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Comment by dsugarman | Hacker News Reader

I would look at board games for a reference. I think almost every board game is essentially a turn-based strategy game, but there are some that involve a turn in which everyone moves at the same time.

One that comes to mind is Diplomacy. TBH I think Diplomacy is a great game, but it actually takes way longer than a normal board game (probably because everyone spends a long time negotiating during every turn to optimize each move) and usually ends with some group of winners rather than playing the game out.

I think designing a strong game of this type is extremely hard.

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> I think almost every board game is essentially a turn-based strategy game

The distinction between "turn-based" and "real-time" is largely perceptual rather than actual. "Real-time" simply does two things: it slices the turns down to an extremely fine grain (such that they're more "frames" than "turns"), and it forcibly makes "do nothing" or "continue previous action" the default action.

Thus, the real distinction for a designer is, "How much time do you want your player to have to make a given decision?" The more time you're willing to give, the more likely you should make it turn-based, and vice versa. This is how chess starts to resemble an RTS when you add a clock. If you pared the "time to move" down to, say, 10 seconds... it becomes hard (but not impossible, since you're still right) to argue that chess is really turn-based.

Turn based games let you block other players from taking actions while you decide what to do. Realtime games do not.

That's the distinction, IMO, not turn length.

You're not really disagreeing with me. You get to block other players for the length of your turn; if that length is infinitesimally small, that's still true. It just becomes meaningless; that's the entire point of blitzkrieg chess.

By which logic timesharing and batch computing are the same.

What matters is the player experience, not the implementation.

A good board game that utilizes simultaneous turns very well is 7 Wonders. The game play is basically like a Magic: the Gathering draft. However, a common criticism is that there is limited direct player interaction (although there are very subtle and important considerations for drafting). The game is very fast, even with 8 players.

On a digital side, I think the Pokemon games does simultaneous turns very well. There is an entire competitive community that is built around such a simple system, and I think this format has much room for improvement. I'm currently working on an online multiplayer game of this format, which tries to explore design ideas that Pokemon doesn't (as it seems 95% of moves are of the variant, deal X damage of a certain elemental type).

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