Have you ever been sick in bed and half-delirious and decide that then, at that moment is the ideal time to take some spreadsheets and flowcharts and lists and write a basic game overview?  It's not advisable.

In the past few weeks - or, it might have been months, the way things have been going - I started thinking about what the perfect tabletop or tabletop-adjacent game might be, and after listing out the various items I’d like to see in a tabletop game I realized that I would be incredibly frustrated if I didn’t at least try to make that game happen.  After spending entirely too much time in spreadsheets and documents I think I have a decent starting point for the game whose working title is 12 Cities.  As I start to test mechanics and write rules, I'll do my best to remember to post about it as well, but that shouldn't be a problem; I've been restraining myself from talking about this idea to anyone with a passing interest in tabletop or rpgs in general.

12 Cities takes place on an unnamed continent on an unnamed planet where a wide variety of different types of people have formed the first cities of this planet’s early bronze age.  2 to TBD players each write the history of that city through diplomacy, expansion and building, and taking control of the Cities’ military units and mythic folk heroes in turn-based battles.  Players choose one of twelve Cities to lead, and each city has a choice of three folk heroes.  Despite the focus on combat, the goal of the game is not to defeat everyone else; your goal is dictated by your random, randomly-drawn role.

The game starts with the players choosing which of the twelve cities or societies they will play.  The continent has four primary geographic regions, each of which has three of the playable cities.  As a note, I am going to call them Cities even though some are not actually cities in fiction.  These Regions and their Cities are:

• The River Valley Cities
  • The Mid-River Dwarf Tower
  • The Riverside Elf Towns
  • The Costal Human Towns
• The Outsiders who Settled in Swamplands
  • The Valley of Time
  • The Stellar Spire
  • The Fae Settlement/The Abandoned City
• The Forest Folks
  • The Legally Distinct Shyre
  • The Dark Forest Gnome Villages
  • Coolsville, City of the Lizardfolk
• The Inland Desert
  • The Undead Settlements
  • Hellscape Temple
  • Oasis Crater Coalition of Orcs, Goblins, and Trolls

As the players choose their Cities, they take turns placing down up to twenty-four hexagonal tiles to build the continent: 6 grassland river valley tiles, 6 desert tiles, 6 swamp tiles, 6 forest tiles.

The thing to remember is that the players each have something similar to a character sheet, but it’s closer to an abridged history and stats of a city, except there are a lot of blanks - some sentences in length - that the player will be filling in with each phase of the game.

Once the players have built the world and created their cities and heroes, the gameplay cycle consists of three repeated phases: Council, Development, Combat.  In the Council phase, players can trade resources and units, negotiate with other players, make alliances, declare enemies, and other Council Phase actions.  An important note: players do not have to honor their promises from the Council Phase, but they have to deal with the repercussions if they don’t (remember those secret roles I mentioned?).  The Development Phase sees players building settlements and infrastructure, expanding into new territories, spending resources to purchase combat units, moving armies around the map, and initiating a battle to be fought during the combat phase.  During the combat phase all players with declared battles.  Combat takes place on a square grid whose size is determined by the Resources of the territory being attacked; the average is the size of a chess board: 8 by 8.  The defensive strength of the defending force determines the number of rounds the offense has to accomplish the objectives needed to capture and secure the territory.

Each of the 12 Cities has three types of combat units the player can purchase, each with differing abilities that favor different roles and play styles.  As Cities form alliances, unite to form Civilizations, or conquer other Cities and turn them to Puppet Cities, players gain access to the units from different Cities, and every City’s units synergize and interact differently with each other, once allied.

These game cycles repeat - Council, Development, Combat - until a player reaches their final objective.  Once that first final object is reached, the game is over.  There’s an end-game phase that is based on retelling the events of the game as (very brief) spoken history of the Cities.  The goal of the game isn’t to win or lose, but to finish writing your chapter of your City’s story so that it leaves the author of the next chapter with a good starting point.