Grid Game (Jan 23 2026)

After some more thinking, I’ve ended up with a game that’s much different than the original Antiquitus. There are still some issues to work out, but I like the general idea a lot, so I’ve started programming it. 

Instead of taking tiles at random from the excavation site, you now have a grid. There are 4 rows for coins/bones/weapons/texts, and 6 columns for values 1-6. During your turn, you choose to either: add (any) token of value 1 to your grid (i.e. column 1); or increase the value of 1 of your tokens (i.e. move it to the next column). Then you get the chance to submit tokens and placards, except that you’re required to submit a minimum of 2 placards at once (to force you to juggle multiple placard rules at once). And of course the placards will require you to get tokens of multiple suits and values. I like this a lot because it gives you full control over what tokens you want, and it makes the different values actually mean something, as placards that want higher values will be worth more points. I also like that the different types of tokens don’t trigger things when you get them, since those were easy to forget in the original game. 

That being said, there are still some gameplay issues for me to work out. A major one is how to add extra cards that shake up the game and give it variety. The first possibility is that there can be cards that sit out on the table and tell you what changes in this game. This allows the cards to change basically anything in the game. The second possibility is through a progress deck like in Moon Colony Bloodbath, where there are cards that let you take a turn, as well as some twist cards that get shuffled in at the start. At first I heavily favored the progress deck because there’s nothing to memorize or forget (which is very easy to do if you just have cards sitting on the table, far away from you). The thing about MCB though is that cards are constantly being added into the progress deck, while in this game I don’t think there will be. But then that means creating and shuffling the progress deck may feel like it’s not doing enough to be worth it.

There are a couple solutions to this (other than not using a progress deck). One is I could tie the end of the game to shuffling the progress deck. Right now the current end condition is when someone reaches a certain number of points, but it could very easily switch over to: after 4 shuffles, the game ends. One thing is, after the last card in shuffle 4, there has to be one last chance to submit things, because I don’t want it to be possible where cards let you add/advance tokens, but it’s all pointless because there are no more chances to get points. Another idea is something I mentioned months ago: players draw a twist that they’ll add into the deck at some point, and there are multiple twist decks. That could also work, but is a lot more complicated. 

Other issues. How and when do players draw more placards during the game? Antiquitus tied it to taking Coins, but this game doesn’t have that option. The progress deck can start with cards that let you draw more placards. But if I’m not having a progress deck, then I’m not sure what the solution is here. Another thing is, none of these solutions have any interaction between players, which I still want. Finally is flavor, since the game is no longer about digging up artifacts and is now about upgrading tokens, which means the history theme and the 4 tokens probably have to change. Which is good for me, because I’m not knowledgeable enough at history to be able to give the placards more names (my teammates came up with most of those names).