The Passage of Time, ch. 1

How games represent time

Time to fire this up again.

This will be a multi-part series in which I examine the various ways games attempt to represent the flow of time. The observations here naturally will tend to apply to simulation games, although there are plenty of Euros that also attempt to show the effects of time on human activities, whether the more abstract treatment of Seasons or the intricate temporal dance of Tzol’kin.

There are a number of ways a game can incorporate time into the structure of play. Over the next few posts I will examine several of these. However, the first of them is perhaps the most straightforward, and that is the fixed turn scale.

A game with a fixed turn scale simply seeks to create an even, consistent representation of time across the game by having each turn represent a particular unit of time. On the lower end, perhaps the shortest interval of time represented by a turn, at least in a mass-market game, might be Car Wars, in which each turn is one second of time (further subdivided into 1/10-second impulses). I recall one convention game I played refereed by the designer Steve Jackson himself where the first casualty happened within three turns of game time, a mere three seconds of elapsed time. Some modern air combat games may get close to that level of granularity. On the opposite end of the spectrum you might have games where a turn represents two hours of activity (Company Scale System), one day (Normandy ‘44), four days (Der Weltkrieg Series), two weeks (the venerable Afrika Korps), one month (Great War in Europe Deluxe), a season (Third Reich) or even longer intervals. (We will find that as one gets towards the longer end of the spectrum, some complications tend to emerge).

In such a system, each turn (and often, by extension, each player-turn) represents the activity that could be or was performed over the interval in question. With a fixed turn length, establishing the amount of game time represented by a historical battle or campaign is early — just multiple the time interval by the number of turns. In On to Richmond II, each turn is one day, so the Civil War Overland Campaign (the core of which took place over 40 days) takes 40 turns to complete.

Slight tweaks to the length of a turn can be made, either to represent a flurry of activity at the start of a campaign (as in Great War in Europe, above, where the monthly turns are subdivided to show the increased pace of activity in August and September 1914) or a slower rhythm of campaigning e.g. over the winter (Axis Empires has essentially monthly seasons over Spring, Summer and Fall, whereas the winter period from November to February is encapsulated in two turns).

From a design standpoint, the fixed turn scale approach has a number of things to recommend it. It reflects the ways in which humans already break up time, creating a framework that is simple for players to understand. It also simplifies greatly the process of rules drafting. If one knows the length a turn represents, and the length of time needed to perform a given action or movement, then it is easy to calculate how much a unit can do or how far it can travel in a turn, especially if you have a map that also has a fixed scale (perhaps a topic for a future series). An example will suffice: if your Civil War game has turns a day long, and hexes a mile across, and you estimate a Civil War brigade could march on average 10 miles a day, then you can give your units a movement allowance of 10. Similarly, you can determine things like advance rates in combat, endurance rates for ships and aircraft, and the arrival of reinforcements to a theater. This flexibility and ease of use certainly explains why this approach is used in such a wide variety of games and topics.

However, the fixed time scale is not without its drawbacks. One of these is that the granularity of a turn is more-or-less the same as the maximum granularity of the activity that one can represent within a turn. It is relatively easy, at least in theory, to represent something that takes longer than the turn length to complete — something like ‘under construction’ markers for fortifications, for example — but very tricky to represent something that takes less, maybe much less, than a turn to perform. If each turn is a week, then your game can’t easily include individual sorties of air squadrons, unless your turn is subdivided into smaller impulses (as in the Car Wars case above).

From a design point of view, this constraint can actually be very helpful; you are pushed to abstract out anything that happens faster than the minimal turn length. If a turn is a month or two, air and fleet movements can be represented by putting out generic ‘support units,’ for example, rather than moving individual ships and planes across the board. There might be times, however, whether for simulation or ludic reasons you want to be able to ‘zoom in’ to a more granular level, and games with fixed time scales don’t lend themselves well to such an approach.

A second difficulty with the fixed time scale is, well, its predictability. To take our Civil War example above, a brigade might have averaged 10 miles marching a day, but that is an average; in reality the amount traversed in a given day might vary widely from that mark. Great Campaigns of the Civil War famously dealt with that issue by having units roll dice for their movement allowances, a step relatively few other designers have imitated. Similarly, fixed reinforcement schedules might reflect historical reality, but in the moment a general often would not know exactly how soon friendly troops would arrive.

There are many solutions to the above problems, of course, but the frequency with which they crop up has led some designers to abandon the fixed time scale altogether, and opt for a different approach. We’ll examine that in the next installment.