Hunting Accidents and Annulled Marriages

This is an expanded and extended version of a Twitter ramble I went on yesterday about taking inspiration from some history books I have been reading recently, most of which have been about England (and the petty kingdoms that preceded it) in the period of a couple of centuries either side of the Norman conquest of 1066. Various bits of these books have started me thinking about game ideas, and this post is basically my way of making some notes that might lead to a prototype one day, but there is no guarantee. 

One of the ideas coming to mind is not at all original, but I feel could be fun when mashed together with a game style that I fancy working on.

So the thematic idea is essentially a struggle for the throne. In the period we are considering, the principle of primogeniture -- that the eldest (legitimate, male) child of the reigning monarch inherits the throne -- had not been established. During the Saxon era, for instance, the next king would be elected by a council of nobles with candidates being from a pool of "æthelings", who were generally close descendants of a previous king, and the selection process would have potentially got quite political to say the least. Later, we see situations where there were a number of potential heirs, and it was the one who managed to reach London or Canterbury the quickest after the death of the previous king who took the crown.

One royal misfortune was the White Ship disaster, which
took the life of the sole legitimate male heir of Henry I
 along with many other nobles.
(Image is public domain, via Wikipedia)

Added to this, it is notable how many men of royal blood came to a sticky and early end, whether that be a hunting accident, being waylaid while travelling, poisoned at a feast, or any number of misfortunes which may or may not have been accidental.

So, a game where families or factions of nobles are manoeuvring to claim the throne and making use of misfortunes to remove their rivals. This is, of course, about as original a setting as trading in the Mediterranean, but I don't care.

I always figure though that I don't really have an idea for a game until there is at least the basics of both theme and mechanism pushed together. In this case, the "throne war" setting makes me think of a "take-that!" game, where players are effectively just attacking each other until, typically, there is only one left. This can, of course, be problematic for multiplayer games as they tend to involve player elimination, meaning that players who are eliminated early can be left with nothing to do while the game continues.

There are ways to deal with this. For instance, if the game is sufficiently short, then being eliminated doesn't remove you from play for long. Similarly, if the first player elimination triggers the end of the game, you don't have too long to twiddle your thumbs, and may be entertained by the climax. Another approach is to allow "eliminated" players to play on in a different way, for instance as a ghost who might have new objectives or ways to affect the game. 

I haven't had a proper go at making a take-that! game, and quite fancy having a try.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the style of play in general, but there are exceptions. For me, the likely king of the genre is Family Business, designed by David Bromley and first published in the 1980's, though apparently currently out of print. The game is about mobsters who are trying to wipe out their rivals, and involves a multi-stage system for attacking each other, where you take out contracts on your enemies, thus lining their minions up against "the wall", and then the targets at the wall can be killed in the order they are lined up. Card play allows you to rearrange the wall, add or remove mobsters, and do out-of-order kills. To be honest, the game probably takes a bit long to play for a "last person standing" type of game, but it's a lot of fun if you are in the right mood.

I've been thinking for some time about ripping off taking inspiration from Family Business as a starting point to explore a take-that! design, and I think this could work pretty well.

My thinking at the moment is that players could trigger events like hunts, feasts, trips to war overseas (or at the borders), and other potentially perilous environments. Each player has a few nobles (represented by cards or tokens) which can be sent to attend the events, voluntarily or compelled by other players, and when they are there, they are vulnerable to having a misfortune, though there may be a benefit for surviving an event, perhaps gaining prestige which could lead to a victory condition. I think one family or faction (i.e. player) being wiped out from the game should trigger the end of the game in some way, but that can be experimented with if the core mechanisms appear to work.

I have a picture in my mind of throwing a "hunting accident" at an opponent, who responds by cackling as she invites one of my characters to a feast...

So I posted a summary of this thinking on Twitter, and ended up having a discussion with Jess Metheringham of Dissent Games (check her work out, it's really cool!), who had some great thoughts about introducing female characters to the game.  The initial idea was centred on claims on thrones sometimes being transferred via an heiress, but developing into thoughts on the political activities of noblewomen in general and how they could exert a lot of influence, plus marital alliances being a good trope to play with.  In the end we were trading ideas about how, in an age when divorce was not legal, petitioning the Pope to have a marriage annulled for trumped-up reasons became a semi-regular occurrence. 

