Six Designs of Real-Time Games

Real-time games are one of my favorite genres. Sadly, they’re pretty rare too, with a game of real note only showing up every year or two. In this article, I’m discussing several of the most interesting real-time games, to highlight what each does great (or not). Rather than trying to rank these games, I’ve listed them in order of publication … but if you want to know my favorite real-time game, it’s Galaxy Trucker (2007), hands-down.


Ubongo (2003)

UbongoUbongo isn’t exactly a real-time game by my definition. Instead it’s a game that you win by engaging in a task (the placement of puzzle pieces within a grid) faster than everyone else. However, Ubongo shows off the most important element of real-time gaming: adrenaline.

When I first played Ubongo, I was amazed by how jazzed I felt afterward and by how much I wanted to play again. That’s because it does a good job of making you want to play fast and rewarding you for doing so.

How does it do so? Perhaps because success always feels like it’s right around the corner, and perhaps because you know you need to finish before your opponents … especially if you’re trying to grab a very specific gem.

Camelot (2005)

Tom Jolly’s Camelot game is a weird combination: it’s simultaneously turn-based and real-time. This is thanks to the “lightning system”. This system focuses on two “turn tokens” that pass around the table. When you get one, you get to take a turn, then you pass it to your left. The catch is that if you dawdle, then the other turn token will lap you, meaning that all the other players will get extra turns.It’s a clever mechanic to force quick play and overall a neat integration of real-time and turn-based play.

Camelot also introduces one of the best elements of real-time games: mistakes. It’s easy to mess up because you’re going faster than you can think. And mistakes are great because they introduce a chaotic factor into strategic play that keeps everyone on their toes. However beyond this element, the turn-based gameplay of Camelot doesn’t really take advantage of realm-time possibilities.

Factory Fun (2006)

Factory FunThis may have been the first modern game that I played that includes a real-time element. Here you purchase items for your factory, then integrate them into your increasingly complex machinery.

Because of the potential complexity of building a machine, Factory Fun sounds like it should really benefit from real-time play. Unfortunately, Factory Fun places its real-time elements in exactly the wrong place. You grab your new machinery in real-time, but then you have as much time as you want to play it. If anything, the result actively detracts from the game, because players make horrible mistakes in grabbing their machinery (which is great!), but then they can spend forever trying to correct those mistakes … and the whole game drags to a halt.

Galaxy Trucker (2007)

Galaxy TruckerAs I said, Galaxy Trucker is my personal favorite real-time game, and that’s only partially due to the real-time aspects. The thing that I like best about Galaxy Trucker is the creativity, where you get to build a ship from scratch in whatever way you want. In some ways Galaxy Trucker is a close mirror to Factory Fun, where you get to build factory machinery in any way you want … but the difference is that the real-time gameplay supports the creativity of Galaxy Trucker where it got in the way of the creativity of Factory Fun. In other words: you could get APed in Galaxy Trucker just like players regularly do in Factory Fun, but because you’re on the clock, it doesn’t matter. You build quickly or die.

Beyond that, Galaxy Trucker‘s real-time gaming works because it’s full of hard decisions. You constantly want everything: guns and rockets and crew compartments and cargo holds. So you constantly have to prioritize. There are even multiple things that you have to think about, such as the connections between the different ship components: a tile might give you a ship component that you want, but simultaneously restrict your future plays due to its connections. This sort of interplay between a variety of hard choices works very well in a real-time game; it also rewards a skill that I think should be rewarded more in games: the “good enough” decision. He who hesitates is lost, but he who plays with his gut wins.

I think that Galaxy Trucker also succeeds due to its simplicity — and this is where I think that supplements have failed the game. They’ve tended to add new components that you can play into your ship and this muddles the real-time gameplay, especially for new players. In a real-time game you don’t want to have to stop and reiterate a rule, and the further a game gets away from its core simplicity, the more likely that is to happen.

