going on, but we can't have it messing up the regular game too much.

1 ...in your copious spare time, eh?

2 Exactly.

Well, it's something to do when I'm too tired to work and too stressed out to sleep.

3 Any chance of a look at the draft design for Cities? I'm especially intrigued by the go...

4 I can certainly post some more details.

The mid-game (what I called Book 2 above) is largely involved with forming contiguous territories on the world map - and preventing other groups of players from doing the same.  That's where the similarity to Go comes in.

However (a) it's played on a hex grid that actually expands over the course of the game, (b) the largest territory any single player can build by themselves is only three tiles, so it's all about co-operation, (c) you need the players in Book 1 (the Mornington Crescent part) to provide you with the potential to make any moves, (d) the players in Book 3 (the Contract Bridge part) can change the nature of the lower game levels from one day to the next, (e) there are computer players coming in from the six sides of the map to mess things up, and (f) there's time travel involved.

So it's not exactly like Go.

5 If you're even half serious about this, sign me up for the beta.

6 My motto here is Not beta, just broken.  We're going to launch straight into the game, and if anything goes wrong, I'll blame it on those rascally Book 3 players.

Soon as I find a decent graph database to run the transit network.