Coalition Design Journal #4: Adieu, Addendums! Ciao, Chair Edicts!

BGGCON 2022

We ran five playtests at BGGCON in Dallas last month. They went as well as I could have possibly hoped. Coalition was received well, we connected with insightful designers and enthusiastic gamers, and came home with incredible feedback. On the drive back to Louisiana we had a long conversation to process all this feedback. By the end of it, we had a clear picture of where the game stood and where it needed to go.

I couldn’t be happier! I feel confident that Coalition rests on a solid foundation – several people came back for more after participating in the first playtest. One evening, we hosted a 6-player game (our minimum player count), immediately followed by a 20-player game (the largest ever)! Seeing people laugh and banter as they politicked felt magical – hey, that’s my game that they’re having such a great time with!

Now that I’ve gushed about the convention, I’ll go into detail about the design problems identified after collecting feedback and the ways that Coalition is changing to address these problems.

We’re killing a darling: Addendum cards are no longer a part of the game. We’ve come up with a better player power system that we’re calling Chair Edicts. It is simpler, lighter on components, and accomplishes my design goals much better than Addendums ever did. I’ll speak more about Chair Edicts after outlining the major problems they were designed to solve.

PROBLEM #1: ADDENDUMS ARE CLUNKY

Addendums were a clever idea, but they were inherently an inelegant solution. You can see the thought process behind their inception in Design Journal #2. I was struggling to come up with a decent system for player powers and Influence economy; tying these powers to a core game mechanic (players winning elections) was a step up from the previous system.

However, there were numerous problems with Addendums. Firstly, divorcing Influence generation from Roles without having some sort of “base income” of Influence meant that the Addendums that generated Influence were almost always more powerful than those that didn’t. Since Addendums were a limited resource, this led to some interesting effects that didn’t generate Influence being used less often.

Additionally, they led to some unfun play patterns. The “double Donate” where two teammates managed to Donate to each other created a nigh-insurmountable advantage. Since Addendums were drawn from a deck, there was always an element of randomness – either you lucked out and drew Influence-generating Addendums often or you didn’t. I tried tweaking the density of effects in the deck, but someone was always on the losing end of the deck’s RNG in a way that just wasn’t fun.

Lastly, Addendums were the least-intuitive part of the game. They were hard to teach and produced a lot of corner-cases, which ultimately added a lot of rules text to the game. Addendums were always the snag that prevented new players from jumping in headlong. They were serviceable up to this point, but I’m not sad to see them go.

PROBLEM #2: INFLUENCE TYPE DOESN’T MATTER

I always knew that I wanted different types of Influence aligning with the game’s values. There’s something appealing to me about seeing different brightly-colored cards spread out on the table in front of me. In the early stages of the game, this was primarily intended as an information-sharing mechanic: as you watched people place bids, you could learn about their Party allegiance.

As it turned out, obscuring your Party allegiance is not the best strategy most of the time. Each iteration of this game has moved further away from obfuscation and closer to open information. So the question became: why have differently typed Influence at all? Why not make Influence untyped, just one variety instead of four?

The answer I had to offer was: “Well, certain roles actually care about types of Influence. It’s a fun design space!”

Of course, the problem was, if you didn’t have one of those role cards, you didn’t care much about different types of Influence. I tried to make it matter more by introducing typed Addendums. To play a Justice Addendum, you had to have corresponding Justice Influence. However, even with typed Addendums, we still got comments about the type not mattering enough to warrant being a part of the game.

Typed Influence is a darling that I don’t want kill. I like the thematic idea that each party has a modus operandi shaped by the Influence that they have access to. You should be able to do different things with different types of Influence – I find that design space interesting! The problem was that Addendums just didn’t do this very well.

PROBLEM #3: COUNCIL CHAIR DOESN’T MATTER

Another question we got was: why is the Council Chair a thing? Why should the first player in turn order get a special title if nothing really comes of it? Again, my answer was, “well, certain cards care about being the Chair, or really want to go before everyone else.” And again, that wasn’t a good enough answer – not enough of the game was engaging with that design space.

Roles like the Knight or Whip benefited from being higher in turn order. There was even one role, the Bishop, who could send people to the bottom of the turn order. But as it turns out, that was such an edge case, no one ever used the Bishop’s power. Even when it only cost one Influence, it just wasn’t worthwhile.

