In 2017, my final attempt at making the cost matrix approach to the game fell flat with three of my most trustworthy playtesters. It just wasn't going to work, and I had to try something else.
I reduced the number of factions from 9 to 6, kept the idea that each faction has an action type, but did away with the idea that each faction's actions are limited each year. And, I kept the concept of loyalty and some of the ideas about cost discounts and such.
But I made two really sweeping changes that I think were wise. First, I had just gotten a copy of In the Year of the Dragon and Broom Service, and was thinking about alea games and how they all get great depth out of simple turn mechanics. I needed a similarly simple turn system, but I wanted something original as well. I settled on an idea inspired by the old 'king's tour' concepts: each year, the king was going to visit several of the baronies all in succession. In each barony, each player would propose one of the six available actions in one of that barony's territories. And each action had a 'power track', which you boosted with your intrinsic power based on the factions you influence, the alliances they're in (loyal/disloyal), and with some of those power discs.
Second, in the previous version I had ordered little aspirin pieces to use for tracking your influence in each of the 9 factions, and now I had no further use for them. I decided that they could be used to provide 'support' to the actions that were proposed, advancing them further on the 'power track'. And, whichever actions exceeded the (faction-specific) power threshold would happen. And then we'd move on to the next barony and do the same thing. But you only had a fixed amount of support to spend for the year, so, use it wisely.
We played -- yes, you guessed it -- half of a game of this, and once again it didn't work. Except, parts of it really worked. The support idea was great: it led to all sorts of interaction and deal-making and horse-trading. There was finally something that looked like actual collusion between the players: we're proposing actions but need to work together to make those actions actually come off. I'll support your action if you support mine. It was fun, even if the deals we were striking weren't especially creative or interesting.
The parts that didn't work were the same things that always didn't work. The connection between factions as entities on the board and factions as the source of actions was confusing. The idea of intrinsic power in a faction was confusing. The tracking of alliances and loyalty was confusing. And some of the actions, which manipulated these things, still seemed disconnected from the actual goals that you as a player were trying to advance.
Thus, in a final act of merciless whittling, I decided to cut the number of actions down to 4, and to have dedicated tiles for each action type that were disconnected from the factions, also cutting out the idea that influence over a faction gave you some kind of discount in that faction's action type.
So, to propose an action, you just place its tile into a territory, and then there's a track that shows who proposed what action and how close that action is to success. But I also decided that instead of a threshold, it could just be that the actions that received the most support were the ones to happen: no intrinsic power, no loyalty, just the support of your opponents would decide whether your action comes off.
When I did that, I realized that we could do away with the power board entirely, and put the action tiles onto the map board and the support discs right onto those tiles. Now it would be easy to see who proposed what action, and which actions are going to happen in the present configuration of things. This had led to an enormous improvement in the game's readability, which in hindsight was always the game's biggest problem. It's not always easy to keep track of all of the ramifications of all of the proposed actions -- it's still a highly intricate game -- but at least seeing what can happen and how close it is to happening is now much more accessible.
Those power discs are still in the game, but they're used a bit differently. They can provide support to your own actions, or can be given to your opponents as a bribe. Discs you hold belonging to other players are worth 1 VP at game's end, and this seemed to make good sense: a disc is worthless to you at game's end, so you want to use it and get something out of it, but if you give it to an opponent, you'd better get the equivalent of 1 VP of value out of it. Yet, these calculations are by no means easy -- there's little that can be reduced to a strict VP valuation because so much depends on which actions get the most support -- so you have to strike deals judiciously.
The result is something that's many miles away from where the game started or where I had any intention of taking it, which is ironic considering that it was called 'collusion' from the jump. It's a game where you can't power your way through anything; literally everything you want to accomplish in the game depends on your opponents. It's not a trading game, though: we're not exchanging commodities, we're exchanging support, and whether I support you depends not merely on what you offer me but also whether what you're asking me to support is something I'm inclined to like myself, based on my own goals. And this is also why it's not a typical alliance game: in this game, there aren't stable alliances that persist for big chunks of the game (Diplomacy, Struggle of Empires), instead there are alignments. So, in this barony, you and I may have compatible ideas about what we want to happen, whereas over in this other barony, our intentions are diametrically opposed. You'll be aligned and misaligned with all of your opponents in all sorts of different ways, and skillful play isn't about browbeating them into doing what you want them to, so much as it is incorporating them into what you want to do, and finding ways to be useful in the things they want to do.
I'll give two simple examples. First, one of your goals says "Barony X is the largest barony". The obvious thing to do would be to seek to become the baron of barony X, and expand X. In that way, you get points both for the goal card and for the value of the barony itself. Except that, if you instead install one of your opponents as the baron of X, then that player is helping you achieve your goal, because it's in your mutual interest for the barony to grow. It's fewer points but has a greater likelihood of success.
Or say that Barony Y has estates belonging to purple and white. If you, as player yellow, can influence one of the factions that's present in Y, or build buildings in Y for a faction that you already influence, then you gain votes in Y, and can use this to extract concessions from purple and/or white. You have made yourself indispensable in their rivalry, and this is usually much more profitable than if you tried to install an estate and join in the rivalry yourself.
These three posts, taken together, hopefully show what Collusion's journey to its present form has looked like. In future posts I'll comment on further design and playtesting progress, and some of the issues that pop up along the way. The game is still a little fiddly, and there may be some balance tweaks needed, so there may yet be room for improvement, but I think it's coming along really nicely and I think, much to my delight, that it's turning out to be something that's completely different from any other game that's currently out there. It's fairly simple but it's so interactive, and the ramifications of those interactions are so far-reaching, that I think it will have a lot of appeal, both at the level of a fun deal-making game and also at the deeper level of a knife fight in a phone booth where everything is hotly contested and haggled over. Games seem to build to an exciting climax every time, but players definitely need a brain break after tallying up the final scores!
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