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!

Collusion: glimmers of collusion

Collusion spent most of its life on the design backburner, by which I mean that I'd take it out, work on it, find that what I tried didn't work, and put it back onto the backburner for a couple of years until my next great idea.

In reasonably short order from the early stages documented in the last post, game-development-wise (not calendar-wise), some core design ideas emerged.  The game needed a proper scoring system, and it was mostly built around the core concepts that animate the current scoring system:  players are given some "schemes" representing game states they want to achieve when the game ends, and then you get points for controlling baronies and for forming marriage alliances.  

In these early stages, most of the actions snapped into place as well.  There were 9 factions, and each had an action you could take: grow a barony, add a faction to the board, move the king, form a marriage alliance, and so on.  Some of these actions persist into the final version.

What took many years to figure out was a sensible way to put interesting obstacles in the player's path.  For too long, that obstacle was cost.  It was supposed to be hard to do what you wanted, because actions have a cost, and you have to be able to pay that cost.  In fairness this is how almost every other game works so it's an understandable mistake.  

At first this cost was explicit.  There were resources, and you had to pay resources to use a faction's power.  The more it was used, the more expensive it became, and each faction had a preferred resource.  Except! As players constructed alliances between the factions, you could pay the resource that faction A accepts to use the ability of faction B, but you have to pay extra based on the number of 'hops' required to get from A to B.  There were a few ways to do this, but the idea was largely about having a sort of power network that you could hop into and out of en route to paying for actions.  Additionally I introduced an idea of 'loyalty'; factions were either loyal or disloyal to the crown.  Early on this was helpful because the idea of factions being in alliances quickly merged with the idea of factions being loyal or disloyal, such that there was a loyal faction alliance and a disloyal faction alliance.  

Thus, one of the things you could do was manipulate the alliance landscape, to switch a faction from one alliance to the other.  This had some benefits to you, since you yourself were loyal or disloyal, but mostly it was a ways-and-means thing, it let you use factions less expensively if you could get the alliance landscape right.  And then in addition, you could influence factions yourself, and using a faction you influenced, or one of its allies, also gave you a discount.

A new wave of playtesters bravely braved this wave of changes, and once again we played a few games that didn't get halfway to completion before the players gave up.  They were good sports, but again, it was just too indirect to go between resources I have access to to actions I want to take to schemes I want to complete.  

The solution to this, I decided, was not to streamline the action and cost system, but rather to try to find ways to make visualization of the costs easier.  Of course this led to some streamlining for the nonce, and the first to fall were the resources themselves.  Instead, paying for an action required 'power' (ooh!), with all the previous discount concepts being ported over to the power system.  

But we also added a system that I truly liked and that, though it's since been cut, may find use in another game someday.  The idea was this: you have a rondel with power discs on it, with each rondel space representing a season.  When you pay 'power' from the current season, your power boost is given by the number of discs in the stack, and then you discard the topmost disc on the stack.  Any unused discs are added to the next season's stack.

Now as you can readily see, this does two nice things.  First, it means that the longer you wait to act -- i.e. the more seasons you let elapse -- the more impactful your discs become.  If you have, say, three discs total, and you use one action per season, you'll take three actions of power 1, but if you wait to take those actions till season three, you take three actions of power 3, 2, and 1, a big advantage.  (But, there's also a limited number of actions of each type available, so waiting has consequences).  Second, it means that power discs now become a tradable currency, and if you give me a disc for my use, it goes to the bottom of my stack, and comes back to you when it floats back to the top.  Thus there's a positive-sum interaction in making deals -- colluding, I daresay -- but also time ramifications.

Now this system was actually pretty good.  The trouble was all of the other stuff, the nine actions, the discounts, and so on.  The idea was that a faction's use cost depended on the target of its action, but factions targeted different things, and so each faction had a different cost structure.  For example, a faction that lets you build a building has its cost determined by the presence of the faction whose building you're going to build, whereas a faction that is going to grow a barony has its cost determined by the size of the barony it will expand.  Now this makes logical sense:  a strong faction should cost more to build, a big barony should cost more to expand.  But in practice, it meant that there's a pretty big matrix of costs to consider (what faction will I use, and what is its target?) and then the discount rules manipulate those costs, and it's just a lot to parse.

