Ultimatums

Our family has had fun over the years with Chinatown; everyone seems to really like the haggling and negotiation.  My wife adopts an especially, shall we say, confrontational style to negotiation, with lots of threats and ultimatums and cajoling.  It's kind of entertaining.  But it got me to thinking several years ago about a game based on this concept -- a game whose central action revolved around issuing ultimatums to the other players.  It would be a game nastier than Diplomacy, a game nastier than intrigue-rich backstabbing games -- it would be a game about stabbing people in the chest.


My first take on this was a territorial game a la Risk but with a diplomatic layer involving an obligatory issuance of an ultimatum to another player each turn.  It never made it to testing, but I don't think it was quite what I was looking for.  For one thing, our family doesn't play that kind of game, so it's not clear it would have been all that well received, and for another, having the ultimatums be something you must do, as opposed to something you can do, seems beside the point.


Nevertheless the core premise of a territorial game seems appropriate -- you're the ruler of some country and are trying to prop up your failing regime by appearing to be louder than your neighboring countries.  So there are silly currencies like your country's disgruntledness and bluster tokens and so on.  But the central absurdity of the game has to come from the ultimatums themselves.


Hence my next idea was/is that you're tracking several aspects of your nation -- its arts, its innovations, its public works, etc.  There are cards that you acquire to promote these, and each has an intrinsic value but also an icon or two, which, when combo'd with other cards, gives more points.  So there's something you're aiming for.


If you're going to issue an ultimatum, there has to be something you're going to threaten to do, so maybe each card has an associated failure mode, and you can play a failure mode to destroy someone's card, possibly taking out that card or all cards in the set with that mode or all cards in that set period.


Let's talk for a second about an ultimatum.  It is, to my understanding, something that conforms to this construct:  "Do X, or else I will do Y".  It's not "Do NOT do X, or else I will do Y".  That's a threat.  It's not "If you do X, then I will do Y".  That's a promise.  It's not "Do X, AND I will do Y".  That's a deal.  The key principle that this encapsulates is that you are commanding the player to do something specific, that they are permitted under the rules to do, and if they fail to do it, you are going to take the threatened course of action.


Immediately then we see a few things.  First, it's essential that the thing you're asking them to do has to be something they can do immediately.  It can't be something that ordinarily requires a turn action or that involves doing something to a third party; otherwise we need to track ultimatums that were issued and whether they were fulfilled or not.  Second, it's essential that the thing you're threatening to do is also something that it's theoretically possible for you to do on your turn, but the other player should not know for certain whether you can or will actually do it.  This suggests that those attack cards should be secret.


With these things in place, what I realized is that this game is actually technically a deal-making game, but it's a game about making negative deals:  you are crafting two unpleasant options for your opponent and banking on their choosing the one that costs you nothing as opposed to the one that requires a turn action to execute.  You want destructive actions to be difficult enough to set up that the other player isn't quite sure if you can follow through on it, although the opportunity cost of an action spent following through should be high enough that sometimes you'll choose not to follow through even though you're able to.


There are a few implications of this.  First, it means that there has to be enough variety to your holdings that there's some scope for creativity.  Again, you're crafting deals here.  If it's simply "give me that card, or I'll blow it up!" that won't be very fun for very long.  You want to be able to cook up more varied and creative schemes than that.  So in addition to cards, the game may need a spatial layer and possibly an economy.  The spatial layer can be quite simple -- perhaps each pair of players has a row of three tiles between them, and a marker showing the 'front' between them.  You should want to push the front forward for some reason.  The economy can be similarly simple, maybe you simply have to provide some amount of support for the tiles you control or must pay to acquire cards or something like that.


Second, it means that building the game around card acquisition would be misplaced.  If I can acquire cards in some peaceful way or in an aggressive way, there are a lot of players who will choose the peaceful option despite the boisterous theme of the game.  The game has to incentivize confrontational play.  So maybe instead it's that we each have a randomly-dealt set of cards, which we allocate to our different cultural aspects.  Surrendering or losing any of these is harmful in that it increases our disgruntledness, but it will nevertheless be the case that the set we're given at the start is random and other players will have cards that we'd like to acquire to form better combos for more points.  So we want to craft ultimatums that get us better cards, and to be able to issue potential consequences that are harmful enough that they're likely to be accepted.


Of course there has to be the opportunity for petty diplomacy and retaliation, and maybe this gives a possible role for direct threats as a way of escalating in the case of an ultimatum -- you can say "no, you can't have X, but if you do Y, I will do Z!"  Again this requires some tracking so it isn't great, but I like the idea of an aggressive action triggering a chain of aggression.


I haven't mentioned some of the other silly ideas like a turn action that lets you insult another player's country to gain some 'bluster' tokens, or the ability to use a free action to declare war on another player, which has no gameplay effect.


The game would of course need to place some boundaries on what you can ask for and what you can threaten as a consequence.  It wouldn't make sense to be able to say "Give me X, or else I will do [an action that causes you no harm]". 


I think this game has the potential to provide quite a different experience from other games, but my hope is that it can be substantive enough that it has more staying power than just a play-through or two for the silly experience of shouting at each other.  It's not intended to be super-thinky but it should at least have some substance. 


Alternatively the core idea of ultimatum-issuing could be used in some sort of truth-or-dare-esque party game, or could perhaps be used in a game like Gauntlet of Fools where we're going to run some sort of simultaneous gauntlet or race and the ultimatums are about handicapping ourselves as a result of ultimatums issued.  But neither of these styles of games personally appeal to me so that's not currently the direction I'm taking this in, although it may end up there in the end.