New Antiquitus (Jan 16 2026)

Bad news on the current game I'm making (which doesn't even have a prototype name for some reason): I've kinda stalled on the enemies. I just don't really know what they can do to be interesting. Which means I'm probably shelving this game until I figure out what the enemies can do (although there's been a trend where shelving a game is the same as abandoning it forever).

While sleeping on monday night, for some reason I kept thinking about Antiquitus. I know I said I wanted to take a break from multiplayer games due to playability, but if this game can also work for single player that may be fine. Now there were a few things I wasn’t a big fan of in Antiquitus, but a big one for me is the game isn’t simultaneous. I was wondering if there was any way to make the game simultaneous, given the system of taking tiles from the excavation site. Also, the tiles have effects when you take them, but they can be hard to remember, especially since they were just tiles, with no instructions written on them. And when playing Pacific with mom, these issues were apparent too. But the tiles can’t all be identical, cause that would be a boring game.

The simultaneous gameplay issue is the one I focused on first. In theory for a computer game, there can be infinite copies of each tile, which would allow multiple players to take the same tile. But there didn’t really seem to be a way to preserve the mechanic of revealing/discarding cards from the site, or letting players interact with the site (when taking bones or weapons). Then I realized, maybe I don’t need the excavation site at all. There are several games where you deal out cards, and when a player takes one there’s a new one. I’m not sure I like them very much, as usually the cards you want are constantly taken away from you. The excavation site is like that, but even more complicated. One idea I considered briefly is, the game can present multiple tiles at once, and after each turn they’re all discarded. But I think it adds way too much luck, since now you’re at the whims of randomly drawn tiles, with nothing you can really do to get around it. Also this idea removes all player interaction from the game.

To solve all of these issues (in addition to the issue of making the tiles different), I could add a new gameplay mechanic. By default, the tiles don’t do anything special. But an idea I had is, there can be special Rules cards that give each tile an ability, and these abilities can do things like give extra points/placards, interact with other players, and also gain/change tiles you have. It also gives the game more variety, as the tiles will all do different things. I’m not yet confident this is a good solution though, due to 1) a beginner’s game, with no Rules cards, still has all the issues that the Rules are trying to fix, and 2) it may be tricky to make the Rules cards (especially the ones that give points, they don’t want to make you skip the gameplay loop of submitting placards). So still some thinking left to do.