Games are basically an excuse to communicate with your friends and have something interesting to rif on. Card games, board games, pool, the best of these are interesting in themselves, but are not so absorbing that you can't talk about other things at the same time.
The casual game and board game world is undergoing a golden age of game design, but many of these games don't translate well to online play.
This is because there are many fun mechanics that take advantage of the fact that folk are sitting at a table at the same time, mechanics like auctions and timers provide a realtime tension and drama that is great. But these realitme aspects keep one from being able to translate these games to the internet without still requiring that everybody block out 2 or 3 hours to get together at the same time.
In todays world it's often not practical for adults to schedule two to three hours with others, our schedules are fragmented. Even when we can do so with a group of as few as 4 or 5 folk, someone can't make it each time. This makes running a longer continuing game even more problemmatic.
That is the problem "Turnstyles" aims to solve.
So the core mechanic of turnstyles is to adopt many of the good turn based mechanics of these games, while avoiding any realtime mechanics that will get in the way and to chunk turns into consistent managable time slices so that each player fills out their turn on their own schedule.
To create non-realtime games that still have interesting mechanics and still enable meaningful communication with your friends via roleplaying and storytelling over a long period of time.
Whether it is one turn that takes 15 minutes a day, an hour or two a week, or three or four hours every month, the key is that the chunk sizes are consistent and manageable for the players and that nobody has to be online at the same time.
Because what's even more fun than sitting at a table and playing together is to constantly be playing in the back of your mind while going about your daily tasks. Thinking about mysteries, thinking about your story, engaging in diplomacy with your friends and potential enemies, filling out your turn and writing your story on your own schedule.
The criteria of whether a turnstyles game good is not how much time you spend playing it, but how much time you spend thinking about it while at work, in the shower, driving the kids to soccer.
A turnstyles game may have mechanics, but the mechanics should exist to create the reality upon which one can tell a story through roleplay.
When you have to accomplish things via mechanics it makes it feel more like a real accomplishment and grounds your story in a dramatic envelope of successes and failures.
At the end of playing a game with your friends, you should end up with an illustrated book that you can print out, put on your bookshelf, and discuss with your friends a decade later.
There are two prototypes that I'm currently working on.
"Space Opera" which is a traditional 4x space game like "Masters of Orion" or "Stars!", but with more of a storytelling focus. This one is first because the mechanics of the genre are so familiar as to make the basic design part fairly easy and reliable.
The other is "The Plot Garden" which is a mystery storytelling game. It's second because the game design component will take more ingenuity and I want to have a working engine before focsuing on too many unique ideas that will require experimentation and playtesting.