Making History Out of Order, But With Kingdom

Over the past few years we’ve played some pretty huge Kingdom legacy games. Yes, the rules say you can make each new era in the past or future of your community, but on a whim I wondered just how often we actually played out of chronological order? Luckily I have all the data, so figuring that out is super easy…

As a baseline, this first charts shows what it would look like if we just kept playing in chronological order. Sessions are shown from left to right, with a longer flat line meaning we played more sessions in that era. The vertical axis shows where in the history each era falls, with lower being earlier and higher being later. So this is just each era following the last, forward in time.

And here’s the Kingdo-mon campaign, 13 eras over 112 sessions. The orange line is where in history the first Kingdom we made falls, because I think it’s interesting to see how we do or don’t cluster around that starting “present”.

So every time the connecting diagonal line goes up, we’re going forward in time (aka making a new era that is later than the last one), and every time it goes down, we’re going backward in time. The vertical distances are not a to-scale measure of time, like how many years apart things are, just how many eras there were in between.

And then here’s the Witches campaign, 12 eras over 68 sessions (so far).

Just at a glance, it’s interesting how we tend to bounce around in time, rather than stay near the previous era when making the next one. I think it’s the natural urge to change up: we just did a modern era, so let’s do something ancient or far in the future, etc.