Undeterred, I kept charging ahead with different board layouts to permit easier visualization of the cost landscape, and when even these failed, I did away with the subjective action costs and just gave each faction its own cost, irrespective of its target.  Even this didn't help, because trying to visualize the discount structure was still a huge pain.  It depended on alliances and various things, but every time something changed, your entire discount matrix changed with it.  A real mess, and more importantly, it just wasn't fun.  Players couldn't connect their actions to their goals because they were so preoccupied with trying to connect their discounts to their actions.  And too many actions revolved around manipulating those costs, too few around manipulating the goals.

Collusion: origin story

I guess I'll start using this blog to document ongoing progress with my latest "big" game, Collusion, which I think/hope is nearing completion.  I've thought/hoped that about other projects in the past and had those thoughts/hopes dashed, so it's possible that will happen here as well!

I mentioned a year or so ago that Collusion had just turned 10, which means that now it's about 11, but a lot has happened in this last year.  It's almost night-and-day different in many respects.  I'll spend a couple of posts talking about those first 10 years -- its childhood, I guess you could say -- and then in a separate post I'll say a bit more about this adolescent phase it has just gone through.

As I have said previously, Collusion was my attempt at a really heavy game, which in hindsight I realize to have been silly and misguided.  At the point that I started Collusion, Sands of Time had not yet reached its apex of complexity, and so I was not quite aware that I was already working on a very complex game.  Moreover, really complex games were still something of a rare breed at that point, but 11 years later, the complexity creep in the hobby has given way to a complexity flood, and games are incredibly complex, cluttered with ideas and systems and icons and components and all sorts of things.  I don't think this has been an entirely good thing and have disavowed complexity as an animating design philosophy in my own projects, which has had interesting ramifications for Collusion as we'll discuss.  But let's look at how it got started.

At around this time, I was an active participant at the Board Game Designer's Forum, having spent most of my formative years as a designer hashing out ideas about design in that community.  One of the designers there was Rene Wiersma, designer of Gheos, and he was talking at that time about a new design of his, his "magnum opus", which was going to pull together all of the things he had learned about design into a single game.  (I don't know for sure whether he ever finished the project though!)  This got me to thinking about embarking on a similar project, or at least a project of a similar scope, and I started with, more or less, two main ideas.  First, the title, "Collusion", and second, that it would have area control but not area majority.

The premise was that we were nobles in some fictitious realm.  Fictitious realms in games always seem to have kings on death's door, but in this game's case, we weren't trying to succeed the king or even impress him; rather, we were trying to use him as a pawn in the great game we were all playing for the supremacy in our behind-the-scenes scheming.  The kingdom had a bunch of territories, each with a characteristic resource that it produced.  The game had seasons, and each type of resource only produced in one or two of the three (?) seasons.  The realm had roads, which were only passable in some of the seasons.  It had estates, which we could claim.  And it had baronies, groups of territories that could grow and shrink. 

Most of all it had factions.  Factions each had a characteristic building, which could be placed into certain special spaces on the board.  And they had cards representing their members.  This was important because we each had a mat, which specified our heirs and with spaces for advisors.  Thus we could claim cards from certain factions and marry them to our heirs (actually, this was a two-step process, betrothal and then marriage) and we could hire them as advisors, by placing the cards onto the corresponding space on the mat. 

But each card also had a special action it could perform.  Thus the turn mechanic was actually quite simple: take a card, and either do its action or attach it to your mat as a betrothal or advisor.  Each faction's actions were associated with the kinds of things that you'd think thematically that faction could do.  The church performed marriages, the merchants converted resources, and so on. 

Each year, the king took a royal tour around the realm, following the paths that were open in whatever season it happened to be.  You wanted to steer the king to your estates so you could entertain him, by throwing a festival in which you expended resources.  Each season had a set of appropriate festival types -- i.e. a resource-to-points conversion -- and we tracked the quality of the festivals we each threw, with the person who threw the best festival getting some reward at year's end.  And then there were also baronial elections, whereby you gained control of the baronies. 

