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[droqen]

A line of thought (which inspired this pretty long blog post I just made) is sticking with me. How interesting can you make a board game when the number of turns is limited, or minimized? Could 'number of turns left' be made into a special, important resource?

Help me out here. Throw some ideas out there about board games and how you could make a deep and involved board game with, say, 5-10 turns (per player?) or fewer across the entirety of the game.

I only say board game because 'turn-based game' is a little more cumbersome.

Also: Do you know any such games? I remember one and only one, that one being some lord of the rings Risk game.

[eclectocrat]

Interesting you should mention LOTR, cuz I used to play Middle Earth The Wizards CCG, and there was a popular variant where you had 5 or 6 turns to destroy the one ring, and each turn Sauron got more and more powerful, represented by more and more powerful enemies and obstacles emerging. The cool thing was that In this scenario every player was cooperating on survival, there was a resource pool that could be shared between wizards and you were trying to help ANYONE destroy the one ring.

I kind of like the idea of competing against time!
I'm sure I have played other turn limited games, can't remember them right now. I'm sure that you'll get a torrent of answers from German TIGers!

[droqen]

I should mention that the point isn't necessarily to time-limit the game to a certain number of turns, but rather that the game contains the spirit of 'not that many turns'. If the game usually comes to a conclusion after 5 turns (and is meant to wrap up kinda quickly) but can go on for 15 or more, that's fine too.

That all sounds pretty interesting though :D I feel like checking that out, now.

[team_q]

Back at College, one of our assignments was to create a game that only lasted 60 turns, we found an easy way to make a hard end was limit the amount of cards to play, when the final card was drawn, the game was over after the remaining round. I think this removes some of the more boring parts of Board games.

[LiquidAsh]

Tic-tac-toe and the dot-box game also have a limited number of turns.  I also saw a game at the store the other day that you drop magnets onto a piece of packing foam trying to not let the magnet attrack any of the others that have been already placed. This adds a bit of complexity I guess rather than depth.  To get depth in a ~5 turn game, I suspect you'll need a lot of potential moves on each turn.

[Fallsburg]

Forbidden Island (and Pandemic to a lesser degree) are sort of like this.  As the game goes on, the flood level of the island increases which causes the island to sink at a greater rate.  Admittedly, the game involves more than 5-10 turns (probably on the order of 20) or so, but turns are definitely a limited resource.

[s0]

Help me out here. Throw some ideas out there about board games and how you could make a deep and involved board game with, say, 5-10 turns (per player?) or fewer across the entirety of the game.

Warhammer 40K is often turn-limited (usually to 4 turns). One turn takes ages though. The WH40K CCG uses a similar mechanic.

As far as "turns as a resource" go, Dungeonquest is a good example. Space Alert is time-limited and played in real-time(!). Also, a lot of German board games like Alhambra, Tikal and Thebes use mechanics as well where the game has a fixed number of  "scoring rounds" that happen when certain conditions are met, so it's kinda like flexible turn limiting.

[it_is_coming]

I played a board game called Conquest of Pangaea where you had a fixed timeline, advanced by drawing cards with amounts of years on them. At different points in the timeline, different continents would split off of pangaea, isolating any territory any player had gained on it. The game ended when the board had split into all the modern continents.

[Musenik]

You should look at the game, Oasis. It's gives you 40 or so turns to build your civ, and then the barbarians show up.

http://www.oasisgame.com/

Also check out, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. You have about 10 turns to explore the galaxy and make points/a profit.

http://www.digital-eel.com/sais/index.htm

Their sequel is 'wierd worlds in I.S.'

[PleasingFungus]

Risk 2210 (much better than the original!) lasts just 6 turns, if I remember correctly.

(But they're rather long turns.)

[verhoevenv]

In recent board games there are a few low-turn games, and I always found them interesting. Two good examples I played are Small Worlds and Age of Empires 3 (yep, the boardgame), they both have a hard turn limit of 8 turns IIRC. AoE cheats a bit by making each turn consist of a lot of "sub-turns", maybe.

The objective with these games is mainly to gather as many victory points as possible in the given time, and victory points can be gathered in many different ways. The nice thing about this is that every turn, from the first one on, counts, yet there's no one who will get way, way ahead in the limited time.

And yes, you will actively need to keep in mind how many turns are left for your strategies. In AoE there are two "scoring rounds" at the end of turn 3 and 6, so you want to build to those. In SW, there is an important action that takes a whole turn from you, the timing of which can easily make or break your game.

The usual downside to these things is that they are very prone to downtime (turns take a while) and what's known as "analysis paralysis", players who just sit and calculate, not moving the game on.

I've seen Pandemic mentioned here, and it's also interesting because it's hard to time the game. There are a few ways the game can end, but the fun thing is that the game accelerates exponentially towards these endings. This makes the end arrive "suddenly", because the last two turns way more stuff happens than the first 10 turns. The whole game is an interesting design on how the human mind has problems dealing with exponential variables.

