I may have been accused of losing my marbles in the past, but I’ve found a really neat way to use them this time. The mechanism shown above is what I’m calling a “Queued Action Pool”. As far as I can tell, nobody has done this yet. There have been ordered queue’s using cards in programming games like Colt Express, and many shifting queues in tableau form. There have been action pools, like the early chit-pull systems in war games, the constantly flowing marble trough in Gizmnos or the bag of actions in War Chest. This one embodies bits of all of these mechanisms, but puts them together in a new way.
In this simple action pool, each marble represents an action. The player, on their turn, can take out a marble of their color from anywhere in the trough. The remaining marbles shift down to close any gaps because the trough is angled. As the pool is depleted, colored bars representing actions are revealed triggering certain events in the game. It is easy to add more actions to the pool and to draw multiple actions out. When the track is completely empty, it could be refilled to start another phase of the game.
This simple and elegant mechanism solved a number of problems I was having with the Arachnid game. Originally, each player had their own action board and a number of action tokens to manipulate. Since Arachnid is a Cooperative game, it was necessary to keep track of other player’s boards as well as yours because events were triggered periodically based on the state of each player’s action boards. This was very confusing and hard to track. Events were being forgotten and it was so fiddley that it interrupted the game flow causing thematic breaks. No matter what I tried, the mechanics were still clunky.
I toyed with the idea of a rondel, but that didn’t give me the flexibility I needed because I also wanted to eliminate the heavily structured turn order. I experimented with shared action pool, but I needed a way to trigger events throughout the game. Finally it hit me. Why not change the action tokens to marbles and put them in a trough like in the game Gizmos. The trough, of course, would have to hold a finite amount of actions, and would work sort of like a thermometer, revealing events as the pool is depleted. This new mechanism showed the current state of the pool clearly, gave the players a way to plan for the upcoming events in the game, and cut down the administration to almost nothing. It was easy to tune as well. Just by shifting the positions of the events, I can ramp up the tension, mess with the narrative arc, and even add push-your-luck elements to the game.
The action system in Arachnid is now working like a swiss watch and I’m currently doing little happy dance. I know I’ve said this before, but it looks like I am finally at the tweaking stage of the game design. That means that I’m about 10% of the way to completion. LOL
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