Pendulum

I'm a big fan of Stonemaier Games, Viticulture was the game that got me into the modern board gaming hobby and Wingspan was my first game that I fell deep into and love. I appreciate the effort and thoughtfulness Jamey Stegmaier operates, with his Ask Me threads in BGG, his YouTube videos going over games and mechanics that interested him, and his blogs on the industry as a publisher and designer. I'm also a big fan of weird and interesting game designs, such as the successful fusion of worker placement seen in Lost Ruins of Arnak. So when the announcement trailer came for Pendulum, a worker placement game with sand timers and touting "the highest-rated protoype in the history of the Stonemaier Games Design Day", needless to say I was very much on board with it.

Chasing Time

In this game, you play as a faction vying for power with the goal of becoming the ruler of the lands. I do feel like the theme is a little weak but the art is gorgeous. The game play concept is pretty simple: your workers can only take actions when there's a sand timer next to them, but you can't place or retrieve workers in an area with a sand timer, making it locked until the timer is flipped to the other section. So you'll want to have workers that you can bounce between the different areas, especially since the timers have different lengths.

The black timer is the fastest, with only 45 seconds, and it has fairly standard but small resource gathering actions. The green timer lasts for 2 minutes and has some more powerful actions, such as going up the victory tracks. The purple timer is probably the most important one: not only is it the longest duration of 3 minutes but it also determines the end of a round. Once its been flipped 3 times, the round will end and no more timers can be flipped until the Council phase has been complete.

The whole flipping timers thing and having periods of rushing action along with contemplative moments of waiting almost makes me liken it to those chess clocks in a way (and yes, I admit, I've never played timed chess but I get the gist from seeing it played). Because its real time, there's the possibility that collisions will occur with players trying to go to the same spot. For this, there's a priority system with the Privilege track which gets changed during the Council phase based on votes accrued during a round. While I hadn't had it occur in a multiplayer session, this Privilege track is really important in solo for the benefits alone. Though in multiplayer gaining votes is also pretty critical as the Privilege track also determines order for getting reward cards.

The biggest issue is that because its real time, generally if you can think and act quicker you will do better, just as Tom from the Dice Tower said in his review. I have played this exactly once with other people, and it was a 4-player game. There were times where people would flip timers and you'd see people react in a "you got me" happy but frustrated way because they were too late to place their worker. I see it as a pro and con, the game definitely favors faster thinkers, but I think it's not the most severe thing as people are just going to make bad moves occasionally when under pressure anyways.

Managing time alone

So in my mind, this is almost purely a solo game. Thankfully, the Automa design is really well done and simplified. Rather than having to manage stuff, you just flip a card and do what it says. Often the Automa tries to flip timers in case you leave any at rest. Other times it will manipulate the Grande workers in the purple or green zones in order to block you from placing smaller workers there. And lastly it will sometimes remove provinces so that the board can stay somewhat fresh with options other than just waiting for the end of round cleanup.

There's a positive and negative I have with the difficulty of solo, which uses a rank system of A through F. I praise Automa Factory and other solo variants that actually provide a range of difficulty to play. It's one of the reasons why I let go of my copy of Viscounts of the West Kingdom, while it was an intriguing game I felt like the 4 "difficulties" were all playing at expert/designer level and were just cheating too much. The one drawback is I never feel good enough to play at the harder difficulties for Pendulum, they suggest that you start out with Level B. So it's great that you can drop down to Level A and have an even easier time, but I do feel like things ramp up at C and I can't even fathom how you would beat the harder difficulties. If I remember, I think I may have been close to beating C once in the past, but that was fighting tooth and nail for it.

One thing I do like however is that you do get into a sort of rhythm or flow state. Planning your actions in-between executing them, there's times where you're anticipating a timer to flip it as fast as possible and there's others where you desperately want to hold off or even let the state of the timers reset in order to get things done in the order you want them. And this is where I think the Automa wins out because of one simple rule: If you flip a green or black timer while the purple timer is off, you must flip a card. This adds a flavor of push-your-luck to the solo mode that isn't really present when playing multiplayer, as often people are more trigger happy with flipping timers. For solo, I feel its pretty meaningful strategy to sometimes attempt for more actions at the risk of having that pivotal purple time flip.

Overall, its one that I've kept in my collection. Partially due to it being a Stonemaier game and in some ways I have nearly all of their games. Partially because of its uniqueness within my collection, I just don't have almost any real time games. And also partially for the novelty of it being so weird. Understandably, this one was a bit of a polarizing and niche game, but I do find I still enjoy playing it. While I currently rate it lower amongst my collection, I think it'd be hard to let go. For all its faults, it does one thing well and that's provide an experience that is unique to it - and that goes pretty far for my tastes.