You'll notice I haven't said anything about collusion, because at that stage there wasn't any.  It would have been more accurate to call the game "Scheming"; I toyed with a name switch to "Levers of Power", but always stuck with Collusion, and now it's a more fitting title for the game.

We played the game once.  Or rather, I taught the game over the course of an hour to two patient souls (one of them was my brother) who attempted to discern just what in the world I was talking about.  Then they heroically attempted to play the thing, we may have made it through a year, and then ended in confusion.  Ending the game early is going to be a common theme in this.  And for comparison, the latest version, I can teach in about 10 minutes. 

I've talked about how in the process of designing Sands I came to realize that a game should have a core idea, but that realization came late in Sands' development and I certainly hadn't made it by the early years of Collusion, although I now know what the idea of Collusion is.  At the early stage, it turns out it was just a kind of generic and not especially focused power-acquisition game, with the intent that there were a lot of different things you had to think about.  I guess that my intent, though I never fully realized it, was that there was a 'levers of power' construct, in that there were different systems in the game, and you couldn't interact with all of them, so the point was to choose how to compartmentalize your participation into just those systems that you were going to emphasize in your strategy.  It wasn't that the game's turn mechanic was complicated, but just that there were so many different layers to what went on during the game. 

As I said, the game was hardly even playable early on, much less memorable.  I think in its current form it may be something special.  I'll talk in the next post about the intervening years and how it made this journey.

En Arche: tile removal and dice allocation

Way back in 2011, I had an email conversation with Jeff Allers in which he told me about his game Heartland.  It's a tile-laying game with a farming theme, with the twist that tiles are placed on top of other tries to simulate replanting a field of one crop with a different type.  It's just been reworked into a feudal Japan theme and published by Renegade as "Gunkimono".


Anyway, what this discussion sparked for me was the awareness that tile-laying games don't have to strictly remain two-dimensional.  And thinking in a third dimension led quickly to the thought of a 3D game in which you start with a stack of tiles and remove them progressively to uncover what's underneath.  This obviously suggests an archaeology theme, and that's obviously where I went with it.


For some reason, I decided that because worker placement games were becoming the popular thing at that time, I needed an elaborate WP system to give you a lot of different things you could do.  It actually probably could have worked, but digging was very swingy, in that you were rewarded for whatever you uncovered as you removed tiles, and also the game was a bit dry.  So it got shelved.


Last week I had an idea for a mechanic that I haven't seen previously:  roll dice and assign them to different actions, and then resolve actions in die order.  Thus there needs to be some reason why you want to go early in some actions, but also that there's an advantage to going late.  I quickly whisked through all of my design ideas for which I've hit a snag and thought about whether this could possibly unsnag any of those games.  And luckily, I think for the archaeology game, there's a potential fit.


The idea is this:  the stack of tiles is laid out in a 4 by 4 grid, with tiles having 1, 2, or 3 squares.  (All tiles in a layer are functionally the same)  At the start of each turn, randomly activate three sites in the grid (e.g. C3, A2, B1).  Then each player rolls dice and assigns one die to each active site.  Then, resolve actions in die order.  (If two players pick the same die on the same site, just use a 'tiebreaker track' to settle who goes first).


Each tile, when it's first uncovered, receives a number of cubes, randomly drawn, in an amount equal to the level on which the tile is found.  These come in four colors, representing different kinds of finds:  artifacts, inscriptions, human remains, and structures.


There are five different actions you can take when your turn comes up:  (1) remove the tile at that site (costs money), (2) sell one of the cubes for money, (3) pick one of the cubes and increase your "knowledge track" in  that color, (4) publish a book about one of the cube colors, or (5) announce a Major Discovery that includes one or two of the cube colors.


