PENDULUM
SWING TURN
The clock is ticking, and there’s a swing turn incoming
Words by Christopher John Eggett
According to its page on the Stonemaier websites, Pendulum is ‘a competitive, turnless, asymmetric worker placement, time-optimization game’ – which to those of us passingly fluent in board game mechanics sounds like a joyful hot mess. Travis Jones, the designer of the game, takes us through what all of that means exactly.
Pendulum is played on a familiar looking worker placement Eurogame board, with areas to place meeples and generate resources. So far, simple enough. But instead of everyone taking turns around the table, everyone plays at once. How does this work? A series of sand timers sits next to each of the areas for generating resources, which once flipped, allow access to the resource generating goodies. The catch is that your worker you placed there can’t be retrieved until the timer has ticked out. Is this a game designed to punish timewasters?
“By no means do I hate people who suffer from analysis paralysis and that I just made this game to thwart them,” says Jones “when I tell this story about coming up with a way to mitigate analysis paralysis, that’s one of the things it does, but that wasn’t like the whole idea behind it was like, ‘Oh man, I really want to punish AP players.’ Cause I totally do it myself.”