Though I only got to attend two days of BGGCON last week, I’m glad I was able to make it. It was great to see so many familiar faces there. Y’all’s excitement to play Coalition: Councils of the Republics again a year later melted my heart. Thanks to everyone who came out to playtest!
I know I didn’t always have as much time as I’d have liked to collect feedback. If anyone has thoughts to share, feel free to reply to this email, or shoot me a message on our Discord server. Also, I know some of y’all took photos – if you have any photos, please send them to me! I’m notoriously terrible at getting pictures of my own events.
I’d like to give a big shout out to Delta Nu Delta at the University of Louisiana Lafayette for organizing a playtest last week! Your feedback is very valuable!
NEW DESIGN JOURNAL ENTRIES: A TWO-FOR-ONE
It’s been a year since I last updated the Coalition design journal. I don’t plan on waiting so long between entries this time. To that end, there are two new entries!
#5: The Constitution Update: Back in May, Coalition underwent a collection of changes I call “the Constitution Update”. I started writing about it, but let it get lost in the shuffle of summer conventions. This entry explains my rationale for changes made from the major version tested from December ’22 to April ’23. It also goes into how we’ve iterated in the wake of the update, as well as some of the design challenges we’ve faced.
#6: Carrots and Sticks, Negotiation and Bluffing: This entry is an attempt to organize my thoughts about player incentives in Coalition. I have lots of thoughts about how I want things to work in theory, but I’m not certain whether or not they work that way in practice. I’d love to hear thoughts from recent playtesters about this stuff.
WHAT’S NEXT?
We don’t have any more public playtests scheduled, but we’re working on it. The good news is that you don’t need to wait for us to playtest! Our Community Playtest Print-And-Play is now available! If you’re interested in organizing a playtest, get in touch with us! We’d love to help you organize, and we’d like to hear your feedback!
The most recent batch of playtests has given me a lot to think about regarding certain Edict effects, the language on some of the Role cards, and how to balance Independent Roles. I’ll be posting an update directly to the PNP Google Drive in the near future. Keep an eye out!
For the uninitiated: a “carrot” is a positive incentive for desired behavior. A “stick” is a negative incentive to punish undesired behavior.
After the last few playtests, I’m wondering: are carrots more useful than sticks in a game of Coalition? I don’t know the answer, and I’d like to hear your thoughts. Many of the role cards in the game are quite aggressive. I’m not fully certain of their place in the game. Please help me deeper my understanding of this beast that we’ve created!
Any role card that generates Influence can be used as a carrot. The Friar and Investor are especially good at this. There are also other carrots in the game: the Magistrate and Advocate can affect how Edicts resolve at their Council, meaning that they’re great for bargaining with players that wish to trigger or avoid certain effects – Independents are usually particularly interested in these roles.
Other role cards are usually sticks. Clergy cards like the Inquisitor only ever punish the opposition. The Guildmaster and Revolutionary can be used to threaten a Council Chair into cooperation.
You might even be able to use some “aggressive” cards as carrots by promising potential allies that you will punish their enemies. The Nobles’ Knight might convince a Clergy to work with them by promising to use their role to boot out the Merchant on their Council. Of course, depending on their dispositions, the Merchants might be less likely to work with the Knight after such a play.
You might also convince someone to work with you if they think your role ability makes you more likely to win a given bid. For example, the Nobles’ Countess card can be used to discard Influence cards that other players bid. A cunning Countess player at a hotly-contest Council might announce that she has the ability to discard part of the Rebels’ bid, making a Merchant player think that it might be less worthwhile to side with the Rebels.
CONSENSUS, COMPETITION, AND RESOURCE CONSUMPTION
Bidding during the Council Phase will usually go one of two ways for your Council: either you will reach a consensus, or you will have a competition.
Consensus is likely if all players on your Council share a Value. For example, a Council of Merchants and Nobles is very likely to draft a Wealth Article, since those parties have Wealth as their shared Value. Usually, the whole Council will bid a total of 1 Influence – or even 0, if they trust the Council Chair.
