Collusion: origin story

I guess I'll start using this blog to document ongoing progress with my latest "big" game, Collusion, which I think/hope is nearing completion.  I've thought/hoped that about other projects in the past and had those thoughts/hopes dashed, so it's possible that will happen here as well!

I mentioned a year or so ago that Collusion had just turned 10, which means that now it's about 11, but a lot has happened in this last year.  It's almost night-and-day different in many respects.  I'll spend a couple of posts talking about those first 10 years -- its childhood, I guess you could say -- and then in a separate post I'll say a bit more about this adolescent phase it has just gone through.

As I have said previously, Collusion was my attempt at a really heavy game, which in hindsight I realize to have been silly and misguided.  At the point that I started Collusion, Sands of Time had not yet reached its apex of complexity, and so I was not quite aware that I was already working on a very complex game.  Moreover, really complex games were still something of a rare breed at that point, but 11 years later, the complexity creep in the hobby has given way to a complexity flood, and games are incredibly complex, cluttered with ideas and systems and icons and components and all sorts of things.  I don't think this has been an entirely good thing and have disavowed complexity as an animating design philosophy in my own projects, which has had interesting ramifications for Collusion as we'll discuss.  But let's look at how it got started.

At around this time, I was an active participant at the Board Game Designer's Forum, having spent most of my formative years as a designer hashing out ideas about design in that community.  One of the designers there was Rene Wiersma, designer of Gheos, and he was talking at that time about a new design of his, his "magnum opus", which was going to pull together all of the things he had learned about design into a single game.  (I don't know for sure whether he ever finished the project though!)  This got me to thinking about embarking on a similar project, or at least a project of a similar scope, and I started with, more or less, two main ideas.  First, the title, "Collusion", and second, that it would have area control but not area majority.

The premise was that we were nobles in some fictitious realm.  Fictitious realms in games always seem to have kings on death's door, but in this game's case, we weren't trying to succeed the king or even impress him; rather, we were trying to use him as a pawn in the great game we were all playing for the supremacy in our behind-the-scenes scheming.  The kingdom had a bunch of territories, each with a characteristic resource that it produced.  The game had seasons, and each type of resource only produced in one or two of the three (?) seasons.  The realm had roads, which were only passable in some of the seasons.  It had estates, which we could claim.  And it had baronies, groups of territories that could grow and shrink. 

Most of all it had factions.  Factions each had a characteristic building, which could be placed into certain special spaces on the board.  And they had cards representing their members.  This was important because we each had a mat, which specified our heirs and with spaces for advisors.  Thus we could claim cards from certain factions and marry them to our heirs (actually, this was a two-step process, betrothal and then marriage) and we could hire them as advisors, by placing the cards onto the corresponding space on the mat. 

But each card also had a special action it could perform.  Thus the turn mechanic was actually quite simple: take a card, and either do its action or attach it to your mat as a betrothal or advisor.  Each faction's actions were associated with the kinds of things that you'd think thematically that faction could do.  The church performed marriages, the merchants converted resources, and so on. 

Each year, the king took a royal tour around the realm, following the paths that were open in whatever season it happened to be.  You wanted to steer the king to your estates so you could entertain him, by throwing a festival in which you expended resources.  Each season had a set of appropriate festival types -- i.e. a resource-to-points conversion -- and we tracked the quality of the festivals we each threw, with the person who threw the best festival getting some reward at year's end.  And then there were also baronial elections, whereby you gained control of the baronies. 

You'll notice I haven't said anything about collusion, because at that stage there wasn't any.  It would have been more accurate to call the game "Scheming"; I toyed with a name switch to "Levers of Power", but always stuck with Collusion, and now it's a more fitting title for the game.

We played the game once.  Or rather, I taught the game over the course of an hour to two patient souls (one of them was my brother) who attempted to discern just what in the world I was talking about.  Then they heroically attempted to play the thing, we may have made it through a year, and then ended in confusion.  Ending the game early is going to be a common theme in this.  And for comparison, the latest version, I can teach in about 10 minutes. 

I've talked about how in the process of designing Sands I came to realize that a game should have a core idea, but that realization came late in Sands' development and I certainly hadn't made it by the early years of Collusion, although I now know what the idea of Collusion is.  At the early stage, it turns out it was just a kind of generic and not especially focused power-acquisition game, with the intent that there were a lot of different things you had to think about.  I guess that my intent, though I never fully realized it, was that there was a 'levers of power' construct, in that there were different systems in the game, and you couldn't interact with all of them, so the point was to choose how to compartmentalize your participation into just those systems that you were going to emphasize in your strategy.  It wasn't that the game's turn mechanic was complicated, but just that there were so many different layers to what went on during the game. 

As I said, the game was hardly even playable early on, much less memorable.  I think in its current form it may be something special.  I'll talk in the next post about the intervening years and how it made this journey.