Twine in the string section?
Simply to reduce play length and in partial paean to Roads & Boats, I’d like all player turns within a City State to be simultaneous. The problem is when player product movements conflict. Multiple players may want to move product markers to the same locations at the same time. I created a forum thread to examine the area here. There have been interesting replies.
What makes the situation a little more complex than even that thread describes is that players may move a single product marker once or several times. Within the single player’s logical space this is not a problem. The problem enters with multi-player coordination and the effective input of iteration. Consider:
- PlayerA moves product marker to LocationX.
- PlayerB moves product marker to LocationY. PlayerB then wants to continue and move their marker to LocationX. Should they make the move and thus create a conflict, or shoud they wait until later in the same turn to see if PlayerA moves their product marker off LocationX with their own double-move first?
- Now add a PlayerC with their own interesting dependency graph.
I’m not sure this is inherently solvable. Much as I discuss, the simple cases can be mostly suitably handled by defining a preset order of resolution of conflicts and a policy for loopbacks. Some problems remain for very large loopback structures, but those may be containable in other fashions (eg simply limit the total number of conflicts that any give player may initiate per turn). The problem is that the problem isn’t that simple, it never is. If I add the multiple-move option described immediately above (which I really need to do for efficiency’s and interest’s sake), then the problem is a lot more complex and I’m not sure that any simple knife can cut that knot.