THE STATE OF COALITION: COUNCILS OF THE REPUBLIC
Before I dive in – there is a version of Coalition that is available to the public! Go check out the Community Playtest Print-and-Play Files!
This design journal is long overdue. I’d started writing this over the summer about a collection of changes I’m calling the Constitution Update. The problem was that I updated the game faster than I updated this journal. So, I’m going to start by describing the Constitution Update, then chart the major structural changes made from May 2023 to November 2023.
In the last design journal I wrote about how we overhauled the rules based on playtests at BGGCON 2022. Since then, we’d gotten in about a dozen playtests of that version. Of course we iterated some between tests, but the core remained largely the same.
After TokenCon in March 2023, I felt that I had a good grasp on what was working and what wasn’t. To solve these issues, it looked like the very structure of the game needed to be overhauled. The question was: how could we do that without messing up the things that were already working well? April and May were challenging months; I felt stuck creatively.
After many hours of deliberation with the team and banging-head-against-wall, we had a new draft of the game ready to debut at BGG Spring. The fundamentals of Coalition remain same, but much has changed. Some things changed subtly, others drastically. These changes are The Constitution Update. Upon seeing it first played, I knew it was a huge step in the right direction. We’ve been refining it since then.
In this design journal, I will do a deep-dive on each piece of the Constitution Update. For reference:
Also: we’ve officially adopted a subtitle for this game! Councils of the Republic is here to stay!
OLD VERSION: THE GOOD AND THE BAD
There are two mechanics that I consider to be fundamental to Coalition:
- The four-party shared scoring dynamic
- Players being split across subgames (Councils) each round.
These are the very DNA of the game. I consider them immutable. Everything else has been subject to change.
Here is what I specifically liked about the pre-Constitution Update version.
- Typed Influence: having different types of Influence for each value and being able to use it to trigger different mechanical effects
- The Council Chair: an unelected position of power at each Council that can only be won via process manipulation
- Elected player moves: I like the tension this creates with the Council Chair. That is, if the Chair wants to score points AND hold on to their position, they have to work with and elect another player. I like that to “have it all” they MUST rely on someone else.
- Chair Edicts: you can force the Council Chair to pick a certain type of Edict by bidding that type of Influence.
- Bids accomplishing two goals: it feels clever that each bid contributes to two competitions. 1. the Election 2. the type of Chair Edict.
- Faction identities: still a little rough around the edges in some ways, but mostly there. The Merchants are my favorite.
And now, for the problems. This will not cover things in the previous iteration that I knew how to fix, such as changes for clarity and balance. This covers problems that were so hard to deal with that it warranted an overhaul.
First of all, the two-council game was very hit or miss. Some playtests it worked out fine, others saw the the councils exchanging pretty much the same two players back and forth, with very little room for shaking things up. It was too easy for two councils to get stagnant.
Secondly, Coalition often felt overbalanced. The scoreboard tends to naturally self-correct over the course of the game. For example, if Order pulls ahead, the Freedom factions will coalesce to counter it, and Justice/Wealth wouldn’t bee too far behind. I don’t think that the self-correction phenomenon is a bad thing. It means that Coalition is truly anyone’s game until the final round is over. However, I do think that some extra added swinginess is necessary to make the self-correcting scoring system not feel boring.
Thirdly, getting stuck sucks. Building voting blocs on your Council is a big part of Coalition. Sure, there will be some rounds where the rest of your Council is opposed to you and there’s not much you can do about it. But sometimes players get stuck in that position for much of the game. Making players make tough choices in hard positions is a good thing, I think, but I want to minimize situations that leave players feeling stuck round after round. This usually isn’t a problem for most players, but it still happens sometimes.
Lastly, Coalition felt narratively dissatisfying to me. Specifically, the Constitution. Up until this point it had only functioned as a scoreboard. The effects of an excess of Wealth or Justice articles being added to the new Constitution did not have any sort of mechanical impact on the game, except scoring points for certain teams.
The Constitution Update starts with a simple premise: what if changes to the Constitution have lasting effects on the game? The result is a game that I believe is more dynamic, intuitive, and narratively satisfying.
NO MORE ELECTIONS – HIGHEST BIDDER MOVES
Previously, players would hold elections during the Council Phase via simultaneous blind bid. The elected player would add an Article of their choice to the Constitution, then move to the next Council at the end of the round.
