Here’s the Ludum Dare 36 entry I am working on.  I took the theme of Ancient Technology and thought about the story of how Solomon was said to have built the first aqueduct system in the middle east.  Whether this is true or not is up for debate, apparently, but I thought a game about building up an aqueduct system in ancient lands would be an interesting strategic theme.

So I spent yesterday evening doing a paper prototype of a game I’m calling Aqueducts of Solomon.  In it, you begin with a village at the end of a trade route, and you try to build up your empire by bringing down water from the high mountain springs, irrigate the lands, build up your cities, and eventually erect great temples.

It went really well.  After a few false starts, I hit upon some mechanics that offered a lot of strategic depth with very simple rules that really brought the idea of connecting places with aqueducts and roads to the forefront of the theme.

With the mechanics largely settled – there are a few things that still need tweaking, but the core gameplay is solid – I sat down and started doing some artwork and laying out the board.  Here’s a screenshot:

Here, you can see the game board which represents mountain highlands (on the left, elevation 3), steppes (elevation 2), and the desert lowlands (elevation one).  Two hexes have been developed – a village and a trade route.  The village lets you develop more hexes by playing cards (and paying their costs), and the trade route gives you one resource each round of your choice, which is super helpful when you’re first getting started.

Below that is your hand of cards, with the mouse hovering over the Aqueduct card.  The card shows the hex that you will build (an aqueduct) and the price (one stone).  On the left is a description of what the aqueduct will do for you when you build it.

This is all being rendered to an HTML5 canvas, so the game will be playable in the browser.  I’ve got the layout working pretty well, so now all that’s left to do is to hook everything up and start writing the controllers to handle the game flow.

The game works as a solitaire score-chaser.  You cannot lose the game, but you can do poorly.  You’re given a certain number of turns, and at the end of those turns, the game ends.  It will then count up the number of victory points you’ve gotten.  Your goal is to get a score worthy of Solomon himself.

After much tinkering and coding, Aqueducts of Solomon is now playable!

Aqueducts of Solomon is a solitaire strategy score-chaser, where you take the role of an ancient leader in the middle east trying to build your empire in an arid environment.  It is said that King Solomon pioneered the use of aqueducts, turning the desert into a fertile cornucopia, and you follow in his footsteps in this game.

The game borrows from tabletop gaming to create a fun, strategic exercise.  You draw cards that give you options for what to build onto a hex map that represents mountains on the left and lowlands on the right.  The hexes that you build give you different powers, and eventually, you will build up an empire to pull down the most victory points.

I’m really happy with the game, because I feel that the mechanics mirror the theme and strategy really well.  We’ve all played these worker-placement, empire builders before, but I feel that this one really does a good job of modeling why the aqueducts (and to a lesser extent, travel and commerce routes) played such an important role in the ancient world.   I’m quite pleased (and a bit surprised) how simple I was able to keep the mechanics while still evoking what I hoped to.

Here’s an animated GIF showing it in action:

You can play it on itch.io, play it here on ludumdare.com, or play it on our site with nicely-formatted instructions: Aqueducts of Solomon.