I wanted turn order to matter, and I wanted there to be someone called out as “presiding” over each Council. As it turned out, leaning further into this allowed us to come up with quite an elegant solution.

THE SOLUTION: CHAIR EDICTS

At the end of the Election, the player with the most Influence bid on them wins the election. The Council Chair notes the most bid type of Influence during that election. The Chair must then select and resolve a Chair Edict that corresponds with the Value of the most bid type of Influence. In addition to this new system, players now gain one Influence at the end of each round, in addition to any Influence gained by Chair Edicts.

I’ve introduced the Council Board component to the game. It provides a space for council members to place their placards, and displays available Edicts for each Value. A first draft of this component is pictured below.

The specifics of the Chair Edicts are still subject to change, but this prototype is a good example. Playtesters might note that several of these abilities used to exist as Addendums, perhaps under different names or with slight differences in effect.

The Wealth and Justice edicts are primarily concerned with the generation and distribution of Influence. The Order and Freedom edicts are concerned with movement between Councils. This serves as a solid basis for making the “flavor” of each faction feel unique. With opposed Values mirroring each other on opposite ends of the axis, this creates an “asymmetry through symmetry.” That is, each Party has easy access to one Value that can generate Influence, and one Value that can manipulate Council composition. However, each party’s unique combination of the two Values lends itself to a playstyle distinct from the others.

Of course, there’s nothing saying a Merchant (Freedom and Wealth) who is the Council Chair can’t pick an Order or Justice edict. They just likely won’t be able to push for one of those edicts by themself, since they don’t have easy access to Order or Justice Influence.

I’ll go into a little bit of how we imagined each Value’s Edicts work:

Wealth: Wealth is concerned with the consolidation of individual power. Donate can be a great bargaining chip, but ultimately only benefits two of the Councilors. Extort doesn’t generate any new Influence, but it does shift the balance of power from one individual to another.

Order: Order’s most powerful option is the Exile edict, allowing the Chair to get rid of disruptive rabble-rousers and stack their Council with allies. However, since this substitutes someone else to move instead of the elected player, it does not disrupt the game’s natural order of “each Council sends away one member and gains a new one each round,” meaning that it cannot unbalance Council sizes. Inquisition is a simple alternative for when the Chair doesn’t wish to Exile anyone, allowing them to potentially glean information on opponents’ role powers.

Justice: Justice is concerned with fair play. The Stimulus edict is the least offensive in the game – quite literally everyone at the Council benefits equally. This makes it a great bargaining chip, and rewards players for attempting to stack their Council with allies. The Redistribute generates no new Influence, but can serve as a powerful check to one player beginning to snowball in power.

Freedom: The inclusion of only one Freedom Edict is intentional. If Freedom has the majority, the Chair must select the only option: Retire. This serves as a safety valve for a “tyrannical” Council Chair holding a strong position for too long. However, they then move to another Council of their choosing, meaning that this effect can potentially work to the Chair’s benefit. The true power of this Edict lies in the fact that it unbalances Council sizes, meaning your Council will be down one member whenever they choose this Edict.

WRAPPING UP

We’ve playtested this new system a couple of times now, and it works so much better than Addendums ever did. As Mark put it: “Edicts feel more like legislation than Addendums ever did, because every round every option is on the table.”

I’ve found Edicts to be much easier to explain and less finnicky than Addendums. Additionally, they add a new layer of depth that makes the game much richer: every Influence you bid is working towards two goals: getting a player elected and pushing for a particular type of Edict.

Coalition now has fewer components and fewer rules, yet it has become a strategically richer game. It is simpler, but also deeper. We’re doing more with less. It feels more elegant now than it ever has. I could not have gotten to this point without all of the enthusiastic and deeply insightful feedback we received at BGGCON, nor without my rules-mechanics muses Mark and Hayden.

Our efforts are currently focused on tweaking the solid foundations of the new Chair Edicts system, and on designing Role abilities that make each faction feel even more distinct. Our results so far have been promising. I’ll be posting a Coalition 5.0 rulebook in the near future so you’ll be able to get a sneak peak at them! I’ll talk more in the future about the design philosophy behind each faction – perhaps in the next design journal! In the meantime, Coco is continuing to develop Coalition’s art style. We’ll have some incredible character art to show off in the near future!

Thanks so much to all of our new friends from BGGCON, who have allowed us to truly take Coalition to the next level. We are so excited to see you at the next con and show you how the game has grown!