Collusion: three or five worrisome things

I've been solo-testing Collusion furiously lately, and while it's not easy to play multiple seats in a negotiation-heavy game, I feel like I'm able to mostly make reasonable assumptions about what deals would be offered and accepted.  But in a live test a few weeks back, I was interested to find that the deals players were making were much more elaborate than those that my imaginary players were making.  On the one hand, this was cool, because one wants a negotiation game to give some scope for player creativity.  On the other hand, that group only covered 1/3 of a game in 1.5 hours of play.  I don't think this game has the legs to be a 4 hour game.  The problem, it seems, was that players were haggling to death points that probably weren't worth the level of mental energy they invested. 

Part of the problem, then, is on-boarding.  We need a simple way to encourage players not to go too crazy on the negotiation until they've gotten their feet wet.  I think one solution for this is simply to require that, in one's first playing, every deal must involve the transfer of some physical commodity; no promises extending into the future.  And, to end those endless back-and-forth negotiations, we can introduce a "wrap it up" timer, which another player can activate to instruct the two involved players to finish their negotiations within (30 seconds, 1 minute, whatever).

Game length, then, is one of my three concerns. 

A second is the way that the game state can change so much, that progress doesn't always feel unidirectional.  All that matters for scoring is the final board state, but if in one turn I add, say, a red building to territory 15, well, in some future turn you can just propose to add a blue building there and if it gets enough support, poof, the red building is gone.  So, what was the point of the red building having been built in the first place?  It is true that there are short-term impacts that such actions make.  For example, that red building will give votes to whoever influences the red faction, so while it was standing, influencing it might have enabled me to get some leverage over my opponents and extract some concessions.  But it does seem like late actions matter much more in the final reckoning.  

One solution to this might be to just reduce the total number of actions in the game.   There are at most 45 actions that will happen during the game, and there are 25 territories, which means that on average, two things will happen in each territory during the game, and since there are four kinds of things that can happen (change barony, build a faction building, influence a faction, build an estate), maybe the amount of flux per territory isn't so bad.  Another solution might be to just watch and see whether players can use the tools available to them in the game to mitigate this.  For example, if I don't want anyone to disturb that red building I built, I can put a different action into that territory -- perhaps "influence" or "estate" -- thus protecting the territory from disruption.  But it means I have to get to that territory before anyone else.  It may be a little weird to have these sorts of configurational matters influence the game so heavily.

But that leads to the third concern, which is the turn structure.  There's a row of barony cards, and on your turn you skip ahead to a different barony and place an action in one of that barony's territories, then provide support to other players' actions.  This creates a seat order effect.  If you're an early player, you'll have more freedom of choice among the territories within that barony; if you're a late player, you'll have more control over which actions actually come off, since you provide support later.  This is asymmetric but I don't know if it's imbalanced.

There's also the effect whereby players can skip ahead to get into an important barony at an earlier time, and I think this is important and advantageous, but if it turns out that it's always strictly better to propose an action in every single barony, as opposed to skipping ahead, then there's a seat order problem that needs to be balanced in some way.  Plenty of ways to do this but realistically it would call into question whether this turn mechanic is the right one to use.

There are two other littler things that I'm not yet worried about, but I'm worried that maybe I should be worried about them, which itself worries me.

The first of these stems from something that happened in our live test last week.  Based on the deals a player was trying to strike, the other players were able to surmise what one of his schemes was, and more importantly, that it was fairly important to him.  The intent of the game, of course, is that when you figure out what someone else wants, to try to make deals that bring that about but that reward you richly for your assistance.  Instead, another player took the approach that "this goal gets him points.  Thus we should band together and deny him those points, and not approve any action that would let that goal be fulfilled". 

If the players take that view collectively -- that it's a game mostly of obstruction -- the game may have a low energy state and not much will happen.  Now I think this is permissible -- the game is called 'collusion', it isn't specified how you're supposed to collude -- but at the same time I want this kind of approach to feel like an uphill climb.  The game should trend toward action, and the focus should be on steering and shaping the actions that happen, not trying to prevent actions from happening at all.  And, I think the game does do this; players have the ability to make offers and deals, they have natural alignment with each others' goals, and the rules require that some actions have to happen each year.  Players hopefully would find, then, that it's better to help and get paid than to deny and obstruct, because if we make a pact to obstruct but someone then dissents from that pact, that someone will be the one to get paid for the help you could have provided.  But it's a slight concern that needs more observation.

The second little thing deserves its own post.