Titanomachina Development: How to lose the Deadline Marker

Quite early on in the development of Titanomachina I realized that the game needs to have an end-point, something to give players both a sense of urgency, and to keep the game closer to an hour to play rather than some greater amount of time. So, cribbing from Blood Bowl, I implemented an arbitrary time limit based on the dimensions of the game (18 rounds), implemented a game track to record-keeping purposes and a deadline marker to move along it and it's worked out ever since. However, there was the issue of then needing to include a deadline marker, and putting the track on the board (preventing the board from being expanded with additional Titanomachina sets). The board art required the track, which was a hassle, and the punchboard needed the deadline marker art, and so on. Additionally, as I proceeded with the development of Titanomachina I found trimming parts was my best way forward rather than adding stuff. 

Lately I've been exploring ways to lose the board, and that was not hamstrung by my need to figure out how to implement the game track and initiative track without a board, because I had already experimented with boards not featuring explicit game and initiative tracks. Initiative was determined by stacking some spare building blocks, with the order going from top to bottom. The deadline marker moved around the edge of the board, with the board itself conveniently (and not coincidentally) being 9x9 squares so that a game was complete once the deadline marker had moved along two sides of the board. Combining the two so that the initiative stack (that third dimension is great, by the way) also tracks as the deadline marker is logical, in that it uses existing game elements to express the same logic of priority and time. Altering the rules to cope with the change from a board with defined tracks to a more abstract, structural representation would require new diagrams and nomenclature rather than any structural change, which is good. 

Practically-speaking, this enables me to fit Titanomachina into a smaller, more space-efficient box. If I include 100 building blocks in the box, then each player has 24 to play on the board, plus 1 more for tracking initiative and the deadline. I would need to double the number of tiles though, as I would need 48 Road/Roundabout tiles, 16 T-junction/L-bend tiles, and 32 Foundation tiles, or tiles that would replace the board in the empty squares where roads cannot be placed. 

Below is something of a mock-up using an old biscuit tin, an earlier prototype of the building blocks (wooden cubes with stickers in the appropriate colours, which is good enough for me, but not colour-blind people), all the cards (including 16 Dashboard cards), 48 Road/Roundabout tiles, a deadline marker/cube (for 101 blocks), a baggy of colour-coded shield tokens (translucent plastic bingo chips), a single dry-erase marker, and four 3D printed Titans with twelve weapons on not-strictly-necessary hexagonal bases. The deadline marker would be another component lost to free up space for more tiles, and maybe stuff like the utility buildings or whatnot. As you can see, 8"x8"x3" can fit quite a lot.