{"id":17640,"date":"2019-03-11T19:00:32","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T02:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17640"},"modified":"2019-03-11T19:01:10","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T02:01:10","slug":"five-tribes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2019\/03\/11\/five-tribes\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Tribes"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Last week, Kam and I played the boardgame <cite>Five Tribes: The Djinns of Naqala<\/cite>. (We had played it before, but it was a while ago.) I more or less like it, but as we went back through the rules to re-familiarize ourselves with it, I felt like the rules just kept going on and on with more and more complications.<\/p>\r\n<p>Later, I amused myself by imagining the process of the game designers playing \u201cyes, and\u201d while creating the game:<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014I just had a cool idea: what if we invent a game that\u2019s like mancala, but played on a 5x6 grid instead of 2xn?<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Nice! But let\u2019s make it a little more complicated: let\u2019s have more than one different kind of tokens\/meeples that you can pick up and distribute to the tiles that make up the grid.<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Okay, sounds good. Let\u2019s make it five different colors of meeples, and each color does something different.<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Excellent. But I feel like the game is still a little too simple. What if we make each grid tile have a different point value?<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Sure. And not only that, let\u2019s make some of the tiles a different color, and if you land on one of those tiles with a particular color of meeple, you get a bunch of extra points.<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Ooh, and let\u2019s say that some tiles let you add other markers to them that also give you extra points!<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Nice. So how shall we decide what order the players move in? Just go around the table like most games? I feel like that would be kind of boring.<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014I\u2019ve got it! Let\u2019s add a whole separate system of bidding for turn order! You can spend money to try to go before other players!<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Great, but where does the money come from?<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014How about each player starts out with some money?<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Sounds good, and lets also say the extra points for the colored tiles take the form of money. But what if we also add a whole separate system of cards that represent goods, and the players can acquire goods over the course of the game, and then sell them for money?<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Great! But in addition to the goods, let\u2019s make some of those cards a special kind of card that increases the effects of various other things you can do!<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014Perfect. But I feel like\u2014I dunno, I feel like the game just isn\u2019t complicated enough yet.<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014One more thing, then: How about if we have a whole separate set of cards, unrelated to the goods cards, that you can acquire in a totally separate way and that you can use to do magical effects?<\/p>\r\n<p>\u2014That\u2019s it! That was the last piece we needed! Now the game feels done.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17640"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17642,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17640\/revisions\/17642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}