Collusion: expansion

I'm not certain that expanding games is always a great idea, but I do think that if a designer is going to consider it, best to consider it early so that the appropriate "attachment points" are built into the design, and the expansion can bolt on to those attachments.  My favorite example of a game that was clearly designed this way is Knizia's Lord of the Rings; the board numbering leaves room for the Bree and Isengard boards, and the symbols on the dice change meanings when the Foes, and then Sauron, are added.  The core mechanics remain the same, we just repurpose the meaning of some things. 

I've kicked around ideas for Collusion's expansion earlier this year, and ordering some wooden bits for a new proto this week pushed these ideas back to the forefront of my attention, as I figured I'd get the expansion pieces now just in case, but had to think about which pieces exactly I would need. 

One motivation for an expansion is the question of whether the game could work with 6 players.  Many of the great negotiation-heavy games play with 6 or more and really thrive with a big group.  Could that be the case here?  It would be longer but the depth of negotiation could possibly be richer.  There's a neat effect whereby with 3p, you align with two goals for each of your opponents, and with 5p you align with one goal with each of your opponents.  With 6p, you'd align with one goal with four of your opponents and none at all with the fifth.  That could be interesting, maybe.

But with 6p, there's another asymmetry:  there are only five baronies, and only five barony-based schemes.  Thus someone is not getting barony points, and we need to add another scheme for that sixth player, and it can't be barony-based but somehow has to correspond to a barony-like concept.  

This leads to the addition of two new entities, which aren't exactly factions, as they function in different ways that perhaps add some richness to the core mechanics.

First is the church.  The church has wooden pieces that can be added to territories.  In a twist, though, each territory can usually contain a barony shield and a faction, but the church, if added to a territory, that already contains both of these, displaces one of those two, and you choose, by the action you propose, which.  Thus the church has some sharp elbows.

Now the church becomes a sixth barony for scoring purposes, in that the sixth scheme says that the church is present in more territories than the size of the largest barony.  But the church doesn't have to grow contiguously, and has two ways to grow, so it's powerful.

Of course, it's a game of collusion, and if my goal is to grow the church, there needs to be a reason -- other than just bribery -- why someone else wants to help me.  And that reason is that we can install heirs into the church, which do two things.  First, they provide points, for all of the heirs that are added to the church after yours, so getting in early is good, and getting in late means you're giving someone else points, but maybe it's worth it for the benefit of being in.  Which is, namely, the second point:  they provide votes.  In a baronial election, each church in or adjacent to (I think) the active barony gives you, a member of the church, one vote.

Second is the rebellion.  As with the church, you can add an heir to the rebellion.  But the rebellion itself has no board presence.  Instead, there's an action that flips a faction to the rebellion's cause.  This impacts scoring: the more buildings for rebellious factions there are on the board at game's end, the more points you get from the rebellion, but if there are too few you get negative points.

Additionally, though, if you're in the rebellion and are acting in a barony in which a rebellious faction is present, you get to place a red support disc, in addition to your usual three support.  

Thus, the church influences baronial politics, the rebellion influences ways and means, and both may be courted even by those not explicitly aligned with them.

There's one other twist.  If the rebellion and church were strictly opt-in actions, they'd be relatively easy to suppress by the other players: just don't support the actions that promote them, support other actions instead.  That's why adding an heir to the church or to the rebellion, or flipping a faction to the rebellion are automatic actions.  That means that when we evaluate the barony and see which actions are the most supported, we treat those actions as those they happen, automatically, unless they are the most-supported action.  Thus to prevent a person from joining the church or from the rebellion from flipping a particular faction, you have to provide support to that action, but your efforts will probably only succeed if a few players band together, so is it even worth bothering?  

Thus both entities have the potential for some bandwagon dynamics, whereby it's advantageous to join at some point but before that it might not be worth the trouble; taking an heir out of circulation weakens your deal-making potential a bit, after all.  Yet they're both a bit hard to stop so at some point everyone may find that they wish they had gotten on the train.  

I like the potential of these two ideas, and the idea of automatic actions, to interact with support and voting in interesting but not-too-complicated ways, and to give some scoring dynamics that feel pretty orthogonal to the main systems in the problems they present to the players and the risk/reward considerations they introduce.  This isn't the kind of expansion that adds wildly different mechanics -- direct combat, randomness, or something like that -- but I suspect/hope that for people who like the base game it may make the experience even richer, and I especially think that it will make the 6p game feel not just longer but incredibly intricate and challenging.  

As soon as those pieces come in I'll probably start giving this one a few run-outs in solo tests to see how it looks.