Dystemporalia

Each warrior and inspiration card in Anachronism bears an element icon, but these did not end up playing quite the role in Anachronism that its creator, Michael Brown, hoped they would.

Michael derived much of the inspiration for the elements from the East Asian tradition of pressure-point fighting. The Chinese version, I’m told, recognizes five elements—water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. These elements relate to each other in a sort of rock-paper-scissors fashion in two “cycles,” a creative cycle and a control cycle. In the creative cycle, water creates wood, wood creates fire, fire creates earth, earth creates metal, and metal creates water. In the control cycle, water controls (douses) fire, fire controls (melts) metal, metal controls (cuts) wood, wood controls (penetrates) earth, and earth controls (absorbs) water. As a relatively logical Westerner, I can perceive and appreciate the control cycle more easily than the creative cycle, but these cycles were in Michael’s mind as he incorporated in the elements into the early designs of Anachronism.

In the end, some of the relationship between the elements came through in theory, as evidenced by the “Elements” section of the Wikipedia entry on Anachronism. However, the rock-paper-scissors feel doesn’t seem to translate into the game mechanics. For example, it’s not necessarily true that a fire warrior is more effective than a wood warrior against a metal warrior. For the most part, the elements seem to have survived basically as another keyword that applied only to warriors and inspirations. Also, of course, Aether and Wind joined the five traditional Chinese elements—I’m not sure whether that was Michael’s doing, or came from one of the other designers who worked on the game before its initial release.

What do you think? Can you see reflections of the creative cycle and/or the control cycle in the actual mechanics of cards bearing the different elements? Which cards do you think implemented the elements best, and which fell flat? Which warriors and inspirations “fit” their elements best, and which least?

Last month, I had the opportunity to chat with Anachronism’s creator, Michael Brown, about the past and future of Anachronism and other projects he’s exploring. During the course of that conversation, I learned that Michael’s original design for Anachronism featured a 5×5 grid rather than the 4×4 grid that was actually released.

When I heard this, I immediately thought of the impact on “forward one, shoot, back one” strategies, which would suffer a serious blow on a 5×5 grid, unless you’re using one of the few Speed 4 warriors. By the way, Michael thinks that Speed 4 is—to paraphrase—broketastic on a 4×4 grid. Ditto for diagonal movement.

Michael’s original plan also called for variable grids. Sometimes you might play on a 5×5 grid, sometimes on 6×3, sometimes on a cross-shaped grid. Terrain features also figured into the original master plan—pits, spiked walls, and so on could have decorated your Anachronism games.

So what happened to the grid? Why did it become fixed at 4×4? The chief factor early on was purely pragmatic: the paper size for those early arenas just wouldn’t accommodate a 5×5 grid plus space for the deck and the rules. Printing considerations shrank the grid from 5×5 to 4×4.

What do you think? What impact would a 5×5 grid have on your style of Anachronism play? What grid shapes other than square would you find interesting? Share your ideas in the comments, and watch for the next installment in the series, coming in a few days.

Longtime Anachronism players will remember schoolteacher-turned-entrepeneur Michael Brown as the driving force behind the creation of Anachronism. Recently, my paths crossed with Michael again, and our conversations gave me a good bit of insight into the prehistory of Anachronism. I was surprised to learn that several of Michael’s original designs for Anachronism didn’t make it into the final product. Would you like to hear some of Michael’s ideas that got weeded out during the early design process? I thought you might! Tune in here during the coming weeks for a series of peeks into the designer’s original vision for Anachronism 1.0, to be followed by a contest series that will enhance Anachronism gameplay for five fortunate souls!

I recently had the privilege of making a research trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I was at the Met to research representations and echoes of the book of Genesis in Western artwork, but I took the opportunity, of course, to drink in as much of the collection as I could. The Met’s galleries include a small collection of pieces from the medieval game Tables, an older cousin of backgammon. Games of Tables would sometimes pit the Greco-Roman hero Hercules against the biblical strongman Samson. In the Met’s examples, shown here, Hercules’s piece is ivory-colored, while Samson’s has a reddish tint.

Hercules

Samson

Anachronism fans, you’ll be pleased to know that the Encyclopaedia Anachronistica now contains the proper card images for the set 7 promo cards Unicorinio Cuerno and Ordin de Balaur!

Also, I just realized today that some of the latest promo cards for sets 8 and 9—cards released by the online collective in January through March 2008—were not showing up in the Encyclopaedia. I have fixed the problem, and now those cards should be visible. This problem affected the following cards:

• Set 8
• Custer’s Last Stand
• Neptune
• O Potamos Sytx
• Poludamas
• Rostam
• Stonehenge
• Set 9
• Augustus
• Queen Elissar

Greetings, time travelers! Right after I post this notice, I am going to try to upgrade Dystemporalia to the latest version of WordPress. I hope this will cause no more than about five minutes’ worth of disruption to the services here. However, since it’s been a long time since I upgraded, there may be some time lag or I may run into problems. Don’t worry—I have everything backed up.

I’ve gotten a lot more response than I expected to my plans to shut down Dystemporalia … so I’m leaving it up! If you folks who are still playing Anachronism can get some use from the site, and won’t be mad at me if it sits where without a lot of updates, then I’ll keep it running. I feel a bit embarrassed at having a site that hasn’t been updated in two years, but if it doesn’t bother you, I won’t let it bother me!

After two years of not posting anything here on Dystemporalia, I think it’s probably time to shut the site down. The site takes up a reasonable chunk of disk space, and with Anachronism pretty much dormant at this point and no longer a part of my regular gaming regimen, I don’t see much reason to keep a non-growing site up.

The title of the post really says it all. The Korean and Norse cultures from Set 9 should now be fully functional in the Encyclopaedia Anachronistica and Online Playmat. The Pirates should be joining them soon, followed by recent promos missing from these resources.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything to Dystemporalia or updated Dystemporalia resources. This past spring semester has been pretty busy for me, and truly, life will continue to be quite busy for me offline. I’ve also been playing more role-playing and miniatures games than Anachronism since TriKing petered out.

However, I’m pleased to announce that the Set 9 Italian culture should now be fully functional in the Encyclopaedia Anachronistica and Online Playmat. I’ll try to get the other Set 9 cultures online in these resources soon. I apologize for the big delay. Thank you for your patience!