Collusion turns 10

I don't exactly finish designs very quickly.  In particular, I have three games that I've actively worked on for more than ten years.  One is Sands of Time (2003-2015), a second is Lost Adventures (2005-present).  The third is Collusion, which this year at some point will become 10 years old.


This one has a silly origin story.  alea spiele's games all have a "complexity rating" from 1-10.  Puerto Rico is a 7, Princes of Florence a 6; I wondered, what would a 10 look like?  Obviously there are plenty of complex games that would rate a "10" on Alea's scale, but to design a game that could be a 10 and also conform to the other criteria that make an Alea game (i.e. componentry that could fit into one of their boxes, etc), seemed to be an interesting challenge.




My early iterations at this project were rather unfocused, but the design over the last few years clarified a bit into a game of flexible power.  You have a set of power discs and you can deploy these to give you permanent upgrades toward certain actions, or can hold them back to retain flexibility.  Some of your discs are deployed to a rondel, and each season you either take an action, using the power from the current season on the rondel, or pass and move this season's discs to the top of the next season's stack, giving you more power later in the year.  But actions can close out so you don't want to wait too long on the things you most want to do.  Why do you need power?  Because the actions have a varying cost and so having enough power to execute them is important.  But, you can form marriage alliances and call on your allies to provide you with power boosts in exchange for loaning them some of your discs.

Just because it should work doesn't mean it will

So here's where we hit the wrong turn.  We want actions to require power, and moreover to have a varying cost?  Let's then say that the power is indexed to the strength or quality of the thing you're trying to act on.  For example, you want to expand a barony?  The power needed is the size of that barony.  You want to add a faction tile to the board?  The power needed is the presence of that faction on the board already.  You want to add an estate?  The power needed is your presence on the board.  In some ways this isn't as bad as it sounds, but with 9 different factions, you need to track your intrinsic power in each faction AND the power needed for the target of each faction.  I came up with a few schemes to make this easier this via clever board layout but crucially, it never made the leap for some players from "I am thinking about what I can do" to "I am thinking about what I want to do". 


As a last attempt, I tried to rip out the target-based cost for the actions and just had a single cost for each faction that scales the more it's used.  Still nope.  The problem, it turned out, was 50% due to the cost thing, but also 50% due to the confusion of keeping track of your power in each faction.  It just didn't work.


Moreover, the game didn't have much collusion in it, truth to tell.  So, back to the drawing board.  But the upshot from the last failed go-around was that I had ordered little "aspirin pill" pieces in five colors for tracking your power in each faction, and so, can we use them for something else?


My latest idea is to streamline the actions and (for now) give each the same power cost.  That cost is high enough that you won't usually have that much power, so other players have to contribute 'influence' to support your chosen actions, and that's what the pills are now used for.  You have a limited supply per year.  Thus, you want to select actions that support your secret goals, but that are congruent with the interests of the other players, so they will invest support in your actions.  So there's "cut-throat cooperation".


Collusion




A few words about collusion are in order.  Each player has secret goal cards; maybe one says "Barony X is the biggest barony", another says "The Builders control 2 cities".  Additionally there's scoring for control of the baronies, based on the size of those baronies.  So your first instinct in playing a game like this is to try to find a way to achieve synergy between all of the goals you were dealt, and with grabbing the best baronies.  But in this game, the intent is actually that you will try to seek synergy with the goals of other players.  This comes through even more now that you need the players to directly invest in your actions to pull them off.  So if I have a "Barony X" goal, and I want to expand that barony, I can probably do that more easily if someone else is the baron and thus it's in their interest to help me.  This isn't technically the dictionary definition of collusion, but the idea is to find ways to create mutual interests of this sort, and I think there are a few layers on which you can do it.  I think the fact that scoring occurs only at the end also promotes this.

Actions in a sensible framework

I just bought alea's "In the Year of the Dragon" and realized that in many cases, what makes an alea game an alea game is a simple and unified action selection framework.  Their games (generally) don't have turns with a lot of phases or menus of turn actions that are wildly divergent in their effects.  This clarified for me the direction that the action system needs to go:  each 'season', one of the five 'baronies' is active, and each player is going to propose one action.  Each action will take place in one of the barony's territories, which means by implication that every action has to specifically perform an operation that can be associated with a territory or the stuff that's in a territory.  So some of the possible actions needed to be thrown out, because they don't fit this framework.




I think that the game that results is self-contained, although whether it's good is still TBD based on playtesting. 




Rules document here:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NU6VRy81rBpUar71Vp8R8c0ctO8kY6oh1ZtA2NR8yx4/edit?usp=sharing