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.

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.  

Collusion: contest feedback

I've never won a design contest or even placed very highly in one, but it's still sometimes fun to enter them.  I like the Board Game Workshop design contest in an odd way.  The first round is to make a 2 minute video describing your game, and a bunch of judges rate it and provide feedback on it.  Now I have no video-making skills and generally find this kind of thing annoying as a contest requirement.  And 2 minutes isn't nearly enough to say very much more than the really basic gist of a game and one or two compelling things about it.  

But I think it's at least useful as a bellwether for whether your game presents well.  Are the things you're saying about it resonating with the people hearing the pitch, or should you be talking more about other things?  

Here's the video I submitted.  It's a cell phone camera video and is obviously not that great.  I spent just a few minutes shooting it.

But to my pleasant surprise, the judges' feedback on the video interacted with the game and was helpful for thinking about what came through clearly and what may have been confusing.  That will probably be useful in thinking about how to start pitching the game when the time comes.  I think for most of the judges, the idea of what Collusion is trying to do, even based just on my short description, made sense and had some appeal.

Here's the feedback (judges names' stripped out for anonymity's sake):

Judge 1

Scores

Innovation: 4 Elegance: 4 Excitement: 4 Presentation: 3 Overall: 4 Score: 19
Feedback: Positives: I really like the way in which you are forced to cooperate with others to achieve goals.  The idea that other players have the same goal as me really forces some level of cooperation, as part of my strategy aligns with theirs and from what I can tell my victory is contingent on convincing them our mutual success is worth the votes.
Concerns:  I would like to see how this inter-connectivity plays out.  Will all my goals perfectly match up with every other player, or will I have some that are mine only? With some level of negotiation present, this game may tend to become very group-dependent like many other social deduction games.  Is there a way to design it so that it does not fall into the same trap?  I really like the idea of everyone voting on other projects that will either help them or encourage another player to return the favor in order for you to complete one of your goals.
Comments on the explanation:  I realize you only have a couple minutes here, but from the video I do not see how moving on the barony track affects which barony is selected to activate.  From the video it sounds like it's down to the one with the most discs.  I watched a couple times to see if I could grasp the correlation and I'm just not sure with the information provided.
I think this game idea is good, and hopefully it has some legs and can get the attention of a publisher.  Good luck with your design!
Word Count: 261 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 2 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 5 Elegance: 4 Excitement: 4 Presentation: 4 Overall: 4 Score: 21
Feedback: A game that I need multiple support just to make my actions?? YES, SIR, I WANT THAT GAME!
It's amazing that just one solid idea can sell a game to someone (at least to me). For some reason I would prefer these kind of games remain in the up to 60' bracket, probably because of my previous bad experience with Diplomacy games dragging for hours. But still, 60'-90' seems very reasonable and I really wish to learn more in the second round!
Good luck!

Word Count: 82 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 3 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 5 Elegance: 4 Excitement: 5 Presentation: 5 Overall: 5 Score: 24
Feedback: I really like how you have setup the cards that results in the formation of natural alineces with other players.  What I would like you to study is to track to make sure the game does not get decided by specific distribution of the cards.  The game is meant to be about who is the best at working with lots of people, not about the card distribution.  So really making sure there is no winning card combination is critical for keeping your audience happy with your game.
Word Count: 87 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 4 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 5 Elegance: 5 Excitement: 5 Presentation: 5 Overall: 5 Score: 25
Feedback: I want to play this game now. Right now. This really hits all the buttons for me. I know I'm working from limited information because of the briefness of the video, but it seems that you've built a very solid set of gameplay mechanisms, founded by straightforward rules, and spiced up with the cooperative/competitive nature of the goals and support tokens. Off the cuff, I don't really see anything that strikes me as problematical, though I do want to see the full rulebook so I have a clearer understanding of how it all works together. Really hoping to see this in Round Two so that can happen! Thank you for entering it.
Word Count: 112 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 5 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 3 Elegance: 2 Excitement: 2 Presentation: 4 Overall: 3 Score: 14
Feedback: Cutthroat cooperation, an interesting idea. Not sure how well it will play out and if there is a need for it. Couldn't tell a lot from the video about the gameplay. Be interested to see how this progresses.