Here's the twist:  for options 2-5, the 'value' of the action you're taking is buffed by the number of dice on the tile.  So if you're first to act on the tile and (for example) choose to sell, you'll have your choice of which color to sell but won't get much money for it.  Whereas if you act later, there will be more dice on the tile and thus selling a cube will be worth more, but the cube selection may be more limited at that point. 


This is a pretty simple turn mechanic so I'm optimistic that it could work well, and certainly it's an enormous improvement over the bloated complexity of the WP conception of the game.  Possible concerns include that the randomly-assigned dig sites will be too restrictive, that the die-rolling will inject too little player control, and that the game won't play equally well at all player counts.  But we'll leave it to playtesting to determine which of these concerns materialize and how to address them.  A bigger concern might be that the earlier concern, that the game was rather dry, may still exist:  there isn't exactly an element of removing a tile and finding something really great underneath it.  Instead it's about positioning yourself to benefit from whatever is uncovered, and to decide which sites to prioritize each round.  I think it will be fun but definitely not the "thrill of discovery" fun of Thebes for example.


For now, I like that both the physical arrangement of the tiles and the turn mechanic have not yet, as far as I know, been done previously, but both should make pretty good intuitive sense so hopefully the game is easy to learn and play.

Red 5

For several years I've been working on Downhill Racer, a game about the Olympic downhill.  It's a dice game whose central skill  is risk management.  You want to increase your speed to boost your score, but speed puts you at more risk of crashing.   The downhill course is represented by a series of cards, and each card shows you a "skier's eye view" perspective of the part of the course you're currently on, and you must make a single decision on each card.  This captures the feel of the downhill and I think it's very successful.

I had always thought of this as a solo game, but at the suggestion of John Velonis we tried a 2p variant years ago, and it has tested so well that I now think of it as the primary way of playing the game.  It's fun to try to stay upright as you race down the course, but even more fun when the other player is a little ahead of you and you're being pulled to speed up even if it's risky to do so.

But this had me wondering whether this same framework -- a two-player game, first person perspective, quick simple decisions -- could work in any other setting as well, and my first thought was the death star trench run scene.

Like the downhill game, each card will show a first person perspective of a section of the trench, with some gun turrets.  (Additional neat thing, visually, the cards are arranged in a pile, so the back-printing of the next card will show what's coming further down the trench, viewed from further away, then when you flip it you see it up close).

Unlike the downhill game, this one is asymmetric.  One player is the rebels (i.e. Luke) and the other is the imperial defenses and Vader.

In the downhill game, there are three skills, each card tests one of them, and you roll dice to see how many 'hits' you get of that card's skill.  In this game I think it will be more that you roll dice and pick the skill you want to use for that card.  For the rebels, I think it will be "fire", "shields", and "maneuver".  The idea is that if you can take out all the gun turrets on the present card, you can speed up, and speed makes you harder to hit as well as necessary for the final shot (it's a kinetic weapon or something like that).  But if you can't take out the turrets, maybe instead you direct energy to your shields, or you maneuver.

Why would you need to do that?  Because the Vader player also has three things he can do, fire the gun turrets, maneuver his tie fighter, or shoot.  Vader has a little card that shows his "targeting computer", and for him, maneuvering lets him move a marker closer to the center, and the closer it is the fewer successes he needs to hit you when he fires.  Thus, by you maneuvering, it moves that marker away from center and/or perhaps there's also a left-right thing that you can dance around to also make yourself harder to hit.  But when he has a clean shot and hits it, you lose one of your three X-wings.

Overall then it's something of a cat-and-mouse game.  My sense is that the climax should of course be the exhaust port, and obviously you should have to roll "fire" results to hit that.  Maybe as you get closer and closer the odds of hitting it go up, but the longer you wait the more you're risking getting blown up before you have a chance to fire.

Of course there are three things that the game wouldn't feel complete without, and I don't yet know how to include them:  R2, Han, and Obi-Wan/The Force.  My only idea here is that you have a special die that has an R2 face, a Millennium Falcon face, and one or two "The Force" faces.  Maybe you're limited when you can roll it or how many times, but if you do, R2 lets you regain a shield, Han takes out a Tie Fighter, and the Force gives you +1 to your shot at the exhaust port.

