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.