If there are a mix of Parties on a Council, competition is much more likely. A Council with a Merchant, a Rebel, and a Clergy is likely to go for either Freedom (shared by the Rebel and Merchant) or Justice (shared by the Rebel and Clergy). Securing the Rebel’s support will likely be key to victory. There may be a chance of consensus if the Merchant or Clergy is convinced not to bid – for example, by offering them a Sigil.
One of the most powerful plays you can make in Coalition is to have your Council reach a consensus. If your Council spends 1 or 0 cards to get an Article on the scoreboard, that’s great. That’s virtually no resources spent to gain a whole +10 points. Players at your Council now have an edge over players at Councils where there was competition. Your Council spent a round conserving resources and scoring points, while Councils that had competition now have fewer resources to spend in the following round. Alternatively, if you anticipate consensus at your Council early on in negotiations, you can use your resources to help other players compete at other Councils.
BLUFFING, BIDDING, AND DEFECTING FROM CONSENSUS
The simultaneous blind bid gives players plenty of opportunity to bluff, making the outcome of competition uncertain. In the above example of competition, if the Rebel and Clergy align, they have the resources of two whole teams available to bid. If they think that this might deter the Merchant, they might each bid low. However, the Merchant might still have a chance to win if they bid high, especially if they are given Influence cards by players on other Councils.
If a player faces a competition that they do not think they can win, they have incentive to bluff bidding more Influence than they actually do. If you manage to make your opponents spend more resources while you spend less, you will have an advantage going into the next round.
A player can also bluff about agreeing to a consensus. If the consensus agreement is nonbinding, they might defect from the agreement by bidding more in secret. This makes it harder for a Council to reach a consensus where they spend little or no Influence to draft their Article. Spending fewer Influence leaves your agreement vulnerable to defectors.
The real question is: when is it worthwhile to defect? Perhaps a Council made up of Nobles and Merchants might agree to bid for Wealth, but the Nobles might decide in secret to defect and instead bid for Order. The Nobles might feel incentivized to do this if the Merchants are ahead, especially if the Clergy are behind. The Clergy might even bribe the Nobles to do so. However, such a betrayal might make the Merchants less likely to work with the Nobles in future rounds. Lastly, as we have established, consensus is quite powerful – the Nobles in this situation would have to decide whether the benefits of consensus outweigh the benefits of defecting. Of course, if the Merchants suspect treachery, the Council might turn to competition instead.
ROLE ABILITIESAND CONSENSUS
Roles with “stick” abilities aren’t likely to be activated if there is a consensus. Meanwhile, carrot roles – particularly Influence-generating roles like the Duke, Friar, and Investor – will likely be activated whether there is consensus or competition. Does that mean that the “stick” abilities are useful less often?
Aggressive roles such as the Knight, Revolutionary, Guildmaster, and Inquisitor aren’t likely to be activated if there is a consensus. Meanwhile, carrot roles – particularly the Influence-generating roles like Friar, Duke, and Investor – will likely be activated whether there is consensus or competition. Does this mean that “stick” abilities are useful less often?
I’d argue that an ability’s frequency of activation isn’t necessarily an indicator of its usefulness. It could be possible that the “stick” roles are actually good for enforcing consensus by threat of activation.
Potential defectors might choose to instead participate in the consensus if they worry about punishment. If a player wants to remain on a particular Council, they’d do well to align with the Knight. If a player wants to remain Council Chair, they shouldn’t cross the Guildmaster. This all sounds good in theory – but how often does it crop up in practice?
ROLE ABILITIES AND COMPETITION
Of course, many of the “stick” role abilities are quite useful in a competition. Being able to take away resources from opponents or directly manipulate cards in bids is incredibly useful.
