Now, we're not even just talking about orthogames, meaning straight standard games. Like a game of chess or Puerto Rico, where players play to win. In RPG; there's RPGs like Mouse Guard where you take turns. It's the game master's turn, then the player's turn. Dungeons and Dragons doesn't work like that.
Nope, Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have turns at all. All right. So, if you're a player, right? How do you need to think about taking turns, right? Well, the first thing you really need to think about, what's most important is: the lefty righty, right try this website? In most games, a player that takes their turn before you, especially if there's more than two players, will be able to affect you in some way. And a player that goes after you, you'll usually be able to do something to them simply because of the fact that you go before they do. So, if a guy goes before me, he could do something to interrupt what I'm about to do and mess with me. So, when you're going to sit down at the table, if you know the game is clockwise, look at who's sitting where. Make sure the really powerful guy is on the left and the really weak guy is on the right. This proves problematic. You might wonder, why do so many games go clockwise? The only reason games go clockwise and that's the order of play is because that's easier for people to remember. That is the only reason. And a lot of games are actually really unbalanced as a result. We would play El Grande, which is this bidding game, but once you bid on your position for turn order then everything else just went clockwise. And the problem with that was that once you realized that to sit to the left of someone, or the right of someone, and we would stand around the table like, "You want to play El Grande?" "Sure. I'm just waiting for someone to sit down." We started having to play another game to figure out where we'd sit in El Grande, because the game didn't take this into account. There's a thing you can get called Shocking Roulette, it's a pretty popular gaming device. Everyone puts their finger in and one person gets shocked, and that's how you know who goes first. And you can use this multiple times to create a turn order, if necessary. Which means everyone but one person will get shocked, which is pretty fun. Now one thing to really think about as a player is: some games give you a way to change the turn order. Like in Caylus someone can use, I think the Provost to jump... - Whatever building it is. - There's a way. You can go in this building and change the turn order. Now I get to go first. Any time a game lets you spend in-game resources to change the turn order, the game is telling you that turn order is really important to winning. So, if you're a game maker, right? How do you decide how to use this taking turns thing? And really the big development in the tabletop world that's happened, in terms of taking turns and the design of them in games, is that we went from games where each player did a whole bunch of stuff on their turn and the other people waited, right? Like war games, you know? One person does a whole bunch of stuff. Move all my guys. Attack, attack, attack. Do all this stuff and then, now it's your turn. You play Samurai Swords or... Ikusa, Shogun. - It's all the same. - It's all the same game. It's like, yeah, the game only take four turns. - The turn takes four hours and... - Risk or Axis and Allies. Scott's turn in that turn takes a full hour. So now, modern games, what they do is; if they have turn taking at all, they do lots and lots of little turns. When you play Eclipse it's like: I move, and the next guy researches, and the next guy builds, and the next guy moves, and the next guy... Right? You're going around doing lots of little things. Ticket to ride. It's your turn. You can take the cards, which takes two seconds. You can build trains, which takes a few more seconds. You can take routes, you almost never do that- maybe once a game. Right? And that also doesn't take very long at all. So it's: take trains, take trains, take trains, bullet trains, take trains. It goes around really fast. And that's a modern game design. People aren't bored at the table. That's why newer tabletop games are much more popular. Now, at the same time, there's a lot of subtlety there.
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