Lots to think about here and the key will be balancing it in such a way that, generally speaking, you're down to your last x-wing and Vader is close to targeting you and about to pull the trigger when you fire off your proton torpedoes.  But there's a lot to put in place before getting to the balancing!

The Hunt for ... something other than the Hunt for the Ring

Many years ago I had an idea for a chase-the-fugitive game in the spirit of Scotland Yard or Fury of Dracula, about the pursuit of the Frodo by the Nazgul.  But there was a twist:  this would be a three player game, with the third player taking the role of Gollum.  Gollum knows where the ring is at all times, but the Nazgul know where Gollum is at all times, so he has to carefully dance between leading the Nazgul right to it and staying so far away that Frodo is able to easily avoid him.


More recently I had the thought that you could implement this with a new kind of physical component:  a circular board with three screens, emanating from the center of the board to the edge, at 120 degree angles to one another.  So, each pair of screens gives a view of a section that is 1/3 of the total "pie".  But these 'pie slices' you can see are all redundant.  However, you only place your pieces on the slice that you view.  We're all moving on our own pie slice, and we don't know where the other people are.  Except that, at certain times, or perhaps in perpetuity, the board rotates by 60 degrees, such that each player has information about one other player's position.  So in the LotR, Gollum sees himself and Frodo, Frodo sees himself and the Nazgul, the Nazgul see themselves and Gollum.


Of course, a new Hunt for the Ring game just came out so my take on this idea will never go anywhere.  But could the idea be used in some other way?  I don't know but maybe it's worth thinking about.  Divorced from the original restriction of the LotR theme,  I like the idea of a divided circular board that can be rotated by 60 degrees in either direction, so you can get information about what either of your opponents are up to.  Call it the "lazy susan" mechanic. 


The thing is, a cat and mouse game has two participants, so the third participant has to have a well defined role that makes thematic sense, and by which that player can win outright; he/she doesn't simply choose to take the side of one or the other.  This would also seem to preclude a three-sided game.  For example, maybe it's a heist or caper game, and we're the crew, but we don't trust each other so we can 'use the building's security camera' (rotate the lazy susan) to see what the others are really up to.  This is an ok idea perhaps, but there's nothing intrinsically three-player about it.  But maybe that's ok.


A totally weird idea that just popped into my head was Hamlet, with the three players being Hamlet, Claudius, and King Hamlet's Ghost.  This isn't a perfect three-sided game because Hamlet and the ghost are nominally on the same side, but perhaps victory conditions could be defined that let them technically function independently. 


Another different idea could be that the three pie slice sections aren't redundant, but in fact the board is all one big board and we're only seeing (and acting in) parts of it at any one time.  In such a case part of the game would be controlling the 'rotation speed' of the lazy susan; you'd be trying to keep the other players from being able to interfere too much with the things that you set up in that other part of the board there.  The biggest problem with a game like that, I think, is probably memory.


Yet another weird idea, in this case a deduction game.  Say we spilt the board into quarters or fifths, however many suspects there are.  Each pie slice is a redundant map of the manor, and you use each slice to track the actions of ONE suspect.  There are a set of discs, in each character's color, that represent the whereabouts in the mansion of each character at a given hour of the night.  Additionally there are cards that correspond to rooms and times.  We are detectives who perform interviews (get cards) which authorize us to learn the whereabouts of the interviewee by placing a token on the map in that person's slice of the board.  You can rotate the board to get information about different people's whereabouts as well as to interview suspects and be authorized to place additional tokens.  Obviously as more and more tokens are placed the picture becomes more and more complete. Taken comprehensively you are trying to piece together the crime.  Who was in the room, alone, with the victim, when?  And who else did that person talk to, and might those people have been accomplices?  And whom can you place in the room that originally, or subsequently, contained the murder weapon?  It's not certain that this idea strictly requires the lazy susan but maybe it provides a useful framework to think about a mystery from the standpoint of reconstructing it from the testimony of the suspects.