Word Count: 38 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 6 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 3 Elegance: 3 Excitement: 3 Presentation: 4 Overall: 3 Score: 16
Feedback: I feel like the 3 actions might be a bit clunky. The proposing actions bit sounds different, but I think the experience might vary a bit much depending on who you are playing with. I think I want less things to have to remember to do. I feel like the main bit of this game is the collusion part, but now I think I want to see you honed in more of the collusion aspect of it. But I do think you have something there.
Word Count: 85 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 7 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 5 Elegance: 4 Excitement: 5 Presentation: 5 Overall: 5 Score: 24
Feedback: This looks awesome! I love the concept of a mixed cooperative/competitive game. You need to help others so that they help you and the goals intertwine. Very clever. I hope to see this in the market!!! Good job. Solid.
Word Count: 39 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 8 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 4 Elegance: 3 Excitement: 3 Presentation: 4 Overall: 3 Score: 17
Feedback: I think your game sounds pretty fun and I'd be willing to give it a try, even though I don't tend to gravitate towards games you'd consider "cerebral." I do like your competitive co-op mechanic and I'm interested to see how that plays out. In your pitch, I definitely would've liked to hear more about the theme rather than just "fictional realm." I know your game is in prototype but the theme appears to be a bit lacking. Is it a fantasy setting? i.e., orcs, goblins, knights? Are we settlers like in Catan? If you can next time, give more about the theme of your game and also maybe some specific examples of what kind of Actions you can propose on your turn. That might help entice me more to play the game. Otherwise, decent presentation.
Word Count: 136 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 9 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 4 Elegance: 3 Excitement: 4 Presentation: 4 Overall: 4 Score: 19
Feedback: Collusion seems like my type of thought-provoking game. I love the pre-planning aspect and the forced teamwork required to succeed. The idea of barons working together to accomplish their political agendas, yet coordinate efforts to actually carry out their wishes is an interesting design choice, and I honestly love it! As far as some suggestions go, I would suggest displaying the way actions are carried out once the majority has chosen one. In the brief video, I was unable to clearly differentiate between territories and baronies on the board. It would be nice to see the distinction clearer and to learn how a barony grows. I know an in-depth overview would help me understand these items better and I am excited to see the progress of Collusion in the next few months. Great job presenting your design! I am very interested in following Collusion to completion!

Word Count: 146 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 10 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 5 Elegance: 5 Excitement: 4 Presentation: 5 Overall: 4 Score: 23
Feedback: Looks like a very elegant and interesting turn mechanic system. I'm a fan of the play length and the common goals. I'd encourage you to sound more enthusiastic when pitching :) Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
Word Count: 38 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 11 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 4 Elegance: 4 Excitement: 3 Presentation: 3 Overall: 4 Score: 18
Feedback: The main mechanic of this game sounds engaging. Executing a turn is clear, even if there is a lot of decision space during that turn.
IΓÇÖm a little unclear on a few things that might be helpful to clarify when pitching the game. How does a player control and grow a Barony, and how does that score? Do players have their own pieces on the board, or is everything on the board community pieces? Are goals all public knowledge (using the word private or public would help)?

A few initial thoughts that may or may not relate to the game:
-My impression is that this game would be more effective as a quicker game. IΓÇÖm guessing that behavior dynamics might become fairly set after a while each game and feel drawn out or have a clear winner decided.
-If goals are assigned randomly, IΓÇÖm wondering if there is a situation where a group of players gets a stronger advantage, as they can continually team up. If not in game already, maybe it is worth including something as a catchup mechanic or that shifts power around that a player can accomplish on their own, such as become the tiebreaker or having a game piece that hinders certain actions on the board.
-There should probably be some intermediate scoring in this game. Scoring more before the end of the game can reward players, encourage more diverse gameplay, give a better sense of progress, and switch up alliances more. It can also give a better sense of how players are doing. Related to this, maybe some of the scoring is done through secret goals so players are not encouraged to math out the game state. Perhaps goals are revealed or are added over time.
-There should probably be some rule structure for player discussion to keep things tighter. Possibly, players can only talk directly with whoeverΓÇÖs turn it currently is and not each other.
Thank you for your submission, best regards.
Word Count: 322 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 12 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 2 Elegance: 3 Excitement: 2 Presentation: 4 Overall: 2 Score: 13
Feedback: Not my personal cup of tea, but that's not really a criticism of the game, just an explanation for the scores. I think you did a good job explaining the flow of the game, though some context around which actions are available or how they work (even an example) might have been helpful for clarifying what's going on in the game for me. Either way, interesting concept.
Word Count: 67 ---------------------------------------------
Judge 13 Game: Collusion
Scores Innovation: 2 Elegance: 2 Excitement: 3 Presentation: 2 Overall: 2 Score: 11
Feedback: Open information semi-cooperative - very interesting. Check you audio volume, its somewhat low. Additionally, when recording for viewers, go horizontal. Something with this depth usually has some flavor - give that to us! Your excitement will make us excited about the game as well. A title card with the basics at the beginning or end might be helpful as well. Best of Luck!