Roles like the Spy and Countess are particularly great at making competition expensive simply by threat of activation. If an opponent knows that one of them is at the table, then the opponent will realize that they need to bid more cards to overcome those potent role abilities.
Of course, as I stated before, many of the “carrot” abilities will be useful here, too. Accruing Influence is crucial to winning competitions in future rounds.
What if I have a card that’s good at competing, but never have to activate it? The Guildmaster can easily become the Council Chair if he has the right types of Influence in hand. But what if every Council Chair at the Guildmaster’s Council is willing to collaborate for the entire game? Would it have been better for the Guildmaster to move on to a Council where they could usurp an unfriendly Council Chair? Or would the ability have been useful even without being activated, providing a threat of activation to encourage the Council Chair to collaborate?
This scenario could apply to any “stick” role. The real question is: would it be better to go and use your role ability? Or is the “soft power” gained through threat of activation enough to make a card useful?
WRAPPING UP
None of the questions that I’ve posed here are rhetorical. I have lots of ideas about how things might work in theory, but I want to hear from my playtesters about their actual experiences. Feel free to comment below, or join theCoalition Discord Server for live discussion!
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 NEXTFOR 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.
Coalition: Councils of the Republic has been through three major versions in the last year. We’ve taken it to BGG Spring, Origins, and GenCon, and we’re proud of how far it’s come. Now you can playtest Coalition at home!
Your feedback will be invaluable for polishing Coalition. If you organize a playtest, let us know and tell us how it goes! When we go to print, we will give you a shout-out in our rulebook! Additionally, we will have other swag available for playtest organizers! (Exact details TBD, may vary on case-by-case basis)
Check out the playtest PnP today! Please note that illustration and graphic design are still a work-in-progress. Some components will look a lot better than others because we aren’t finished with them yet!
BGGCON 2023
We had a blast at BGGCON last year, and we’re excited to be running Coalition there again. If you’re attending, join us for a playtest on Friday (Nov 17) or Saturday (Nov 18) at 6:00 PM or 8:00 PM. Sign ups available now on tabletop.events!
The Inquisitor, one of our Clergy characters, featuring our new card background!
ON THE HORIZON
Our convention circuit begins next month with CoastCon in Biloxi, MS, and TokenConin Oklahoma City. We look forward to continued playtesting. In the meantime, Coco will continue to bring the game to life, character by character. Check out our latest art above for a glimpse of the Council Hall in which the constitutional convention takes place!
WINTER PLAYTESTS:INSIGHTS GAINED
Council in session! Playtest at Beausoleil Books, January 2023
Thanks to everyone who came out for our winter playtests! I had a great time, and your feedback was greatly appreciated.
Merchants won both games, though the Little Wars game was by a rather thin margin.
The asymmetry of the current version shines through. The Chair Edicts that each Party has easiest access shape their playstyle. With the added spice of Role abilities, each Party and each Role successfully offers a unique play experience. This is a huge step up from previous versions, where Role abilities were underwhelming, and each party essentially had access to the same tools.
However, we learned that not all Parties are equally easy to play. It is easier for the Wealth factions to snowball, while the Justice factions must play aggressively to keep them in check. This is partly by design, but it does create a “power ranking” for games with mostly new players. From easiest to hardest, these are:
Merchants. Their Role abilities all scale based on the number of types of Influence they have access to, meaning they need to trade around for Justice and Order Influence to get their powers “fully operational.” Newer players are usually willing to trade one-for-one without asking for anything extra (favors, additional Influence, etc.), making the Merchants easier to play.
Nobles. The Council Chair is already a powerful position, but the Duke and Magistrate are able to act as force multipliers for the Chair. Newer players often don’t recognize a position of power, meaning that the Nobles were often able to lock down Councils with little contest.
Clergy. The Clergy have lots of “sticks” in their arsenal. The Bishop is obviously powerful, but the Inquisitor and Templar require players to be willing to wield their powers like a cudgel to cajole others into working with them. This requires a certain amount of finesse.
