Dynasty: The Spread of Culture in Ancient China

 About a month ago (maybe two by now) I said I should make an in-depth post about Dynasty. So here we go!

History

As I have said, Dynasty is at once my newest game design, and one of my oldest. I had the idea for this game a full 20 years ago (!), a game where you would gain access to resources by founding villages. Where you'd move leaders around and conquer each other's villages. Where you'd invent technologies... and in doing all this, you'd assimilate other players' culture, taking their culture chits onto your player board, and as you fill up your board with chits, you gain benefits such as upgrading villages to cities to gain access to more, and rarer, resources.

I revisited these ideas time and time again over the years, in blog posts, or in my notebook. At one point I assembled 1/2 of a physical prototype (I suppose that's still around here somewhere), but I never finished it -- my biggest hurdle was creating a large tech tree full of technologies with costs and effects. I knew what I wanted a lot of the effects to be, but actually creating the tech tree seemed like such an onerous task that I just never got up the impetus to do it.

Rebirth

A couple of months ago thoughts of Dynasty crept back into my mind again, and this time I enlisted the help of ChatGPT to just list out a bunch of (a) resources that would make sense in an ancient China setting, and (b) a list of inventions that came out of China in that era. I had some from before that I'd looked up or read about, but I figured I could use a big list to choose from, then I could figure out what game effects I wanted to use, assign them to various inventions, to finally build the tech tree that had been holding me back.

While I was at it, I asked the chat bot to map the inventions into tech areas with sensible pre-requisites. It took some doing, and a fair bit of my own editing, but the AI output was at least helpful in that it got me over the hump to create this tech tree, even if the output wasn't a nice, finished tech tree on its own.

The other things I needed to create a playable prototype were a map board and iconography. The board seemed simple -- I'd always imagined an outline of China, split arbitrarily into 8 or 10 regions, each region with a particular resource in it... the "common" resources would appear in 2 regions each, the "uncommon" resources would appear in 1 region each, and the "rare" resources would not appear in any regions, they would come from cities or technologies. I asked the chatbot to help me create a simple map of China divided into 10 regions, and hilarity ensued:

So I decided to back up a step. I told it "Let me go simpler.... let's start with a simple outline of China, as if drawn on parchment with calligraphy, black lines on parchment" (it did, see below). Then I asked it to "please draw similar black lines to divide that map into 5 regions, each one touching 2 others." Again, hilarity:

For those counting along at home, that image on the right has more than 5 regions! In fact, it has 10, which is what I was after in the first place, so I called it a win and edited it in MS Paint or GIMP to tweak some of the lines and stuff

On the next bit, the chatbot did a better job... I needed player icons, so I asked it to create 6 ancient-China appropriate icons that are simple, distinguishable from each other, and legible at a small size (say 1/4 inch circle):

Culture icons

Then I asked it for icons for the resources. There are 10 different resources, so it ended up overlapping colors on some, and in true AI fashion, it used kind of detailed art rather than simple icons. Also in true AI fashion, it gave me 11 "icons" for 10 resources, it mislabeled one of them when I asked it to add labels, and then it weirdly changed the image on one of them when I asked it to fix that -- in the end I just discarded the unnecessary one: 

First try

Mislabeled the silkworm one

Two silk! Close enough.

It did a fine job with Village and City tile images. I later added culture icons to these in GIMP for ease of scoring:

Next I wanted images for the four main actions in the game. It did a great job except with the labels, so this final version was just the 2nd try:

Now it was time to finally tackle that tech tree! AI had been pretty helpful thus far, so I was hopeful it could help me get this thing made somehow. I listed all the effects I wanted to have -- I came up with about a dozen of them -- and asked it to pair the effects with some of the inventions we'd listed previously in a way that made some kind of sense. After some back and forth and some consideration on my part, the chatbot created this 1st draft of a tech board for me:

I could tell right away that a better way to go would be to have it make the techs, and then assemble it myself in GIMP, and eventually, that's exactly what I did. Also, I added a few techs to bring the total to 16, and I assigned resource costs to each:

Later I revamped the costs, but that's not too relevant to the story

The next step for this tech tree, after some playtesting, will be to increase the costs pretty much across the board, and maybe even add more different resources to help ensure that a player won't just have everything they need in mid-game, making it interesting to keep getting access to resources, or else choosing to trade for them.

New Action Selection Mechanism

As I mentioned in my last post, nowadays games like this generally have a logistical or personal puzzle involved in the action selection, and I also like engine building in games (as I've said before, all I can do is design Eminent Domain over and over again). So, I gave it some thought and came up with an action selection mechanism that sounded good to me: 

Each of the four actions in the game will be dealt a random assortment of action cubes (color coded to the actions, of course). Each turn you'll choose an action to resolve, then you'll take a cube from that action's space in the display and add it to your player board, powering up the action associated with that cube. For example, you might do a Village action, then take a red cube from the village space and place it in the red (Leader) section of your player board, powering up your future Leader actions.

When you get to 5 cubes of a color, you get a bonus action of that type, then discard some of those cubes from your board, dropping your power level back down a bit (you actually lock one cube in first, and discard the rest, so over the course of the game that action still gets stronger in general). And when you take the last cube from an action space, you trigger a mini-scoring based on which space it was (for example if it was the Invent space, the players with the most and 2nd most Inventions get a reward), then all of the cubes are cleared out of all the action spaces and they're refilled like during setup.

I like how this is working out. In a way it's like Eminent Domain's deck learning in that each turn you do an action and get stronger at an action, but unlike EmDo, in this case it's not necessarily the same action (currently it could be, though I've considered a rule that makes it impossible to power up the same action you just took -- I'm not sure it's worth the hassle though).

First Playtest/Early Iterations

Finally, on Feb 12, 2026, after 20 long years of thinking about this game, I got it to the table for a first test! We had a shaky start as I realized I'd costed early game things kinda high, and so nobody could do much at first, but after a few turns (and an audible to removing resource costs on gaining leaders), we actually began to be able to play for real, and from that point on it went very smoothly. What a relief!

After that first game I had some obvious tweaks and changes to try the next time. Each of those early playtests led to improvements pretty quickly, and a short 3 months later I found myself playing the game with a prospective publisher!

Success!

The development timeline on this game has been very atypical for me, so I guess it stands to reason that after the unusually long 20 year idea-to-prototype phase, the prototype-to-pitching phase should be an unusually short 3 months. And to continue the "everything is unusual" nature of this game, I was super excited that the publisher reps who played the game all seemed to like it quite a bit. In fact, they wanted to play it some more on their own, and about a week later I got the best kind of response email you can get from a publisher:

We played Dynasty again and love it even more. We are interested in signing it!

And sign it they did! As of yesterday I have a contract in hand, and I'm super excited for this game to move forward. I understand these things take a long time, so I won't hold my breath, but when it gets close to time to launch the game, or a kickstarter campaign, or whenever there's official news to share, I'll be sure to post about it anywhere I can :)