Beginning the rondo

The thematic premise to date has been competing city states (cf early Greece) with players variously investing in the city states and potentially guiding their life cycles, or exploiting the facilities the city states proffer to generate profits. As such the core pattern is a mix of macro-investment tightly combined with micro-investment. A player may guide a City State to built the QRS building so that they can then use that building to produce products which they sell/use to make large profits with another or the same City State, or another player, or perhaps at another building nearby or elsewhere. Thus it is expected that the relationships and connectivities of the city states will provide a large and evolving context which the players will build and evolve, all the while also exploiting the details of the imbalances in that system to their own advantage.

I realise that many players yearn for in-game identities. They want to be the…XYZ. They want to have an identified anthropomorphic role. It has been difficult to determine such a role for this game. Several concepts cam to mind: clan heads, apocryphal jewish investors, Illuminati, conspiring hidden hands etc. I’ve been rather fond of a forced misinterpreation of the Commonwealth term “Shadow Cabinet”, which while it means something else entirely, by name suggests the sort of hidden role the players would take in guiding the lives and fate of the City States.

I am increasingly unfond of the current name of Shadow Clan. It is too melodramatic and suggestive of things this game is not intended to be.