Word Count: 63 ---------------------------------------------
Feedback Count: 13 Average of Innovation: 3.9230769 Average of Elegance: 3.5384614 Average of Excitement: 3.6153846 Average of Presentation: 4.0 Average of Overall: 3.6923077 Final Score: 18.769232
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Collusion: elections

I mentioned two minorly worrisome things in the last post, and the second of those is voting for baronial control.  

Now I should be worried about this in general because of the potential for a kingmaker effect.  Say that it's the final baronial election of the game, players B and D are candidates, and the barony is worth 5 VP.  To whom are you, player A, going to gift with your votes, and 5 VP?  In a game with 1 VP victory margins this may seem like a swingy decision.

I'm not actually worried about the elections themselves, for a few reasons.  First, because players have the ability to cut deals.  If your votes will give someone the barony, you can try to get something in return, and there are many kinds of deals to strike.  Second, because at least part of your scoring potential must remain secret and so no one exactly knows how well everyone else is doing unless they're paying really close attention and making several good inferences.  Most players will find the outcome of this decision uncertain.  Third, because you know from the beginning of the game the order in which baronial actions are going to take place for the whole game, and have ample opportunity to shape the board state in such a way that that final election doesn't "swing" the game at all.  You play a role in deciding, not just who gets the points, but how many points the barony is worth in the first place.

My concern is actually with the configurational aspect of the elections.  Each player gets votes from the factions they influence that are present in the barony.  Players cast votes in clockwise order, and the candidate who receives the most votes gets the barony.  If there's a tie, the player who received the most votes earlier gets the barony.  This introduces a turn order effect that has a weird consequence.  Let's say that B and D are candidates, and voters have the following votes to cast:  A-3, B-0, C-2, D-1, E-0.  A will vote first.  

Now this means, essentially, that only A's votes matter.  If A votes for B, B will have gotten to 3 votes first, and D can't exceed 3 votes, so it's a done deal.  If A votes for D, again, it's a done deal.  This means that C's votes don't really matter.

My only thought for a change is that if there's a tie, instead of resolving in order, resolve based on the votes of the players who are not candidates.  But that doesn't change things in this case.

I think it just needs more study at this point.  Getting influence is supposed to mean having power in elections, either to vote yourself in or sell your votes to an opponent, but if it's often the case that only one person's votes matter, then that's less fun for the other players.

On the other hand, getting lots of votes consistently usually means that you've gained influence over a bunch of factions, or a bunch of buildings for factions you influence have been built.  Thus if other players don't want you to get more votes than they, they should stop supporting your influence actions.  

This is one of the fun subtleties I've been discovering about the game, actually.  Compared to board-altering actions like "switch barony" or "build a faction", which interact directly with schemes, the influence action seems indirect and harmless by comparison, and sometimes you'll support an influence action for that reason alone.  But do that often enough and one player can become very powerful indeed come election time, and can sway every election.

It's interesting to watch what that power over elections looks like in practice.  During setup, each player is given one barony.  Although the baronies grow and shrink, usually maintaining parity seems like a wise course: giving someone a second barony seems to make them very powerful, unless you're somehow sure that one of their valuable goals is definitely going to go bust.  Thus the elections aren't always about big swings of power; rather, they're often about, how much are you going to pay me so that I keep you in power and maintain parity?  It's as much about what you can get out of the current baron as anything else.

This is why one of my other concerns about elections may be allayed.  Necessarily, an election needs two candidates to be interesting, but additional candidates only come through successful use of the estate action.  I've biased that action in a few ways to make estates easier to add.  And the aforementioned considerations make it advantageous to support other players' estate actions: if you can get a second candidate in a barony you don't care about, that just means that one more person to potentially bribe you for your votes.  But even if there's only one candidate, there's still an incentive for that person to cut some deals, to help secure his/her position in later elections.  For example, maybe I'll take one of your heirs as a courtier in the baronial court, because if you later depose me, that heir leaves the board, costing us both 1 VP.  Thus, my accepting your heir early biases you slightly toward wanting to support me later.  And this is important because the ability for territories to change ownership from one barony to another sometimes means that candidates pop up 'unexpectedly' in different baronies as the game unfolds.