Elections are no more. They have been replaced with a step called Drafting an Article. Now, during the Council Phase, players will bid directly on the type of Article that they want to add to the Constitution. Whichever value has the most Influence bid determines the type of Article. For example, if players at Council 1 bid more Freedom Influence cards than any other type, then that council adds a Freedom Article to the constitution.
You may be wondering: how do you determine which player moves to the next Council? This end-of-round movement is crucial to keeping Coalition dynamic! The answer: the highest bidder moves to the next Council. If I bid more Influence cards than any other player at my Council, then I will be the one to move to the next Council.
For both Drafting an Article and determining Highest Bidder, the Council Chair breaks ties!
This new mechanic preserves so much of what I liked about elections before: that if the Council Chair wishes to shape the Constitution and also maintain their position as Chair, they need another player in cahoots with them. Now, if the Council Chair can’t convince another player to bid more Influence than them, they will be at risk of losing their position if they make any sort of sizable bid. Needing to get other players on your side is what makes Coalition tick.
EDICTS AND THE CONSTITUTION
Chair Edicts are no more. However, the effects of many of the Edicts from the previous version are still in the game. They have been reworked as persistent effects that “become law” at certain thresholds of Articles in the Constitution. Once an Edict becomes law, each Council Chair must resolve its effect at their Council every round of the game.
Each of the four Values has two Edicts: a mild but useful First Edict that can become law earlier and a powerful game-shaking Second Edict which becomes law later.
The thresholds at which each Edict becomes law depend on the number of Councils in the game. For example, in the three-council game, the First Edict becomes law after two Articles, and the Second Edict becomes law after four Articles.
Importantly, this means that every Article to the Constitution works toward accomplishing a particular goal. This makes cross-Council alliance building much more interesting. For example, if the Wealth factions conspire to write in two Wealth Articles into the Constitution in first round, the Donate Edict will become law immediately. Then the Merchants and Nobles will be able to take advantage of Donate for the rest of the game! If those parties fail to share enough the Influence generated by Donate, then the Rebels and Clergy might conspire to pass enough Justice Articles to make Redistribute become law.
I did find the old system of Chair Edicts to be quite elegant, but this new system is much better. One of the key changes here is that Edicts are global effects. Previously, each Council would end up selecting its own Edict. This change makes the game more dynamic, since players now have to worry about how other Councils vote. The Nobles might have one Council completely locked down, but if the other Councils pass Freedom Articles, the Nobles will have a much harder time maintaining their bloc.
Lastly, this change makes Coalition more replayable. A game where Redistribute becomes law early will feel very different than a game where it becomes law late.
I find all of this to be extremely narratively satisfying. I credit Sarah Shipp’s blog for giving me lots of food for thought on this front.
OTHER CHANGES ACROSS VARIOUS ITERATIONS
After TokenCon, one of our testers said that he felt like an extra bargaining chip would go a long way towards helping people make deals. The problem with giving players from other parties Influence was that it might be used against you. Enter a new card type: Sigils.
Every player starts the game with one Sigil. Each Sigil is worth +5 points at the end of the game, but not for the Party it started with. For example, a Noble Sigil doesn’t score points for the Nobles, only for the other three Parties. Additionally, Sigils can be used to secure binding deals. Deals are nonbinding by default in Coalition. However, if a Sigil changes hands as part of a deal, that deal becomes binding.
Thanks for the Sigils idea, Michael! They’ve improved the game a ton!
The setup rules have changed as well. Instead of random Council assignment at the start of the game, players now seat themselves according to their Party allegiance in the following order: Clergy, Nobles, Merchants, Rebels, then Independents. This means that the Clergy have the first show at being the Council Chair, since if a person sits down at an empty Council, they’ll be first on the Council List. Rebels and Independents will usually start far away from the top of the list.
Speaking of Party allegiance – that’s public information now! For the longest time, players had no idea what the allegiances of other players were at the start of the game. One of our BGGCON ’22 tester suggested trying it out with allegiance being public information – it was both more thematic and allowed for more negotiation/conniving. We did that at our next playtest at home, and haven’t looked back since then. Thanks, Alan!
SUMMER 2023: BGG SPRING, ORIGINS, AND GENCON
The main problem presented by the new system was the amount of bookkeeping introduced to the game after updating the scoreboard. The previous gameplay loop was elegant: players had timed negotiations, broke up into their Councils to place their bids, then added their new Articles to the Constitution scoreboard. That was a whole round.
Having global effects based on the state of the Constitution necessitated a new step after updating the scoreboard: Edict resolution. As I quickly saw at BGG Spring, as the game went on, more Edicts became law. By the mid-game, the new mechanic had thrown a clunky speedbump into the previously-simple gameplay loop. There were too many Edicts to resolve!
