The core problem of the game that the players try to solve is simply that described above: the iterative process of building and modifying a DAG across which both good and bad things flow such that they net profit over the other players from their DAG manipulations by the end of the game.

This is going to be an extremely counter-intuitive game. Great.

Initial theme concept is of competing political campaigns. The politicians are of course self-serving and slimy. The player in the best shape at the end of the game wins the upcoming election and thus wins the game. There is no ranking, merely a winner and a set of losers.

I expect this will be a (near) pure card game. Unfortunately I suspect it won’t fit neatly within a multiple of 60 cards, but I’ll worry about that later. Scaling is probably 3-5 players. Multiplayer chaos is likely a problem, but we’ll see.

Basic pattern:

• Each player has an (identical) hand of cards, coloured to match their player colour. Each card has on it two values, a ‘good’ value and a ‘bad’ value. The values are likely five or less for each. The exact values are to be determined by some number theory (which I’m assuming will work).

• There is a deck of event cards. Each card contains two events, one good and one bad. I’m thematically supposing Kovak-style cartoon art. An example card might read, “Your politician has a mistress…who is REALLY HOT! (good)…with more than two legs! (bad). The good events will have a “good press” value, and the bad events will have a “bad press” value. The expected value range is probably less than 7 for each.

• The event cards are shuffled and a draft pool of at least N+1 are revealed, where N are available for drafting and when one is drafted the N+1’th becomes available for drafting.

• The game consists of rounds. First is a networking round, then one or more rounds handling the press outfall from an event.

• In the networking round players iteratively play one of their cards on another player. This may repeat several times until each player has played several cards. Played cards accumulate in front of that player.

• Possibly a player may spend money to move a previously played card instead of playing a new card.

• A card is played by placing it face up in front of another player. In this manner each player will accumulate a tableau of cards in front of them.

• There is then an event round. The active player selects an event from the draft pool. The event comes with good tokens equal to the good value of the good event and bad tokens equal to the bad value of the bad event.

• The active player must then distribute to good and bad tokens to the cards that players have placed in his tableau. The event is essentially a pair of press stories about the other player’s candidates and the player’s must try and use their social networks to distribute the bad press away from them and to try and “collect” the “good press”.

• The player must distribute the tokens equally among the cards put in front of him by other players, with the cards with with higher values (of each type) getting priority for tokens of that type.

• Each player then retrieves the tokens placed on their (cards), and distributes them among the cards placed in front of them which have a higher value than the card they took the token(s) from, with priority again going to highest value. The one change is that the player may keep any good press tokens that are left over after a “fair” distribution (minimum 1) to the cards in their immediate network.

• Good press tokens are good, bad press tokens are bad. Tokens that have reached the end of their network are collected by the player and define their score.

• This then repeats with players retrieving and distributing tokens until all tokens have reached the ends of their connection graphs.

• Next is another network building round, another event selection, another set of press distribution rounds etc, then repeat etc.

• After N event or possibly an internal metric (one player achieves a state) the game ends.

• Good press tokens are worth N more than bad press (bad press is better than no press) , player with the highest score wins. Possibly a largest bad press elimination.

– Possible additional mechanism would allow players to spend money(?) to distribute bad tokens they’ve already accumulated to their downstreams? There are several other possible ideas for mixing in currency models.

This morning’s shower was good for Corrupt Beneficence; I think got the core of a game put together while the water drummed staccato rhythms on my nape.

A recent review of Ruhrtropolis by Scott Tepper got me thinking about players iteratively creating incentive structures, and in particular having players communally create an implicit DAG among themselves in order to predictively profit from incoming events and then having to maintain and optimise that graph across future events.

This feels, nay tastes, like there’s a really neat problem hiding in here that a game could be wrapped around. Something juicy. I’m just having a difficult time isolating what the core problem really is so I can wrap a game around it (in case it gets lonely of course). Grrrr.

The blog title is suggestive of a possible themeing around grubbing ambulance-chasing politicians attempting to exploit public disasters for political profit.

The limited file storage space on BGDF was annoying so I moved all the images off to my own (slow) system. I’ve also updated a few of the below entries to contain the images I couldn’t post before.

New rules.

Also drew another map for the game based on Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea (an excellent series BTW). The Earthsea map has 20% less islands and rather less routes. The intent is for a smaller map better tuned to smaller player groups.

Two small changes:

1) When one market exhausts, finish the turn (this is already in the posted rules, I just forgot to mention it)

2) During the Explore Routes phase a player may discard 3 prestige in order to explore one more route than they have explorers. This change allows prestige to be fungible like other currencies

Both are fairly minor. The second should allow for more subtly interesting and challenging end-games.

Word of mouth appears to be working. Three people, two of which I don’t know and have never spoken to have approached me asking to get in on a game of ‘Ohana Proa. They say they’ve heard Good Things from other playtesters and like the look of the game. Multiple other positive murmers and reports in local groups. There appears to be an underground conversation.