Rebels. The Rebels are the most aggressive faction – they have the some of the best tools to break up “stronghold Councils.” This requires Rebel players to be capable of threat assessment – to break up a stronghold, you have to 1. recognize it 2. come up with a plan of attack.
Most abilities will stay the same in this version. However, the Merchants’ Investor is receiving a small nerf, while the Rebels’ Courier is receiving a rework. The Investor will now be required to split profits with another player. The Courier will be capable of moving willing players between Councils, allowing them to act as a lynchpin role for the Rebels.
While I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that some factions are more challenging than others, we are working to lessen the “delta” between the easiest and the hardest.
WRAPPING UP
Mark and I with our table at Little Wars for our Boards and Brews playtest
We have a lot of stuff in the works that we’re excited to share with you, including new art, improved components, and tons of playtests! Give us a shout-out if you’ll be at any of the upcoming conventions; we’d love to see you there!
The Revolutionary, the first of four Rebel character designs
A BIG YEAR FOR COALITION
Happy New Year from the Coalition team!
2023 is shaping up to be a great year for us. The game has been through many iterations in the last few months, and we’re particularly proud of the current version. Check out the latest rulebook to see what’s changed! Or, for a peak “under the hood” of the newest design, see Design Journal #4. In short, the changes consist of:
Removed Addendum cards
Added Chair Edict system, emphasizing typed Influence and adding a new axis for negotiation
Reworked Role abilities and fleshed out Party mechanical identities
Excited to try out the newest version of Coalition? Good news: we’ll be bringing Coalition to SIX CONVENTIONS between now and August! For our Louisiana residents, we’ll also be hosting public playtests locally!
WINTER PUBLIC PLAYTESTS
Saturday, January 28: Beausoleil Books – Lafayette, LA – 6:30 PM (21+ to enter)
Sunday, January 29: Little Wars – Baton Rouge, LA – 6:00 PM (21+ to enter, $10 cover, catering provided)
Stay tuned for further additions to our schedule! If you’re going to any of these cons, give us a holler – we’d love to see you there! In the meantime, take a look at our new accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
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: ADDENDUMSARE 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. Inquisitionis 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!
We’ve been plenty busy since GenCon. Firstly, Sidereal Gaming is now officially an LLC recognized by the state of Louisiana. We’re legit, people! Secondly, we’ve added some more talent to the team making the dream come true: an Assistant Developer and two Graphic Designers. You’ll get to know them soon enough!
Coalition is coming along steadily. Our brilliant art team has been doing exploratory work to establish a visual identity for this game. Above is a sneak peak of what we’ve got in store – character art! Today we’re showing off the Knight, a weathered but jovial Noble proudly showing off his battle scars (and immense wealth) at the city’s convention.
Though we’re still experimenting with some mechanics, the silhouette of a metagame is coming into focus. We’re learning more about the ecosystem we’ve created and starting to identify strategies that work. We’re learning how the player experience changes based on player count (for better and for worse). We’re turning dials, tweaking the nuts and bolts of the game.
We’ll be taking this game to as many conventions as possible so we can collect as much data and insight as we can, and we’d love to see y’all at some of our tests. To that end…
COALITION AT BGGCON
Our team will be at BGGCON in Dallas next month (Nov. 9 – Nov. 13)! Signups for our playtests are open for badgeholders! We’ll be in the Cotton Bowl room in the evening on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, next to the other big social games like Werewolf (though our 6:00 Saturday game is actually in a different room). We’ll also have some presence in the UnPub section on those same days.
If you’ve played the game before, we’d love to show off the latest iteration and hear your thoughts on changes made. If you haven’t played the game before, we’d still love to get your feedback. Give us a shoutout if you’ll be at the con!
BGGCON will be the last convention we attend in 2022. Sadly we’ll be missing PAX Unplugged. However, keep an eye out in 2023 – we will be attending lots of conventions! I’ll have an update on our planned convention circuit ready for y’all after the holidays.