[Chris Pavia]

Risk 2210 (much better than the original!) lasts just 6 turns, if I remember correctly.

(But they're rather long turns.)

It's 5 turns. I love this game, especially how the strategy changes (especially who wants to go first/last) each turn.

[J. R. Hill]

The first that comes to my mind is a defensive war game, where you just have to hold off the other player(s) for a limited number of turns.  I guess the cavalry arrives then?

Second would be a game where you have a limited amount of resources you have to play strategically, like dominoes but with less options.

[s0]

I recently purchased Dungeon Lords. It's pretty awesome. And turn-limited.

The game is split into two distinct phases. In the first, you build a dungeon over the course of a "year" (basically 4 turns in the game, players take turns simultaneously) which you'll then have to defend against invading heroes in the second phase, which is more like a puzzle and also implicitly turn-limited.

[Chris Pavia]

I recently purchased Dungeon Lords. It's pretty awesome. And turn-limited.

The game is split into two distinct phases. In the first, you build a dungeon over the course of a "year" (basically 4 turns in the game, players take turns simultaneously) which you'll then have to defend against invading heroes in the second phase, which is more like a puzzle and also implicitly turn-limited.

I tried playing this recently and didn't like it too much.  There were a lot of rules, and it seemed like most rules had a number of exceptions in certain cases that made it a pain to keep track of. I'd give it a try again though to see if a second playthrough is any easier.

[LemonScented]

There are plenty of turn-limited games, it's not an uncommon mechanic. One that I played recently (which I think has already been mentioned) is Smallworld - which is an excellent game, incidentally, well worth a purchase. Other games have a limited number of turns but are less explicit than having a counter, instead having the game end when a particular deck of cards or stack of counters runs out. One of my favourite games that does that is Lost Cities by Reiner Knizia: The game ends when the last card is drawn from a deck, and you want to have played all of your scoring cards by then... But you get a better score by holding back cards until you have the right combinations, and so you're constantly assessing the size of the remaining deck to figure out whether or not you've got enough turns left to play all the cards you have. I often end up spending my last few turns picking up useless cards from the board so that I avoid picking them up from the deck, trying to eke out an extra couple of turns.

[Bones]

I was about to mention the board game which I had created at GGJ this year, but by the sounds of it your looking for "Few-turns throughout the entirety of the game"
Not something along the lines of a few or limited turns distributed each turn among a set amount of pieces.

Being that the objective of the game is decided on if your opponent has any remaining pieces on the board, the actual game play can take anywhere from 2-3 turns to games as long as risk consisting of days.

But I may as well mention it anyways.. because turns are the "resource" of my game for the most part.
In the board game I created at GGJ called "Dodo Go-Go"
You control multiple pieces, every turn you must distribute your roll of the dice between, 1-10 dodo birds.
You can move a single dodo as much as you would like as long as he is physically able to, being that only one Dodo is allowed per square it becomes a bit of a lane blocking game.
If you are un-able to move a dodo during your movement phase, than that dodo must lay down and rest until next turn, if you are un-able to move that dodo on your next turn it will die and be removed from the board.
Landing on "Fertility" tiles will allow you to draw a card which will state how many dodo's are created in the nest.
With the maximum amount of ten dodo's it will be impossible to move each dodo during your turn even if you rolled a six so no matter what, four or more dodo's would have to rest until the next turn. The one dice is kind of a limitation in how many moves your pieces can make, and how many of them survive the next turn.

[s0]

I recently purchased Dungeon Lords. It's pretty awesome. And turn-limited.

The game is split into two distinct phases. In the first, you build a dungeon over the course of a "year" (basically 4 turns in the game, players take turns simultaneously) which you'll then have to defend against invading heroes in the second phase, which is more like a puzzle and also implicitly turn-limited.

I tried playing this recently and didn't like it too much.  There were a lot of rules, and it seemed like most rules had a number of exceptions in certain cases that made it a pain to keep track of. I'd give it a try again though to see if a second playthrough is any easier.

The rules aren't that bad actually. It's just that the rulebook is incredibly clumsy and all around horrible and makes them seem a lot more complicated than they are at first glance.

Actually this is something I've been noticing with a lot of recent board game. Whatever happened to just writing a step-by-step rundown of the rules and putting a section explaining some exceptions and special cases at the end?

[frederiksen]

i've recently come across Dōbutsu shōgi, shogi is a japanese or chinese chess variant. Dobutsu shogi is a simplified variant of that to attract kids to the game and explain the basics. There are only a few moves and the whole thing will be over pretty quickly but it has some depth to it. The thing that fascinates me is that every turn is important and can change pretty much the whole outcome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobutsu_shogi

[droqen]

every turn is important and can change pretty much the whole outcome

This is probably 90% of what initially interested me about the concept of few-turns board games, rather than the actual limitation of turns (no matter how many there are).

(game looks fantastic and adorable btw; i need to try it)

Pretty damn cool stuff posted above though guys :D