Take aways:

• Polynesian theme is popular

• Gift economy is attractive. Get ahead through giving is thought to be weirdly good. Appears to resonate strongly.

• The delivery process with resources constantly being handed to players is attractive. The constant earning without having to manage a snowballing (or not) balance sheet is particularly liked. (‘Ohana Proa requires sustained and rolling income, not income growth or resource accumulation)

• Positive sum aspects are more attractive than negative sum aspects (the reverse of my preferences)

• Map is “pretty” and “cool”. Note: map is mostly a standard issue atlas-style map of the south seas with a network and a few tracks overlaid.

• The piles of bright pastic market tokens are attractive.

• One caught on to the currency exchange basics of the game and called that out as a key interest.

But, no game this last Monday at SB-Boardgamers. Had to miss tonight’s session at SVB (car trouble). Next game scheduled for Monday.

New rules.

Changes:

• Clarified currency usage in introduction

• End game scoring extended by privilege multipliers. This is the biggie. x1, x2, x3, x3.5 (rounded down). The other choice is x0, x1, x2, x3, but the reward at +30 seems overly large

• Turn order no longer (ever) reverses

• Rewrote the Delivery section again

• Rewrote and yet again re-determined how Kahuna work

• Fees for moving over others routes with kahuna or empty optimised out

• Entire resource game is now positive sum. There are no fees and no payments except for turn order auction, VP sales and kula. This small coherency change has a large bu subtle effect.

• Rules are getting shorter.

Note: Not clear that Kahuna are still needed. For now I’m going to leave them. I don’t intend to remove them from the design. If they go anywhere it will be to an advanced/more strategic variant, leaving a simpler base game.

(I’m tired, it is late and if I don’t write this now, two days later, I never will. I’ll try to get back to this and update/extend but don’t be surprised if I don’t).

Two games were played on Saturday at the Los Altos Gamesday. Both were using the new reduced map (all single-edge leaf nodes removed) and a variety of small teaks to kahunas and kula and the end game condition simplified to one market exhausted. Both were four player games. I played in both – I find that I can’t really evaluate a game if I don’t immerse myself in the decision making process for that game.

First game:

• I gaffed the route claiming in the initial round. Rather than a free claim in player order, then a paid claim in payer order with turn order going to the last in turn order, I did a forward and reverse order with ties going to the higher turn order. Ooops. That really screws the player in last in the initial turn order and gives the first player total certainty on his gains on the first turn.

• The new delivery model (delivery over route and that player’s routes produce on the next island. Worked well and explained easily. Resource production increased less than I’d expected. Cause appeared to be that players simply far more frequently delivered over other’s routes for a close to net zero gain in total resource production.

• The kahuna changes worked badly (payouts only if other player delivers through kahuna).

• Prestige did not work well. My earlier analysis that prestige accumulation was too monotonic seemed verified. The changes to increase variance and range of prestige allocations worked but did not provide the tension or arc I was expecting. The only focus was to not be last. Being first in prestige or having high prestige had no interest other than not being last.

• Late in the game one player admitted that this was not his sort of game, complaining that it was too combinatorial and that he preferred simpler high tactical games. The other two players married couple) only really warmed to the game as the end-game approached and the prestige race really hunkered down. They appeared to greatly like the positive sum aspects of the game and ended the game with saying they wanted to play again.

• Playtime was 3 hours.

Lessons:

0) New map is good. 1) Get initial turn order assignments right. 2) Make kahuna reward their owners and other players 3) Add a reward for high prestige, something to draw players up the prestige scale in addition to the fear of being at the bottom 4) New endgame definition worked well but was slightly slow.

Second game:

• Fixed initial turn order worked much better.

• As an experiment I tried another variation on kahuna only rewarding on other player actions. This worked moderately well for me as I occupied the centre of the map and my kahuna were hit on east/west traversals. The other players never bothered to invest in kahuna (and I can’t blame them).

• Added a scoring multiplier to prestige of (int (prestige/10)+1) with a max multiplier of x3. This worked well. All players focussed on prestige early and engaged ion kula exchange ASAP. Considerable plotting went on to ensure that the only profitable deliveries available either had no players attached to give kula to or only specific players. The turn order auction tightened. Final highest prestige was 35 with two other players in the mid/high 20s. All previous games ended with most players with prestige in the teens and the high point in the low 20s.

• One player was overly tired and had a hard time grokking the currency conversions. The other two adored the game and asked for repeat plays. Points they brought out as particularly liked were the delivery model, the prestige multiplier, and the challenges of maintaining income while competing for prestige.

• Removed 5 markets of one type before seeding board so that orange markets were less common than all others (26 vs 31). Endgame worked much better though it wasn’t orange that ran out.

• Play time was 3.5 hours (one very slow player who never really figured out what they were trying to do (it was after midnight so there’s some excuse)).

