Collusion: scoring variant

Expansions can take many forms, but one that's not too uncommon is the "kit of parts"; the expansion has several different elements and players can use some or all of them.  Broom Service, though a standalone game, has a few modules that fit this model.  So does Escape with its various expansions that make the game more challenging.  The Lord of the Rings expansions each introduce two different additional gameplay elements that can be used together or separately.  And War of the Ring includes additional content for the base game and a whole additional game that can be played with the pieces of the original game.

I say all of that to preemptively justify any expansion idea proliferation that takes place in this blog or in actual playtesting.  The previous post identified two possible modules, the 6th player and the church/rebellion expansion.  You can play with the latter only, but if you use the former you must also use the latter.

Anyway, Collusion has a number of different player pieces: power discs, influence discs, heirs, action tiles, and cubes.  All of these have multiple in-game uses, but the cubes are something of an odd duck.  Their two uses are to signify control of baronies and to protect scheme cards in your possession, i.e. to keep you from having to reveal them publicly.  Thus if you become baron of more than one barony, you'll have to reveal a scheme to retrieve the cube that protects it and place it in that barony.  This is nice.  But it doesn't feel like there's much you actually do with the cubes.  If you don't gain a second barony, you'd never feel especially tempted to reveal a scheme that's protected by a cube.  What would you do with it?

I've thought about all sorts of additional expansion ideas and most of them seem to swirl around different ways to get additional pathways to support (to land actions) or votes (to gain baronies); these seem to just offer more paths to muscle your way through the game.  But the church and rebellion already do this, and it seems like another path to votes or support is largely redundant and will also tend to dilute the existing infrastructure by which these are already resolved.  Thus it seems that if the game is going to add something, it needs to be a different kind of voting concept or a different kind of action concept.  And it would be nice if it was also something players could haggle over or favor-trade.

My first idea is incredibly simple but also quite consequential, maybe too much so.  At certain points during the game, you'd have the opportunity to allocate one of your available cubes to the "score board".  (You only have 3 cubes in the base game and one goes to the first barony you're given, so maybe in this variant you'd get another cube, say).  The "score board" has a box for (almost) each of the game's main scoring contributions:  Scheme 1, Scheme 2, Scheme 3, Scheme 4, Baronies, and Player Discs.  At the end of the game, whichever box received the fewest cubes would not score for anyone. Thus if "scheme 3" received the fewest cubes, each player would get zero points for the scheme card that they selected as their third during setup, whether they met the condition or not.

Of course the problem with this is how to resolve ties or what to do if multiple boxes get zero cubes.  So it's not a certainty this works.  But I do think it meets all of the desired qualities.  It's a voting concept that rhymes with support/voting but is entirely different than both.  It makes the cubes very important in the game, and makes them a precious commodity that you're willing to trade to an opponent for the right price, or willing to allocate in a requested way for the right price.  And it gives you some interesting avenues to problem-solve.  Is your scheme 1 going bust?  Then reveal it, grab the cube, and allocate it to something other than "scheme 1" on the score board.  Did you just lose control of a barony?  Then take the cube that you just reclaimed, and allocate it to something other than barony scoring on the score board.  

I know there are games that use variable scoring concepts in different playings (e.g. Isle of Skye) and I think there are even games where players get to select the order in which the game's scoring systems trigger, but I'm not sure if there's a game that does "vote for scoring" in this way.  It's definitely weird in that you have to still work on all 6 of the scoring concepts since you don't know till the end which one is the cancelled one, but then the game ends and at least some of your progress is negated.  I usually don't like that kind of thing, but because this is an interactive game, the point should be to try to shape public opinion such that the thing that doesn't score is the thing you care the least about anyway, i.e. that it swings harder for everyone else than for you.  And it could be swingy.  Scheme 1 is worth up to 10 points, scheme 4 up to 3.  If scheme 1 is canceled that's a huge blow to a player who was poised to score it, so correspondingly you'll work hard not to let that happen.  But you also have to work to make your scheme 1 come true, so dividing your attention between these aims adds an extra challenge. 

It's definitely a variant but it might be a variant worth trying.  It gives you another thing to haggle over, think about, and fret over, but it's not exactly an additional system with a lot of additional rules. Thus it's probably strictly better than, say, adding an economy or events or direct attacks or something like that.