Space Alert (2008)

Space AlertApparently designer Vlaada Chvátil enjoyed his work on Galaxy Trucker because just a year later he published a second real-time game design, Space Alert. It’s rather unique among the real-time games because of the fact that it’s cooperative. This turns out to be a great solution for the problem that I just mentioned where complexity can get in the way of real-time play. In cooperative play, the game’s complexity becomes part of the cooperative challenge.

A lot of real-time games up the stakes of real-time decisions by requiring players to “lock in” decisions as they go. Thus in Factory Fun when you take a tile it’s yours, and similarly in Galaxy Trucker when you place a tile in your ship, it’s there forever. Space Alert makes this design element explicit: during the play of the game you’re programming a series of actions. As the real-time clock ticks down, you’re forced to first lock in the first third of your actions, then the second third, and then your time runs out altogether. It’s a great mechanic that increases the adrenaline of real-time gaming, whether it’s implicit or explicit.

Mondo (2011)

MondoMichael Schacht’s Mondo has often been described as a simplified version of Galaxy Trucker, and that’s not a bad description of the game. In Mondo you build up a world from tiles while avoiding volcanos, collecting animals, and creating lots of terrains.

Even more so than in Galaxy Trucker, it’s obvious that some tiles in Mondo are better than others: some have animals (great!) and some have volcanos (awful!). Though you’d usually avoid this type of inequality in a board game it’s a great choice for a real-time game because it rewards fast play: quicker players get the good tiles rather than the bad ones.

Some of the advanced variants of Mondo include some head-to-head competitions, which hasn’t been much of a factor in the real-time games that I’ve mentioned to date other than Ubongo. In Mondo there’s one element up for competition each round, where you’re trying to be the best in category — and definitely not the worst. For example, you might get rewarded if you have the largest lake … or dinged if you have the smallest. Trying to figure out how everyone else is doing in the middle of a real-time game is a real challenge, and so a nice real-time element.

Mad City (2014)

Mad CityThe newest entrant to the real-time gaming category is Mad City, by Kane Klenko. It’s about as easy as a real-time game can get: you receive 9 tiles and have to form them into a high-scoring 3×3 city. The trick is in the extreme constraints: you get just a minute to build your city, and in that time you also have to count up icons in your terrain (so that you can decide how to build) and you must also assess if you’re competitive with other players for different types of terrain. It turns out to be too much to do in a minute, and the result is frenzied, fun play. That’s a good lesson for real-time design: by pushing hard on the time constraints, you can up the enjoyment factor.

Klenko has a second real-time game due out this year: Pressure Cooker from Rio Grande Games. It’ll be interesting to see how he continues to innovative and expand this (tiny) sub genre of play.

Coda: Almost Real-Time

One of the most innovative games of recent years was 7 Wonders (2010) a card-drafting, civilization-building game. Much of its innovation derives from the fact that it’s almost real-time: players choose and play cards simultaneously, but then wait until everyone is done before beginning the next round of play.

This near-real-time gameplay has some of the same challenges as real-time gameplay: you never know for sure that everyone is following the rules correctly. It’s easy to make mistakes like playing duplicates cards, buying resources (illegally) from yellow cards, or just getting confused about what resources you have access to. You have to assume that everyone is doing good enough.

7 Wonders also has another weakness that can be an issue in simultaneous play of this sort: timing. When players are putting down cards that might affect your ability to purchase resources or what you earn from playing cards of your own, it’s can be confusing trying to figure out which cards were already available and which were newly played. (Fortunately this doesn’t come up a lot.)

Despite these issues 7 Wonders is a terrific game. Although it’s not quite real-time, I’d love to see more games like 7 Wonders because they reduce the downtime of gaming almost as much as real-time play does, and so help everyone to have more fun more of the time.


