u/oo7im

This channel I follow usually posts epic low budget recreations of Hollywood movies like jurassic park and star wars, but this one just popped up on my feed. It's awesome!

I've always loved the 90s sierra video game 'Pharoah', which was a city builder based in ancient egypt.

I've recently been working on tabletop version of the game, which can be played solo or multiplayer - it's essentially a 'race' to complete your city objectives and become pharoah before the event deck runs out (72 event cards, representing 6 years).

The issue I'm having is that it works great as a solo challenge against the deck, however multiplayer feels a bit too much like parallel play. The only real player to player interaction is the occassional resource trade, or offering to use each other's dock to sell resources (usually only happens if your own dock has already been used for a different resource). There's also a basic track that represents player rank (going from village elder all the way to pharoah), so there's also a minor racing element. The interactions mentioned above only happen very rarely though - in fact most multiplayer games can go from start to finish with virtually zero player interaction.

I'll briefly describe the mechanics below:

• Each player starts with 10 Deben (the currency of ancient egypt), and can purchase buildings which they place in their city.
• The cheapest building is a 'crude hut' costing 1 deben. This will provide 2 worker cubes.
• Better housing will provide more workers, however upgared housing requires additional resources (eg, pay 2 grain to upgrade a hut to a cottage, so it now provides 3 workers)
• Other buildings can be purchased using deben, and then staffed with your workers in order to function. (Eg, pay 3 deben for a grain farm, and recieve 1 grain per farm worker when the relevant 'raw material production' turn card is revealed from the event deck)
• There are various resource chains that take place throughout the game. For example, workers in a barley farm will produce 1 barley per worker. A brewery can take 2 barley and convert it into beer. A senet house will convert beer into culture tokens.
• Culture tokens can be used to upgrade high level housing, advance players on the 'ranking track', or they can be placed on a festival square insetad of having to pay wages when the wages card comes up.
• Each city has different objectives, which are always some combination of culture, prosperity, housing and monument level.

At the moment, it feels very much like a worker placement game, however it's missing the crucial element of 'space blocking' when there is more than one player involved. If player A builds a grain farm and fills it with workers, it does not block player B from doing the same thing in their own city.

In terms of solutions, I'd love to know what sort of things you guys might suggest?

I was toying with the idea of making it a 'shared city' where the various buildings in play are used by both players (who would have their own separate coloured worker cubes, so could therefore 'block' spaces from other players) whilst still having their own separate space for housing, monuments, and a personal treasury for the purposes of advancing themselves in the game.

The issues here is figuring out how resources should be allocated when a single building is staffed by workers from both players.

In some cases it would be quite simple; for example a grain farm provides 1 grain per worker, up to a maximum of 4 workers. So if player A has 3 workers in the farm and player B has 1 worker, then the grain is split between the two players in a 3:1 ratio.

However, some of the buildings work differently: For example, a potter requires two workers to function (it will convert 2 clay into pottery). Or a temple, which requires 3 workers to function (it provides various benefits when a 'blessing' event card is revealed). If both players each have their workers in the same building, how should the reward be split, especially if the reward is just a single resource or token? I suppose a dice roll could be an option, with an advantage given to the player with more workers, however I'd rather avoid adding to the complexity by introducing dice.

If you guys have ever faced something similar, I'd love to hear what sort of things you were able to come up with?

Cheers!