ichthyoid

Happy New Year! 2020 is here, and I'm eager to continue to develop Of Duchies and Polities to completion, and share it with everyone here on Coil! In today's post, I want to write about the trials and changes made as I play-tested the game with friends and family. A lot of it was expected, and some very unexpected, but all in an effort to make the game more playable and enjoyable.

Before I do that, though, I should review and give a more detailed walkthrough of how the game flows in general, so the rest of it makes a bit more sense.

Game Flow and Play

As I wrote in my previous posts, Of Duchies and Polities is a political game that has influences from Risk and Monopoly. It's made for 2-4 players, and the goal of the game is to have control of 20 out of the 26 territories (called counties in this game). Control of a county isn't having an army on the territory, however. Rather, control means that a large majority (80%) of the population in that county supports your rule over them.

Population support is represented on the map by tiny little population tokens. I'm currently using Risk game pieces as tokens, with the different colors representing the population's support. For example, tokens that don't support any player are represented by black and gray Risk pieces, while the other colors (red, blue, green, and yellow) represent support for different players.

One of our current games.

When the game starts, every duchy (or polity) on the map is populated with neutral population tokens—all except the ones under player control, of course, which are populated with tokens that support those players (called player-owned population tokens in the game). These player-controlled regions are randomly determined at the start of the game.

Population tokens are converted through the use of Agent tokens that can be bought from a player's controlled territories. These include Diplomat (everyone starts with one), which can be upgraded to an Orator, which can then be upgraded to a Philosopher. Each of these tokens can move around the map, converting other population tokens to your side. Diplomats have generally a low chance of conversion, while the upgraded Agents have increasingly higher chances to convert.

Players can also purchase favors in each territory they have a Diplomat in. These favors are calculated per county, and give players a better chance of converting tokens in those counties as well.

This card is used to keep track of player territory and favor.

Additionally, there are Armies to raise, Cities to build, World Events that happen, Bribes to buy, and (of course) taxes to collect! All of these things add into the game, but the main point is still to influence and win over the people's hearts.

Balance and Fun

To that end, most of what I'm doing nowadays is play-testing to make sure the game is both enjoyable and balanced. Even from the beginning, I knew I had to balance out certain things.

For example, as I said before, increasing the size of “Wales” and “France” to include more counties was necessary even before play-testing began. This was because, just like Risk, getting large regions affords some bonuses. In Of Duchies and Polities, these bonuses are sometimes (intentionally) quite powerful, depending on what kind of strategy one decides to go for. If the size of Wales was too small, then it would be far too easy for a single player to immediately get the bonus, and thus disadvantage the other players.

Of course, the one thing I did most often was change the cost of different items. For example, in the beginning, Diplomat agents cost 7 Gold, its upgrades were more expensive, and Favor cost was static. But as my playgroups tested the game, it became apparent that it was always more cost-effective to get more Diplomats than upgrade them. And so I had to decrease the cost of Orators, and then rework the cost of Favors. This incentivized different play-styles. Those who wanted to “go wide” and get lots of Diplomats would still have that option, while others could upgrade or buy more favors without feeling like they are falling behind.

The current cost structure

Another thing I had to do was rebalance World Events. Just like how Monopoly has Chance cards, Of Duchies and Polities has Events that happen at the end of each round. With World Events and Weather Effects, I had to re-balance what their effects were. Some of them were fun, others more punishing.

For example, there were times where several rebellions occurred in consecutive turns. These rebellions ended up not just rebalancing the game (as was the intention), but costing all players the game so that everyone lost! That was an interesting, though unintended, consequence, and most people felt it was not fun.

And that's one of the things I've learned most through balancing and re-balancing. When I design things, I often try to come at it from a more logical or emotion-less standpoint. But in play-testing, I've found that, even if something is perfectly “balanced”, if it doesn't feel fun, then people won't think it's fair, and thus don't want to play it, no matter how “logical” the design is.

Cutting Out the Fat

In the beginning, World Events were divided into Weather Effects and other happenings. But as I tested with different groups, it became quite clear to me that having two decks to draw from was too cumbersome, especially when some of the effects were along the same lines.

The remnant of the "weather effects" slot on the board.

I believe cutting out things is part of game design. However, there are often sacred cows or pet mechanics that any designer wants that almost always end up not working out.

Currently, that mechanic is trade. Originally, players could enhance their income through building trade routes with adjacent counties. But as games progressed, it became clear that, for the majority of players, counting income was not fun. Especially when there are upkeep costs for armies and agents, counting how much you collect and how much you owe can be a burden on some. In a game mostly about politicking and scheming, accounting is often not a priority that one wants to keep track of. At least not a fun one.

I'm still tossing that idea around for now. The current iteration of trade is through Contracts, but I haven't made enough progress in play-testing to see if they're worth it. But if they work, they may make the game even more crazy than it can be.

And that's it for this post! Next time, I want to dive into the player interaction, scheming, and politicking for this game, and how the game is designed around it. In essence, it will be (more or less) about the art of war.