Ubongo picture courtesy Toshiyuki Hashitani (moonblogger at BGG), released under a CC license. Factory Fun picture courtesy Daniel Danzer (duchamp at BGG), released under a CC license. Galaxy Truck picture courtesy Gary James (garyjames at BGG), released under a CC license. Space Alert picture courtesy Christian Becker (silk at BGG), released under a CC licenseMondo picture courtesy Z-Man Games’ website. Mad City picture also  courtesy Daniel Danzer (duchamp at BGG), released under a CC license

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12 thoughts on “Six Designs of Real-Time Games

  1. Interesting article. I have a question about this:

    > Ubongo isn’t exactly a real-time game by my definition.

    Strange, because I think Ubongo is absolutely a real-time game. Players are simultaneously competing; there are no turns. The player who solves his puzzle fastest wins the round.

    You say you have a definition of real-time games in that sentence, but you never actually spelled it out. What is that definition? What is it that you feel makes Ubongo not qualify as a real-time game?

    Also, I would highly recommend that you check out a few games:

    First, Space Dealer (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23451/space-dealer). This was recently re-implemented as Time ‘N’ Space, but I think Space Dealer is a much better game.

    Space Dealer is played to a soundtrack, like Space Alert (or Escape: The Curse of the Temple), but every player gets two sand timers. Players flip their timers in real-time. If you flip your timer on a mine, it produces a good when the timer finishes. When you fly your spaceship, you point it to a planet and flip your timer next to the ship. When the timer finishes, you have arrived at the planet. If you want to research a technology, you flip your timer on the technology. When the timer finishes, you now have that technology.

    It’s far from a perfect game, but it’s so wonderfully innovative, it’s one of my favorite games.

    Second, Tamsk (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/108/tamsk). This former member of the GIPF project is also a real-time hourglass flipping game, but it’s a 2-player abstract in which all the pieces are sand timers. If one of your timers runs out, it is frozen in place and cannot move. If you delay your turn, your opponent can flip another timer to force you to move.

    It’s simple, but fascinating. I’m not much of an abstract fan myself, but this one is excellent.

    Third, I’ll have to be self-indulgent and lame and recommend my own game, Prolix (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39635/prolix). This is a turn-based word game, but it has a real-time element. If a player takes too long, you can interrupt him and use your own word. It took me a few years to balance interrupts so they weren’t too weak or too powerful, but they give the game a unique punch.

    What I like about all three of these is that they’re real-time, but they’re not “twitch” games. Sometimes, taking your time is the right thing to do.

    • By my definition the real-time element of a game genuinely needs to be an element, not the goal. UBONGO was different because it’s solely about being the fastest; the other games are more complex because they involve trying to balance speed with efficiency and good play. So, I saw UBONGO more as an evolutionary step toward the more complex real-time games.

      I agree that SPACE DEALER is an extremely interesting real-time game, and it only escaped my mind because it went in and out of my collection. Having real-time interactions with adjacent players and taking actions that require you to set a timer (and wait it out) are both great game elements. I believe it went out of my collection mainly due to other issues (high set-up time, CD being a bit of an annoyance and that was before everything was an MP3). It was just too much of a labor to get it to the table.

      I’ve never played TAMSK, but I agree that the use of hourglasses on the pieces is ingenious (and sorry, I’ve never played PROLIX either).

      • Space Dealer was also immediately brought to mind in your article… although I don’t think I ever did play it with the CD, we just slapped down a 30 minute timer…

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  3. I’m confused by your initial assertion, that these games are rare. Other than roll-and-move games, real time games must be the most ubiquitous of all board games. Every plastic game with rolling or spinning pieces (such as Loopin Louis, Beat the 8 Ball, etc), every speed game (Halli Galli, Jungle Speed), every shooting game, basically any game that requires dexterity or speed (Set) is a real-time game. Add in all electronic games of yore, as well as VHS games and DVD games.

    Yehuda

    • I think that the category is pretty rare at the eurogame tabletop. I rarely see them played, and when I do, it’s one of just two or three possibilities.

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  6. Never thought about Real-Time games as a genre unto itself. Thanks for pointing me in that direction. I’ve always enjoyed the adrenaline rush of snap decisions, and now I can have more opportunities. Thanks again! “Galaxy Trucker Rules!”

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