I think there are all sorts of little considerations and heuristics like this that come into play in the game, but because it's so interactive the ones you rely on should change every game.  At least I hope that's the case.

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.  

Collusion in a nutshell

The last three posts may not make a ton of sense since I haven't yet explained how the game works.  Here is a quick synopsis.

Collusion is played on a board containing 25 territories.  These are clustered into 'baronies', and wooden pieces belonging to 'factions' are added to those territories.  Additionally, players place discs into territories as 'estates', or associate them with the factions to 'influence' those factions.

During setup, each player receives four 'schemes', representing the end game state you're trying to achieve -- things like "X barony is largest", "Y faction controls 2 cities".  You arrange your schemes in a row, and they stay in that order.  At game's end, the leftmost scheme is worth the most points, if you meet its condition, and the cards to the right are each worth a little less.  

You also get points by controlling baronies, and the bigger a barony you control, the more points you get.  You also have three heirs that are worth negative points unless you get them out onto the board.  And finally, those power discs you have count as points for other players if you give them away.  

The turn mechanic is very simple.  There's a row of five 'barony cards'.  You advance your marker to the right on this row, to a different card from the one you're on.  Then, you propose an action within that barony, placing an action tile into one of its territories.  Finally, you place three support tokens onto action tiles previously proposed by other players.

When everyone has had a change to propose and support within a barony, that barony is evaluated, and the three actions within that barony that received the most support are the ones that happen.  Then there's an election.  Anyone with an estate in the barony is a candidate, and anyone who influences a faction gets votes, if that faction is present in the barony.  The person with the most votes becomes baron.

There are four types of actions and they're all quite simple: expand/shrink the barony, add a building for a faction, influence a faction, or place an estate in the territory.

But of course, because your actions only happen if they gain enough support, the trick is to propose actions that you think your opponents will support.  There's a clever way of dealing out the schemes such that, in a 5p game, each of your four schemes will "rhyme" with a scheme held by exactly one opponent.  Thus you're aligned with every other player in exactly one way.  But of course, you can also try to bribe them for their support, and that's where giving out power discs and trading heirs come into play.

There's a bit more to it but that's the basic gist.  I think it's unique in that everything that scores you points -- achieving your schemes, securing baronial control, getting heirs onto the board, acquiring power discs -- involves your opponents.  Thus it's no exaggeration to say that at the end of the game, the person who wins will have been gifted the victory by the collective action of everyone else.  

Collusion: a bolt of lightning strikes

In 2017, my final attempt at making the cost matrix approach to the game fell flat with three of my most trustworthy playtesters.  It just wasn't going to work, and I had to try something else.

I reduced the number of factions from 9 to 6, kept the idea that each faction has an action type, but did away with the idea that each faction's actions are limited each year.  And, I kept the concept of loyalty and some of the ideas about cost discounts and such.

But I made two really sweeping changes that I think were wise.  First, I had just gotten a copy of In the Year of the Dragon and Broom Service, and was thinking about alea games and how they all get great  depth out of simple turn mechanics.  I needed a similarly simple turn system, but I wanted something original as well.  I settled on an idea inspired by the old 'king's tour' concepts: each year, the king was going to visit several of the baronies all in succession.  In each barony, each player would propose one of the six available actions in one of that barony's territories.  And each action had a 'power track', which you boosted with your intrinsic power based on the factions you influence, the alliances they're in (loyal/disloyal), and with some of those power discs.

Second, in the previous version I had ordered little aspirin pieces to use for tracking your influence in each of the 9 factions, and now I had no further use for them.  I decided that they could be used to provide 'support' to the actions that were proposed, advancing them further on the 'power track'.  And, whichever actions exceeded the (faction-specific) power threshold would happen.  And then we'd move on to the next barony and do the same thing.  But you only had a fixed amount of support to spend for the year, so, use it wisely.

We played -- yes, you guessed it -- half of a game of this, and once again it didn't work.  Except, parts of it really worked.  The support idea was great: it led to all sorts of interaction and deal-making and horse-trading.  There was finally something that looked like actual collusion between the players:  we're proposing actions but need to work together to make those actions actually come off.  I'll support your action if you support mine.  It was fun, even if the deals we were striking weren't especially creative or interesting.

