The Jagged Time is a narrative deckbuilder game based on the Late Bronze Age Collapse. It is a game about complex systems, institutional inertia, and civilizational collapse. It was produced, along with a written thesis manuscript, as part of my Masters of Design degree at Concordia University.

In this game, you take on the role of the People of the Reeds, an analogue for New Kingdom Egypt, and guide them through four hundred years of history, culminating in an endgame crisis that parallels the Late Bronze Age Collapse of the 12th century BCE. You will manage your society’s growing complexity, its relationship with its neighbours, and the many compromises and contingencies that shape the course of history.

My goals in designing this game were threefold: first, to explore the historical strategy genre which is dominated by 4X titles like Sid Meier’s Civilization in a novel mechanical context; second, to make a game advancing a specific historical argument (see: “What I did,” below); and third, to make a game that tried to explore reactive, compromise and collapsed-focused gameplay rather than conventional narratives of infinite growth and player empowerment.

I designed and made the entire game, top to bottom. This includes designing the game’s mechanics, its cards, conducting historical and sociological research to inform the design, and producing both a full ruleset and thesis manuscript.

For historical references, I drew particularly on 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline and The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. Both of these informed not only the historical arc of the game, but also its core mechanics. Cline (tentatively) advances a systems-collapse explanation for the Late Bronze Age Collapse: no one factor, from environmental changes to epidemic disease to the arrival of the Sea Peoples, can adequately explain the complete disintegration of Hittite, Mycenean, Minoan, and other societies of the era. Rather, a confluence of all of these factors at once, in close geographic and temporal proximity, caused a negative feedback loop that resonated through the tightly-interconnected Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean and bringing about a general collapse.

For my definition of both collapse and complexity, I drew on Joseph Tainter, who defines complexity as a simultaneous increase in social stratification and social organization and collapse as a sudden reduction in both of these things. ‘Collapse’ is not strictly negative in Tainter’s framing; if anything, even as it causes widespread suffering, collapse is nevertheless a rational and even preferable outcome to many of the people living in a collapsing society.

Mechanically, this game is a deckbuilder – you accumulate a set of social institutions which you can play in order to gather the resources necessary to deal with an escalating number of internal and external crises. My guiding principle in designing the game is that every turn should present a puzzle, which it is up to the player to figure out how to solve with the limited resources at their disposal. By design, this usually means making compromises or accepting long-term harms for short-term benefits. The traditions of dead turns weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the player, as it were.

I would like to revisit these ideas someday from the other angle – the player as an agent of social collapse, rather than trying to prevent it – but whatever that game may one day be, it is not The Jagged Time.

Where to play it

A playable save file (with Tabletop Simulator) is available on my itch.io page.

If you’d like to just read the rules, rules reference, or my thesis manuscript, you can find them here:

1. How to Play
2. Rules Reference
3. History as a Playable System: Modeling the Bronze Age Collapse in The Jagged Time (aka: my Masters thesis)