SIMULTANEOUS TURN RESOLUTION
All players' orders executing at once — plan phases where both sides commit blind, then resolution where the plans collide — rather than alternating turns.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING TURN-BASED
- COMMON IN TACTICS · STRATEGY · WARGAME · COMPETITIVE
Frozen Synapse is the form's showcase (both squads' five-second plans execute together, and the drama is the collision of predictions), Diplomacy is its century-old board ancestor (simultaneous written orders, adjudicated together — betrayal's natural habitat), Atlas Reactor and Warhammer-adjacent digital adaptations run planning/resolution rounds, racing and auction board game adaptations (RoboRally's programmed movement) execute queued moves in chaos, and Dominions' multiplayer resolves entire strategic turns simultaneously by server. Designers choose simultaneity because it deletes the alternating turn's twin artifacts — first-mover advantage and perfect reaction (in alternating play you always respond to a completed move; in simultaneous play you respond to a prediction) — replacing them with the yomi layer: reading opponents, second-guessing their reads of you, and committing under genuine uncertainty. The result plays like chess crossed with poker — pure information becomes mutual mind-reading — and resolution becomes theater, the phase where everyone learns together whether their model of the opponent was right. Simultaneity also solves multiplayer pacing structurally: no waiting for turns means eight players plan in parallel, which is why play-by-mail and async formats gravitated to it. Key decisions: resolution ordering rules for conflicts (when both units grab the same tile, who wins — initiative stats, action-type priorities, or physics; these edge rules ARE the game), how much of the opponent's committed plan leaks before resolution (Frozen Synapse shows last turn's full truth; Diplomacy shows nothing), and replay/preview tooling — players must be able to simulate their own plan against hypotheses, or planning is guesswork stacked on guesswork. Pitfall: resolution incomprehensibility — when plans collide, the outcome must be reconstructable ('I lost the tile because rock beats scissors on initiative'), because simultaneous resolution already asks players to accept losing to predictions; losing to opaque adjudication on top of that converts the yomi game into a slot machine with a planning phase.
SEEN IN
- FROZEN SYNAPSE
- DIPLOMACY
- ROBORALLY