I’ve been watching people play Civ again, as a writing break. It’s less dangerous than letting myself play the game, what with the likelihood of one-more-turning through the rest of the day. But all this Civ-watching is tickling a game idea I’ve had for a few years.

Years ago, there was an article on RockPaperShotgun reviewing a 4X game in which the writer mused on why there weren’t any 3X, or 2X games. For those unfamiliar with the term “4X,“ in this context it stands for “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate”—a series of objectives common to many real-time and turn-based strategy games, considered foundational to turn-based strategy games like Civilization. But that writer’s comments resonated with me. And while there are first-person exploration games and walking simulators (which might count as 1X games), I’m really curious about a map-based game.

Civilization, and games like it, engage me most during the early stages. It’s the exploration that really does it for me. The discovery of new possibilities, the uncovering of new places of interest, and the process of learning how to connect the places you already know with the places you’ve just found. These are similar to the themes and experiences that I love in exploratory RPGs.

By the time that I’ve reached mid-game, the game often feels more stagnant. I can usually run the numbers at that point and have an idea of whether I’ll win or lose, or I know that the focus of the game will shift to the (almost) inevitable grind of fighting some other group. I’ll need to declare war on someone else, or they’ll declare war on me and I’ll need to defend myself. And even there, I can often tell beforehand how those challenges will play out. It doesn’t help that the AI isn’t very good at using its military in most Civ games. This means that the game, which had been exciting and engaging and full of discovery, slows down and fills with busy-work and micromanagement.

I expect some people really like that stuff. Sometimes I find it rewarding too.

But I’d love to see something else. I’d love to see a game that is predominantly about exploration, and about making connections. Maybe it’s about spreading out from one point and building trade networks? Maybe it’s about finding ways to connect things you’ve discovered with your home. I’m honestly not sure, except that I know I want the game to be more about discovery and exploration than about any of the other eXes.

What’s kept me from making this, for the most part, is not having made time for it. That, and the pandemic, which has made playtesting with excited friends more difficult. But I want to try putting together something with index cards, flipping tiles from the top of a deck as you uncover new spaces. There are definite limitations to doing this by hand instead of programming it, but at least it would avoid needing to a) refresh my ancient programming skills to be able to program such a game, and b) figure out how to generate satisfying maps through procedural generation. Instead, I simply need to puzzle through how to make satisfying maps via kludge and fiat with tile placement.

If you do know of something like this, I’d love to hear about it. I’ll be sure to share whatever I discover, when and if I try it myself.