BEANS AND DICEPODCAST
Lastly, if you want to hear some more about Coalition and our (tentative) plans for it, I will be making an appearance on the Beans and Dice Call-in Show at 8:00 CST tonight! Even if you can’t tune in tonight, I highly recommend checking them out. Their call-in show is always a ton of fun!
Me outside the First Exposure Playtest Hall, 8/4/2022
A MAGICAL PLACE
Yesterday I returned home from GenCon 2022 in Indianapolis. Coalition was featured in the First Exposure Playtest Hall, in which I ran four playtests. This was my first time presenting Coalition to complete strangers.
My experience with First Exposure was life-changing. Nothing has ever felt so right to me as being among fellow game designers. Whether they be veterans with several titles under their belts or novices such as myself, they were all incredible people, and each had things to teach me.
It brought me indescribable joy to see people enjoying the game I created. I will be forever grateful for my testers’ enthusiasm for giving feedback and willingness to talk through solutions to the game’s problems.
GenCon is an incredibly stimulating environment for my designer brain. Learning unfamiliar games, being around other designers, and soaking up every fellow con-goers enthusiasm makes a perfect concoction for having great ideas. Most of the groundwork for the first draft was laid out on the car ride home from GenCon 2019. Continuing the tradition this year, I drafted the bulk of Coalition 4.0 on the plane last night while processing playtest feedback.
Now, enough gushing. I will split the rest of this post into two sections: one section where I share some of the roadmap to publishing, based on lessons learned from other designers, and a second section in which I detail the playtest feedback.
Playtesting on 8/5/2022. Thanks for the pic, Kalani!
THE ROAD TO PUBLISHING
Coalition will most likely be self-published. This means relying on crowdfunding on a platform such as Kickstarter or Backerkit. To drive a successful crowdfunding campaign, the game will need a base of enthusiastic followers. The only way to further build that base is to get the game in front of people.
To that end, I am making it my goal to bring Coalition to GenCon 2023 with a set date for the beginning of a crowdfunding campaign. Between now and then, I aim to bring the game to at least three other conventions. One of these three will be the Southern Board Games Festival in March 2023, a small convention in Lafayette, Louisiana (where I currently reside). The other two are currently TBD.
Things are starting to look more serious. As development on Coalition continues, we will be adding members to the Sidereal Gaming team. We already have our illustrator Coco Lincoln, whose work was well-received at GenCon. However, we will need more hands on deck to help with graphic design for game components, as well as extra help promoting Coalition both online and at conventions. Expect to see more of us soon!
Below I will summarize the feedback received about the version of the game tested, Coalition 3.2. I will also include some of my own observations.
#1: Addendums aren’t intuitive and have memory issues
Consistently across every test, Addendums were the last thing to click for people learning the game. This will likely remain true, as they are a mechanic wholly unique to Coalition, but there are solutions that could make them slightly easier to grasp.
Firstly, people had to be reminded who got to use the effect on the card. It is a lot to keep track of, since the ability triggering involves two players (the player it was placed on and the player that gets to use it). Secondly, people sometimes had trouble remembering who played which Addendum when several were on the table. Again, this is complicated due to two players being involved in the ability triggering. Lastly, it was hard to tell at a glance the order in which Addendums would resolve, which often matters when cards like Tax Collection or Extort are played.
An additional type of game component could help alleviate all of these issues. The next iteration of Coalition will include numbered tiles for each Council that correspond to each Council seat. When a player plays an Addendum, they will place the tile corresponding to their Council seat on the card. For example, if I am second in turn order, I would place the tile labelled “Two” on the Addendum card that I play.
These tiles will help players remember who played which card, and will help indicate the order in which they resolve. Lastly, they will serve as a reminder that there is more than one player involved in the power resolving, since the card and tile will be placed in front of the player the Addendum is placed on.