We needed to limit the number of active Edicts. So, I updated the Council Board to include a “slot” for each Value. It often felt redundant to have the first and second Edict for a single Value active at the same time anyway. Now, whenever a Value’s second Edict became law, it replaced the first one. This meant that there would never be more than four Edicts active at a given time.
Additionally, the effects of the second Edicts have been hard to get right. It has proven particularly challenging to make Edict effects that benefit the gameplan of both Parties that share that Value. We ran 8 games at Gencon, and the spread of wins for each Party was: Nobles 4, Clergy 2, Rebels 2, and Merchants with a whopping 0.
This was surprising. The Merchant abilities are potent – many have had to be dialed down in previous iterations. And for the most part our Merchant players at GenCon were playing well. We saw the Redistribute Justice Edict go off several times, which was particularly harmful for the Wealth Parties by design. However, the Nobles still took the win in half of our GenCon games. Why were the Merchants losing so much?
It wasn’t impossible for Merchants to win. One of our testers ran a game at his LGS shortly after GenCon (thanks, Jeff!) and reported that, in the hands of experienced players up against newbies, the Merchants crushed the competition.
Still, something didn’t feel right. Hayden pointed out that the answer might lie in the second Wealth Edict: Hoard. The text of Hoard read: “Each player besides the Council Chair discards half their Influence.” Of course, any Party can secure the Council Chair. But the Nobles are particularly good at it – it’s what their Party is all about. The Merchants, on the other hand, are not as good at entrenching themselves. The second Wealth Edict would often hurt the Merchants a lot more than it hurt the Nobles, especially if Redistribute was also online at the same time.
So, we cooked up a replacement: Spoils, which allows the highest bidder to recover half the Influence that they bid.
Besides the effects themselves being tough to get right, our developer Mark pointed out after GenCon that the resolution step still felt clunky, especially later in the game with the wordier texts of the second Edicts. It needed to be even simpler.
FALL 2023: SOBO AND BGGCON
After some deliberation, we settled on something new. Which Edict effects were online were now to be determined by a tug-of-war on each axis of the Scoreboard.
There are now two Edict slots on the Council Board: an Order/Freedom slot and a Justice/Wealth slot. Now, after updating the Constitution scoreboard, the active Edict in that slot is determined by whichever of the two Values has more Articles on the scoreboard. This means that every round, there are exactly two Edicts to be resolved at each Council.
For example, if there are more Order articles than Freedom articles, the Order Edict will be resolved this round. If that is still true next round, the Order Edict remains. If there are more Freedom articles instead, then the Edict will be replaced with the Freedom Edict. If there is a tie, then the current Edict is replaced with its opposite.
There are still two levels of Edicts, now called Tiers. Once the number of articles for a given Value reaches a certain threshold, its Tier 2 Edict will come into play instead of the Tier 1 Edict.
So far in playtesting this has felt great. It also allowed me to make the Tier 1 Edicts a bit more powerful/exciting, since they aren’t necessarily going to be resolved every round for the remainder of the game.
Dialing in the effects has still been troublesome, though. I’d decided to give Justice a meaner Edict for its Tier 1: an Asset Tax that forces the player with the most Influence cards at each Council to give away half of them to other players. Though I’ve seen some Clergy/Rebel victories since then, playtesters feel that Justice Edicts are hard for them to play around, meaning that they often felt disincentivized to go for Justice. The new Wealth Edicts feels underwhelming. The Tier 2 Order and Freedom Edicts are quite powerful, but rarely actually matter when resolved on the final round of the game.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR COALITION
I have some ideas on how to refine the current array of Edicts. Stay tuned for an update on the next iteration of Coalition: Councils of the Republic.
The other major design problem I’ve been grappling with are the Independent characters. I’m happy with the play patterns generated by the current set of Independents, but many of their objectives get too hard to achieve at higher player counts. Fortunately, the most recent round of tests has given me great ideas on how to make the Independents scale in power as you add more players to the game. I’ll be dedicating a journal entry to this – stay tuned!
Lastly, I’d like to give a resounding THANK YOU to all of the wonderful friends I’ve made at all of these conventions! I especially loved seeing so many familiar faces at BGGCON from last year – y’all’s enthusiasm to play the game again after a whole year makes me feel like we’re making something truly special.
Until next time, Councilors.
Josh Ballagh, Lead Designer
Sidereal Gaming 
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