July 2: The Sands of Time
Let's talk about the elephant in the room: Yes, Pendulum has sand timers. Three of them, to be exact: They're custom timers designed by Panda Game Manufacturing, and they have run times of 45 seconds, 2 minutes, and 3 minutes.
When I first heard about Pendulum from Design Day attendees, I was curious but hesitant about the "real time" element of the game. If you're like me, when you hear “real time,” you think about frantic, hectic, stressful moments as the timer ticks down. A race against time. That’s not the case in Pendulum.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Pendulum is "a turnless worker-placement game featuring simultaneous play." Players are weighing the cost/benefit analysis of placing workers on actions where they’ll remain longer (and get better benefits) versus actions where they’ll be available sooner (and get weaker benefits). That's why I've compared to it to Tzolk'in, one of my favorite games.
Before I yield my time to game designer Travis Jones, who will explain how he came up with this idea and how it's implemented in Pendulum, a few quick notes:
The timers are only active during each round, which lasts around 10 minutes, so there are regular breaks in the action.
Players control when they actually flip the timers. So if you're not ready to flip a timer, you can just wait until you or someone else is ready.
If you need to "pause" the game, you can turn the timers on their sides.
Sand timers can sometimes be off by a few seconds, but this impacts all players equally in Pendulum (opposed to each player having their own sand timer).
We've included a variant in the game that allows you to play without the timers but retain the other mechanisms.
Okay, the rest of this post is by Travis!
I still remember when the original seed of Pendulum was planted. It was after a game day with some friends. We played a couple of heavier strategy games and finished the night with a lengthy game of Ora & Labora. It was a blast, but it took several hours as some of my friends can have really bad ‘AP’ (Analysis Paralysis). For anyone not familiar with the term, it’s when a player takes a really long time on their turn to decide what to do. In the interest of full disclosure, I can be very guilty of this myself. I went to bed with thoughts rattling around in my head of whether you could ever have a deep strategy game experience without having to wait on your friends to take their turns.
My brain must’ve worked on things over night, as I woke up in the morning with thoughts tumbling out of my brain. Obviously, such a game would have to be played in real time. I had played a few real-time games before, but none of them felt like ‘strategy’ games (although they could certainly be fun and exciting in their own way). Something about a clock furiously ticking down to zero just seemed to preclude strategic decision making.
The eureka moment I had that morning was that rather than having a clock that would run out on you, timers could be used purely as a communal gating mechanism for taking actions. This led to having three different sets of action spaces, each with a timer of a different length. Players can choose what actions they wish to take on their own time, and how much time to lock up their various workers for. These choices are all made with players deciding for themselves how much time to spend thinking and planning, so those that want to move at a slower pace are completely free to do so. Time truly becomes just another a resource players are utilizing within the game however they see fit.
The other critical idea from the beginning was the creation of the mirrored rows of action spaces. Players need to flip the timers from one row to another so they can get their worker free or to take an action they want to take. By creating incentives for all players to naturally flip the timers as part of their own actions, the timers effectively regulate themselves with no one needing to watch the last seconds tick away and yell ‘stop!’ at their opponents. This makes time feel like an actual resource you are utilizing along with others in the game, making trade-offs and decisions of how to allocate it, rather than a rush to get to the finish line first.
This all adds up to a real-time game where the goal is not to just play as quickly as possible. Instead, the point of the game is to think about using your time judiciously – sometimes it’s best to make a quick decision, and sometimes it’s best to take time to think. There is no final buzzer you have to beat. The challenge thus becomes to determine when there is value in thinking more about a move and when there is not. The idea behind the game is to prod into this space – how do people decide how to decide? When you can make a choice using instinct or by doing a thorough analysis, how do you decide which approach to use, and how can you get better at choosing the right approach?
There’s actually a whole academic space around ‘decision science’ (which can be a very interesting area to look into, and as a great start I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking). And even within board games you can see this in places, for example the game Galaxy Trucker asks players to specifically place a value on the time they spend deciding/planning and going as fast as possible is not always the optimal choice. But, nonetheless, I think it’s an area that hasn’t been explored as fully as it could be, so hopefully, even if just in a small way, this game opens a bit of new space in board gaming.
What's your favorite game that uses time optimization?
Wer darf denn zuerst umdrehen? Und wenn derjenige umdreht, platziere ich schnell meinen Worker? Wie gleichzeitig darf das gemacht werden? Nach wie vielen Milisekunden ist es zu spät? Muss ich mit links die Sanduhr umdrehen und mit rechts gleichzeitig den Worker setzen? Und dann schrei ich, alle ausetzen wuhahaha? Es erscheint mir hektisch und komisch in der Phase des Umdrehens. Und wenig spielerisch reizvoll.