The Advantages of Clock-Gating Over Cooldowns in Board Games

A long time ago, I made a game in the style of Bomberman. Players moved around a grid, planting bombs that went off after a while, causing different effects. I needed a way to track how much time was left on each bomb, but using countdown tokens was tedious given the number of bombs to update.

I solved this upkeep problem by assigning each bomb a number. Every turn, a circular clock track advanced, and all bombs matching the next number on the clock went off. This is an example of clock-gated effects, a powerful alternative to cooldowns that assigns each effect specific turns when it may be used. Clock-gating creates the same delay between uses as cooldowns but does not require tracking how much time remains before a cooldown expires for each ability individually.

Cooldowns are common in MOBAs and other real-time video games, where they balance powerful abilities by limiting usage. As I found in my Bomberman game, cooldowns require significant upkeep in board games, but clock-gating does not. Besides reducing upkeep, clock-gating also creates new ways to balance abilities and improves the game's texture by providing temporary opportunities.

Studies in Sorcery is a great example of a game that uses clock-gating to balance ability usage. Players take on the role of students at an academy of the dark arts, completing various class assignments that give them both points and new abilities. The game plays out over four "months," each consisting of four rounds. Each round is tied to a phase of the moon. Some powerful abilities can only be used during a specific moon phase.

Because they can be restricted to specific moon phases, games with clock-gating can separate broken ability combos in a way that is impossible with cooldowns. For example, the Lunar Eclipse card in Studies and Sorcery lets you take an additional project action every new moon phase, potentially doubling the effectiveness of powerful project actions. Since the ability only works during the new moon, any project action that is too powerful to use twice in one turn can be restricted to a different phase to prevent synergy with Lunar Eclipse.

Another advantage of clock-gating is that it improves the game's texture by creating a temporary opportunity. A player's efficiency varies depending on whether they can take advantage of clock-gated opportunities, resulting in a strong contrast between turns.

To use clock gating, you need to find a thematic way to label the different turns. In a game like Studies in Sorcery that takes place over several months, lunar phases make sense, but you could just as easily gate abilities to a time of day like 8 PM or a day of the week like Tuesday, depending on the timescale of your game.