Lessons:

1) Multiplier for prestige. Probably need a bonus for >30 but moving to x4 is too large a leap. 2) Free claim in turn order, paid claim in turn order, ties won by player later in turn order works. 3) Revert kahuna to paying the owner for their deliveries and paying all other players for making kahuna pay. 4) Lose all the negative sum aspects of the game for resource management. Distracting, confusing and not necessary. 5) Reconsider limiting kula to two tokens. 6) See if endgame can be pulled in by ~2 turns. This is difficult.

I played two playtest sessions this weekend at the Los Altos Gamesday, both with 4 players. In both games I made a variety of small rules optimisations (more on that later), but in the second game I made one small rules change to the scoring of prestige which suddenly snapped the whole game together and into strong focus. It was…amazing. I’ll post a more detailed report later but here’s the teaser:

Score=VictoryPoints+(Prestige*multiplier)

I see four core challenges and one obervation/opportunity:

1. Encourage players to use each other’s routes
2. Make kahnuas change the graph node weights for both the owning player and the other players
3. Make kula a first class economy where drains exceed faucets, but leave enough latency for kula management to be interesting
4. Do the above while keeping the 6 currencies of the game balanced (drains exceed faucets but enough latency between production/destruction for interesting currency management decisions and no profitable currency translation loops)
   • The game will always divide fairly cleanly into two sections: setting up routes and sustainable income levels, and then prestige and VPs in the second half.

New rules.

• Delivering a market over another player’s route has no fee, but the route-owning player gets the resources produced by their routes at the island. (estimated 15% growth in resource production rates but the auction and raised costs (below) should soak this up))

• Players continue to pay route fees for moving kahunas.

• Delivering to a player’s kahuna over that player’s route gives the delivering player a prestige point. I’m hopeful that the new delivery/cost rules will make for much more route sharing.

• Prestige points can be earned as follows:

  • 1 point for 5 markets (as before)
  • 1 point for giving a kula item
  • 1 point for delivering a market to a player’s kahuna over their route
  • 1 point for giving a kula to a players kahuna
  • 1 point for creating an all new kula item
  • 1 point for each max-value token in a given kula item (max 2) (ie a single delivery and gift could earn up to 7 prestige

The most concerning thing here is that there are really only 3 points of variance for the value of a kula:

- 5 markets
- Did you create it?
- Delivered to kahuna?
- Delivered to kahuna over their route?

The prestige for giving is constant and the prestive for max-sized tokens is likely near constant for any given kula item. I’m not sure if that’s really quite enough dynamism to keep the distribution of prestige point awards well spread (and thus prompting tension and arc), but I’m hopeful.

- Kula items can only be two tokens and kula rot in the same way as fish. Kula token values are now also more limited: 1/4 for fish and 3/6 for shell (no 2 fish or 4 shell). Cost is 3 resources for the small ones, 7 for the big (which come with a prestige point when given) and 5 for an upgrade.

There are several things combined here, but the key items are: Kula aren’t worth as many VPs, Kula need to be moved, fast, before they rot, there’s a much broaded ranger/variance in the prestige points that may be earned by a single delivery and actions that directly help other players (deliveries and gifts to their kahunas) are rewarded directly.

I’m pretty much convinced that the two-part division of the game is a given. I’m not sure it is a problem. They best I can do is blur the line. No matter what the game is going to split into:

1. Get more Proas and get routes out.
1. Setup for scoring!

I’m hopeful that the new prestige rules will have prestige coming out earlier in the game, and will make the rush to 7 proas a little more interesting (and not quite as automatic).

• Changed end-game definition to one market being closed. At that point the core problem of the game in terms of market sorting has reached its first approximation. That seems like a fine time to end the game. I’m also looking to scale the game by simply removing islands from the map.

New rules.

Very early first draft reaction to the playtest (I haven’t calculated how the economies balance — this is the very first draft):

• All leaf nodes removed (recursively). One node added in Papua New Guinea.

• Bases renamed to kahuna

• Kitoum renamed to prestige

• Vocabulary added to the Core Concepts section

• Turn order control through route bidding simplified

• Requirement for connected routes removed

• Island scoring removed

• Explorer tokens removed

• Still have to pay for delivering over another’s route, but they also get resources for the island reached (one per route etc). If they have their kahuna on there the moving player gets a prestige point

• Player giving kula gets one prestige point for giving kula, one if it is a new kula, one if giving to player with kahuna on island, and one per maximal value kula token in kula item (may be too much?)

• Player receiving kula gets half of value of kula in VPs (rounded down) or full value if their kahuna is there

• Kula tokens are 1/4 (fish) and 3/6 (shell) and cost 3/5/8 for small/upgrade/big

• Turn order is reversed in Repeat phase rather than reverse order deliveries.

• Kahuna nee base section rewritten

• Kula and Prestige nee Kitoum section rewritten

That’s a pretty big set of changes. In part I’m going to have to rely on the claiming turn order auction to sock up resource value variances, which is a poor and cheap solution (even if I was relying on it before too). Now to start running the numbers…