Collusion: the religious question

Solo tests of the streamlined turn system described in the previous post have gone very well so far. The more limited scope of your turns -- on two turns, place an action; then on the third turn, place support -- helps you to focus more without needing to switch mental gears mid-turn.  I've gone from about 120 minutes to about 100 minutes in my solo tests.  I think I'm nearing the point where live play is likely to be more efficient than solo play so I hope, hope, hope that we'll see this thing clock in under 2 hours next live test.

Encouraged by the increasing stability of the game, I tried a solo of the expansion with 5p.  I think it shows some promise.  It didn't add any length nor does it add too much complexity.  You have to opt in to the church and/or the rebellion, and only a few players do, so for much of the game, for most of the group, the rebellion and church are something you have to think about but not necessarily a whole additional layer of stuff you have to actually do.  And they don't change the core turn mechanic.

The rebellion is neat.  In this game, one player opted in and was alone in rebelling the whole game.  Because of the automatic actions, you can make some progress with the rebellion even on your own, but it eats up a lot of your actions, meaning you're not doing other stuff too; this player scored poorly in the end.  I think this is good; there's a bandwagon/critical mass thing about the rebellion that will make its role in the game highly variable depending on what the players do as a group.  Sometimes there won't be a rebellion at all; you need rebels to have a rebellion.  

But when it's present, it gives rise to a neat symbiotic relationship.  The rebellion scores points dependent on the number of buildings of rebellious factions that have been built on the board, but other players need to build buildings to meet their goals, so you end up proposing stuff with the expectation that the rebellion player will probably support it, and you decide to let that faction rebel (increasing the rebellion players' payout) because it probably means the rebellion will help you as to try to grow that faction.  But if everyone thinks that way, the rebellion can snowball, and then it requires a concerted effort to rein them in.  I like that the rebellion seems to have a thematically-appropriate story built around its actions.

The church may not have this to quite the same degree.  In the version I tested, the church has two goal cards associated with it, meaning at least two players want to build churches, and it confers votes: players with an heir deployed to the church (off the board) get one vote for each church adjacent to the barony that is being contested.  This injected a huge number of votes into the game, which was good but maybe too much of a good thing.  And the church is built in a way that elbows out other entities (baronies and factions), which is fun.  But it didn't give a strong sense of, well, "churchliness".  There isn't as clear of a story that emerges surrounding the church.

It feels like what you want is some entity that you can enlist for their help, but over time you end up regretting having asked.  I don't currently have an idea for how to do this but I do at least have one church idea that might move a bit in this direction. 

I previously said that each territory can hold one barony shield (indicating which barony controls it), and one faction, but that the church moving into a territory pushes one or the other of these out (depending on which action was used to move the church in).  Thus, a territory containing a church has either a barony, or a faction.  And, each barony and each faction has two goal cards associated with it (A/B, or C/D, respectively).  Each goal has a numerical condition that the entity in question must meet.  For example, D is "[This faction] controls 2/1 cities".  The goal pays out more if the faction has 2 cities rather than 1, but it pays out nothing if it has zero.  Controlling a city requires owning two territories touching a city.

What if the church's role was as a 'fixer' for situations where a goal is going to go bust?  For example, if a faction has only one territory next to a city, but that territory has a church in it, close enough -- the goal still scores.

Well, sort of.  It would score half, but the church takes its cut. 

During the course of the game, churches are built and players can deploy heirs to the church.  Then, at the game's end, in the order in which players added heirs to the church, each of them gets to deploy their churchly heir to a particular church on the board.  Then, they announce which goal that church is helping.

So if the territory has a church and barony "blue-and-white", the player would announce, "the church is helping blue-and-white's goal A".  (The person holding B may be disappointed by this).  If goal A is then able to score, the person holding A gets half the points (rounded up) for the goal, and the player from the church gets half the points (rounded down) for the goal.

But, no helping yourself!  If you help your own goal, you only get half the points.

Thus it would behoove you to be attentive to what goals people are pursuing and which ones seem likely to need a nudge, so that churches can be built in helpful places to promote those goals AND so you can be wise in selecting which church to deploy your heir to, so that you get the biggest payout.  But of course doing so also earns points for the person whose goal is now 'fixed'.  It is called Collusion, after all.

I think this ties up all the loose ends so I'll probably give it a dry run in the next week or so.  Hopefully I will run a live test of the full (base) game next weekend, so we'll also get info on how that's coming along.