#2: Role ability costs need rebalancing
Some playtesters used their Role abilities very little, if at all. Previous iterations of Coalition had no cost whatsoever for Role abilities, leading to unfun spam of controlling abilities like the Knight and the Judge. To solve for this, I added a cost of two Influence to activate Role abilities.
I was happy with how the added cost tempered the most powerful abilities. I never saw the Knight used more than twice in a game. Each time it was impactful, but not abusably unfun.
However, for other less-swingy abilities such as the Whip and the Judge, the cost was too steep. Many players decided that they’d rather just bid that Influence rather than use their powers.
Coalition 4.0 will include variable costs for player abilities, reducing the costs on some abilities while remaining high on other.
#3: Why is Influence typed by Value?
Or, “why are there four different types of Influence?” someone inevitably asked during every playtest. My answer was that: 1. it is an information-sharing mechanic 2. some Role abilities involve choosing a type of Influence to affect. However, to players that did not have a role like the Whip, the reasoning for this was not apparent.
Some testers even argued that I wasn’t using the design space of different types of Influence enough to warrant its inclusion, and said I should not have Influence correspond with Values. I disagree, but I am certainly taking the note about how the design space could be used more.
Coalition 4.0 will make it clear from the outset why Influence corresponds to Value, namely by allowing players to do different things with different types of Influence. This will introduce some extra asymmetry to the game by giving factions different modus operandi. I hope that this allows the flavor of each Party to feel more distinct. More information TBD!
#4: Some rules language needs cleaning up
Most of these were in regards to wording on specific cards. However, it seemed that every card could use reminders about timing of effects (e.g. role abilities being activated on a player’s turn, while Addendums take effect when the election ends). Some players suggested extra graphics to show each phase of the game.
On that note, some sub-phases of the game will be tweaked as well to make some administrative work easier (namely, gaining Addendums).
#5: Smaller games can be punishing
Being a Partisan in a game of less than eight means that you have no teammates. While most players managed fine, some players made mistakes in the mid-game that they were unable to recover from. Without a teammate to fall back on, these players did not have much agency to influence the late game.
It is clear that smaller games need more testing for balance. Coalition 4.0 will be adding a new rule that should make the game slightly less punishing at < 8 players.
One last photo before going our separate ways, 8/7/2022
SPECIAL THANKS
… to all the playtesters who offered their feedback and enthusiasm for Coalition.
It’s been a while, but there’s plenty of Coalition content on the horizon!
Firstly, I will be playtesting Coalition at GenCon 2022 (August 4-7) in the First Exposure Playtest Hall (FEPH). I look forward to getting feedback from avid gamers and industry veterans. I suspect that after I process this feedback, the game will either become 1. Much more polished 2. Much different from its current form. We’ll see!
Second, Coalition now has art! I’ve commissioned a logo and some icons from my dear friend Coco Lincoln. Coco is a talented painter and a student of medieval history (including art). In fact, we were both in the very class that inspired the setting for this game – a survey of medieval Italy with Prof. Luongo at Tulane.
I am currently putting the completed art to use to make a Print and Play (PNP) version of Coalition! I have done my best to make readable and visually-pleasing cards using Adobe InDesign, but I am no graphic designer. My designs will likely be subject to change as this game gets further into development. Also on the docket is an updated rulebook – I’d like to have something a bit more attractive and legible than the current Google Doc. Keep an eye out for these things!
Recent playtests have yielded valuable insight into some structural problems with the game. I will elaborate further in my next entry in the Coalition Design Journal, in which I will also include lessons learned from GenCon!
Lastly – yes, the name of this website has changed. As I found when I registered for FEPH, “Magic Circle Gaming” was such a good name that it was already taken by an actual company! Given my longstanding interest in sci-fi and growing interest in real-life outer space, I settled on Sidereal Gaming. “Sidereal” means “of or with respect to distant stars.” I hope that this new name evokes wonder and mystery. Maybe one day I’ll use it to name an actual company!
Sidereal Gaming 