Pendulum

Pendulum is a 2020 competitive board game published by Stonemaier Games and designed by Travis Jones. Its premise is unusually direct: the Timeless King of Dünya has vanished, and the players are powerful nobles competing to become the next ruler. Rather than presenting a campaign or a scripted adventure, the game turns that succession crisis into a simultaneous worker-placement contest.

Pendulum is designed for one to five players, with a stated playing time of roughly 60 to 90 minutes. Its central feature is real-time play. Three sand timers govern the game’s worker-placement areas, and each timer has a different duration: 45 seconds, two minutes, or three minutes. When a timer is running, workers can be placed in its associated area; when the timer runs out, that area changes what actions are available. The result is a game in which players must make decisions while the timing system is actively shifting, rather than waiting through conventional turns.

Players seek victory through four tracks: Power, Prestige, Popularity, and Achievement. A player’s final score is limited by the lowest of these four values, so specializing in a single strength is not enough. Pendulum therefore combines its time pressure with a balancing problem: gaining ground in one category can be less useful if another track falls behind. Resources and special actions help players develop their positions, while asymmetric noble powers give different characters distinct capabilities.

The base game includes a solo mode and supports competitive play with player boards that represent each noble. Stonemaier also released an official “Automa” system for solo opponents, allowing a single player to face an automated rival. The publisher made the game’s rulebook, player aids, and other materials available digitally, a notable part of its launch and a practical response to the game’s intricate timing and iconography.

Pendulum was released after Stonemaier’s more widely known titles such as Scythe and Wingspan, but it deliberately moves away from their turn-based rhythm. Its identity rests on the interaction between worker placement and sand timers: players are not merely choosing efficient actions, but choosing when to commit workers and when to wait for a better opening. That mechanism gives the game its distinctive tension and makes the disappearance of Dünya’s ruler feel mechanically relevant: every succession candidate is racing the clock, and no player can safely ignore the changing pace of the board. Its unusual structure makes every placement a small scheduling decision.