Collusion: edge case

It's hard, in solo testing, to keep everything straight, and the other day I made the first bad mistake I've made: a player proposed an illegal action.  Specifically, the player proposed to support a faction that the player already supported.  Other players went on to support that action, and I only discovered the error when it was time to resolve the action.  Presumably in an actual game, a player would have caught this.

But it creates an interesting problem if it happens.  Obviously you can't allow the illegal action to happen, but what is the mechanism for invalidating it?  The obvious thing would be "as soon as it's discovered, the action is removed", but this creates an incentive for the other players, noticing someone has played an illegal action, to stay silent until that player's turn ends.

And if the action makes it through to the barony resolution phase with no one catching it, it's disallowed, but does it count as one of the actions for the purposes of deciding which actions are the most-supported and happen, or does it automatically become, effectively, the least-supported action, and all the other actions happen?  That's not a satisfying outcome either since other players have provided support carefully trying to arrange that their preferred actions will be the most-supported.

It's also a concern in that some actions may be legal when placed but may seem to become illegal when resolved, or vice versa.  As an example of the former, baronies have to grow contiguously, so placing a 'barony grows' action in a territory next to barony X may seem to be illegal if barony Y takes over the territory, originally part of X, to which the targeted territory was adjacent.  As an example of the latter, you can't support an a faction you already support, but if, between the time you propose the action and the barony comes up for resolution, someone else may have kicked you out of support for that faction, in which case, upon resolution, the action is actually legal.

The surprising consequence of this, actually, is that it makes me think that the right answer may not be to have rules about how to nullify illegal actions, but instead to expand the range of what is allowed to be legal.  For example, usually you can only support each faction once, and can't re-support a faction.  But why not?  If you have two power discs in that faction, it's twice as useful to you.  If players think that's too powerful, they shouldn't support your actions that put you in that position, or they should use the influence action themselves to kick you out.  

I think in some ways this game will mess with players' understanding and expectations of balance.  "But [X] is too strong!"  Yes, it may be, but in all cases the players' collective actions have allowed [X] to happen, and in the case of an action, they actively provided support in a way that caused it to happen.  This was anticipated in the previous post about elections.  Yes, it's powerful if a player has 5 votes in every election and can control who wins each one.  The point is, don't let that happen if you don't want one player to have so much power!

So I think perhaps the rules have to state explicitly what are the rules about placing actions, and then just have it be that, if the time comes to resolve the action and you're unable to (whether, say, because it's an estate action and you already have an estate there or because it's an estate action and you have no available power disc to use in an estate), the action doesn't happen but it doesn't change the outcome of which other actions happen.


One other edge case came up in testing.  What happens when a player reaches the end of the barony track and can no longer propose new actions?  I had previously ruled that you took one final turn to provide support and then were out of the game (at least with respect to actions and support).  But this has two problems, both of which manifest if you're well ahead of the other players on the barony track.  First, it means you're sitting around watching for a while.  But second, and more consequential, it means you don't have a chance to provide support to actions that are proposed by trailing players, i.e. after you've left the game.  This seems to doubly punish players who skip ahead:  they get to propose fewer actions than their opponents, and they lose the ability to shape which actions are selected.  But even more than the negative experience it creates, I think the game's interdependencies of support and favor-trading really depend on all players being able to participate throughout the game.  If I want you to support my late-stage action, but I'm unable to reciprocate simply because I'm disallowed from doing so, that's going to strain the interactive systems of the game, and right at the end when presumably it matters the most.

I think the solution to this one is easy, or at least it's easy to try:  once you pass the end of the barony track, you don't keep taking actions, but you may keep providing support each time your turn comes up, with the added rule that you aren't obligated to provide 3 support each turn.  Now this exception may make skipping ahead too strong, so it may not work.  What we see in the late game is that players have run out of actions that they're allowed to provide additional support to (maybe they've previously supported them), so players are forced to pile 3 support onto a single action, and usually one that they dislike, and so the end game becomes configurational in a different way.  Relaxing the support rule for the final turn may give them more control so that the actions players collectively want to happen are the ones that come off.