This also leads to another point: as any game that develops out of this idea is not likely to be particularly historical, we don't need to slavishly stick to "conventional" gender roles. There were plenty of times in the period where a woman had great control over the crown, or came close to claiming it for herself, so we can lean into that and assume that in our fantasy version of medieval England, women were considered viable candidates for the throne more often. 

Jess' ideas around marriages and the like would probably make for a much more complex game with greater scope than I had envisaged, but one that could have some real spark to it. At the moment I think this project would be a low priority one, as I have several more pressing things to work on, but may get a bit of work done on it. Initially I would expect to go with the lighter take-that! play initially, and then consider if marriages, alliances, and the like would make for a good extension of the game or something that should be considered a separate project.

The Quarter Vinyls

 A few years ago I found that game designer Phil Tootill worked at the same place as me, and for a while we met up regularly over lunch to test each other's prototypes or show each other published games that we thought were interesting. Eventually Phil moved on to another job, but we've been keeping in touch and meeting up occasionally, but we never quite managed to find a project to work on together.

Early this year, Phil pitched a promising idea to me about the development of popular music through the decades, and some possible ways to approach this. We talked this through a bit, discussed via a Google document for a while, and then Phil got to work on building an initial prototype.

Then, not too much later, Covid-19 hit full force and the country went into lockdown.  Phil found himself furloughed for a while, and used some of that time to work on this game, which he gave the working title of The Vinyl Age.

Time passed, and after the restrictions were sufficiently relaxed, we finally found a time to get together and play the prototype as it was. 

So in the intervening time, Phil had put in a hell of a lot of work and built a crunchy card game with some real brain burning as you work through one deck of oversized cards representing recording artists, and another deck of standard cards representing records, performances and events, looking for combos and synergies to maximise your scoring. The popularity of five broad genres of music was represented by tracks covered by "fan" markers, and you could attract fans of the different genres to your city, revealing scoring and resource opportunities as the tracks become uncovered, while being able to make use of the fans as a resource in themselves.

My partly-there rebuild of the game in Tabletopia, as per discussion later.

The game as it stood was a cracking piece of work and played very well for the right sort of players. I lost pretty badly, but could see how Phil had worked with the resources he had available to build something of an engine, while I was just trundling along opportunistically. I'd have been able to play much more strongly on a replay.

We had a feeling though that the game would be difficult to sell. It was easy, particularly when new to the game, to get caught up in "analysis paralysis" (a cycle of assessing and reassessing options in an attempt to find the best course of action), and the game could get very "mathsy", particularly towards the end. It felt like the game had to be either a bit lighter and smoother, or double-down on the crunchiness and go for something really heavy. Given the theme of the music business, I felt that lightening things up might be better, and possibly this could be done by removing the financial aspect to the game and refocusing on the remaining elements.

After some discussion, Phil said I could have a go at trying some changes. So that's what I've been doing, putting together a virtual prototype in Tabletopia.

Of course, removing a whole element of the game's economy (cash, in this case) results in a lot of knock-on changes, and fixing up those results in even more.  The changes I have been making bind the acts and the other cards together more tightly than before, so we see a story developing more for each of those acts; and some feedback from Phil has suggested a way to enhance this even more.

The downside is that the game is otherwise a lot less coherent than it was before, particularly with the alternative paths of building a career for an artist and having them retire from their active career. This is the current focus, to actually add some detail back in to the game and find ways to balance out the alternative ways to manage an act. The game as it stands is not fully playable, and only works for a few turns, so I also need to build that up.  Fortunately we still have the data files with all the ideas and detail from Phil's build of the game, so I can gradually pull more of them into my version as I put more flesh back onto the bones that I picked clean.

At this stage, I am just tinkering with ideas and we don't yet know whether this will result in a viable line of development or not, but it is an interesting project to work on when spoons and time allow.  Hopefully I'll be able to report some interesting developments on this in time.