The parts that didn't work were the same things that always didn't work.  The connection between factions as entities on the board and factions as the source of actions was confusing.  The idea of intrinsic power in a faction was confusing.  The tracking of alliances and loyalty was confusing.  And some of the actions, which manipulated these things, still seemed disconnected from the actual goals that you as a player were trying to advance.

Thus, in a final act of merciless whittling, I decided to cut the number of actions down to 4, and to have dedicated tiles for each action type that were disconnected from the factions, also cutting out the idea that influence over a faction gave you some kind of discount in that faction's action type.  

So, to propose an action, you just place its tile into a territory, and then there's a track that shows who proposed what action and how close that action is to success.  But I also decided that instead of a threshold, it could just be that the actions that received the most support were the ones to happen: no intrinsic power, no loyalty, just the support of your opponents would decide whether your action comes off. 

When I did that, I realized that we could do away with the power board entirely, and put the action tiles onto the map board and the support discs right onto those tiles.  Now it would be easy to see who proposed what action, and which actions are going to happen in the present configuration of things.  This had led to an enormous improvement in the game's readability, which in hindsight was always the game's biggest problem.  It's not always easy to keep track of all of the ramifications of all of the proposed actions -- it's still a highly intricate game -- but at least seeing what can happen and how close it is to happening is now much more accessible.

Those power discs are still in the game, but they're used a bit differently.  They can provide support to your own actions, or can be given to your opponents as a bribe.  Discs you hold belonging to other players are worth 1 VP at game's end, and this seemed to make good sense:  a disc is worthless to you at game's end, so you want to use it and get something out of it, but if you give it to an opponent, you'd better get the equivalent of 1 VP of value out of it.  Yet, these calculations are by no means easy -- there's little that can be reduced to a strict VP valuation because so much depends on which actions get the most support -- so you have to strike deals judiciously.

The result is something that's many miles away from where the game started or where I had any intention of taking it, which is ironic considering that it was called 'collusion' from the jump.  It's a game where you can't power your way through anything; literally everything you want to accomplish in the game depends on your opponents.  It's not a trading game, though: we're not exchanging commodities, we're exchanging support, and whether I support you depends not merely on what you offer me but also whether what you're asking me to support is something I'm inclined to like myself, based on my own goals.  And this is also why it's not a typical alliance game: in this game, there aren't stable alliances that persist for big chunks of the game (Diplomacy, Struggle of Empires), instead there are alignments.  So, in this barony, you and I may have compatible ideas about what we want to happen, whereas over in this other barony, our intentions are diametrically opposed.  You'll be aligned and misaligned with all of your opponents in all sorts of different ways, and skillful play isn't about browbeating them into doing what you want them to, so much as it is incorporating them into what you want to do, and finding ways to be useful in the things they want to do.

I'll give two simple examples.  First, one of your goals says "Barony X is the largest barony".  The obvious thing to do would be to seek to become the baron of barony X, and expand X.  In that way, you get points both for the goal card and for the value of the barony itself.  Except that, if you instead install one of your opponents as the baron of X, then that player is helping you achieve your goal, because it's in your mutual interest for the barony to grow.  It's fewer points but has a greater likelihood of success.

Or say that Barony Y has estates belonging to purple and white.  If you, as player yellow, can influence one of the factions that's present in Y, or build buildings in Y for a faction that you already influence, then you gain votes in Y, and can use this to extract concessions from purple and/or white.  You have made yourself indispensable in their rivalry, and this is usually much more profitable than if you tried to install an estate and join in the rivalry yourself.

These three posts, taken together, hopefully show what Collusion's journey to its present form has looked like.  In future posts I'll comment on further design and playtesting progress, and some of the issues that pop up along the way.  The game is still a little fiddly, and there may be some balance tweaks needed, so there may yet be room for improvement, but I think it's coming along really nicely and I think, much to my delight, that it's turning out to be something that's completely different from any other game that's currently out there.  It's fairly simple but it's so interactive, and the ramifications of those interactions are so far-reaching, that I think it will have a lot of appeal, both at the level of a fun deal-making game and also at the deeper level of a knife fight in a phone booth where everything is hotly contested and haggled over.  Games seem to build to an exciting climax every time, but players definitely need a brain break after tallying up the final scores!