A couple of years ago I got the opportunity to work on a revamp of a classic Eurogame for a publisher: Reiner Knizia's Merchants of Amsterdam. It was a great opportunity, and I gave it a go, incorporated everything the publisher requested, and improved on the game the best way I thought I could. In the end I did create a game... but unfortunately, it was far too big a departure from the original game, it was "too procedural," and too big in scope for the publisher's line, so they found another designer to try again. The new designer appears to have done a much better job sticking with the original feel of the game. If you want to see how it turned out, check out Merchants of Andromeda, developed by Robert Hovakimyan for Allplay. (At least I contributed the Merchants of Andromeda title!)
However, that leaves me with a game that, while it was supposed to be a revamp of an existing game, it's really more just inspired by that game, but is really its own entity.
In Political Galactica, you take on the role of a Chancellor, angling to become elected Supreme Councilor of the Galactic Federation. To do so, you must earn the favor of four delegations by defending them from alien invasion, establishing trade agreements with them, supporting their political agendas, and satisfying Law cards (which you’ll vote into play). Your approval rating limits the benefits you receive from Law cards, so you must balance your goals with the need to maintain support from your people.
I was actually pretty proud of the way I'd gone about revamping this game. Since I'd only played it once or twice, and it had been 15 years or so, the first thing I did was to play the original Merchants of Amsterdam with my playtesters... One of which had also played before (over a decade ago), and the other two of which had never played before. Merchants of Amsterdam is played over a series of turns, and each turn one player draws 3 cards off a deck, one at a time, and for each one decides whether to KEEP it, AUCTION it off, or DISCARD it. Therefore, each round there will be one auction, and 2 cards will be resolved (potentially by the same person). The cards pretty simply add your influence to one of a few areas, and bump up one of 4 commodity tracks. Every few turns there is a scoring round, the turn track indicates which area scores, and players are rewarded (with money, which is both what you spend in the auctions, and how you count victory) for having the 1st/2nd/3rd/4th most influence in that area. The amount of money you get depends on how much influence total is in the area - so you want to hold majority influence in the most popular areas to score the best rewards. That's one of the unique things about the game, but it's a bit dry and mathy.
The *real* hook of the game is the auction mechanism. Merchants of Amsterdam used a Dutch auction, where the price starts high, and counts down over time until someone jumps in and says "I'll take it for that amount!" The most memorable part of the game was a plastic contraption that facilitated this auction, you would wind it up to $200,000 and it would start counting down, dropping $10,000 every couple of seconds. In order to "jump in" and claim the card for the current price, you would physically reach out and slap the device, stopping the countdown and setting the price you will pay. Unfortunately, it seems like much of the time the contraption was loud and prone to breaking, but it was certainly a catchy component, and it facilitated the Dutch auction, which was uncommon even among the myriad auction games of the 1990s and early 2000s.
In theory, the countdown/Dutch auction was novel -- long-time readers of my blog may recall that I tried a mechanically identical "count-up" auction in my low-bid/route building game Riders of the Pony Express. However, as I learned in that game, the countdown auction is really just an overly dramatic way to resolve a blind bid. In RotPE, I relegated the count-up auction to a variant rule and instead codified a blind bid using cards. The same would work for Merchants of Amsterdam, though there would have to be a way to adjudicate ties. The nature of physically slapping the auction clock kind of does that (for the most part). The other thing it might do is play on the anxieties of the bidders, tricking them into jumping in earlier than they had meant to as the ticking clock makes them feel more and more like another player might pounce and get the card. I guess that can be considered "fun," unless you think about it too hard... I will note that in RotPE, while gamer types tended to prefer the blind bid, the original, verbal count-up auction tended to go over better with more casual players, probably for that very reason.
Side note: I believe that a Dutch auction really works better when there are multiple copies of a thing being auctioned off, and as people "jump in" and claim them for the current price, the clock keeps ticking, and other people could claim them for less, until they run out. When you're just auctioning off one item, the Dutch auction may be cool and fun, but only for a second, and then someone jumps in, ending the auction. If you were waiting for a lower price, you just get nothing. That kind of killed the fun for me in that game.
Having re-familiarized myself with the game, the challenge was set -- how do you revitalize a 20 year old game, keeping the main mechanisms (deal/assign 3 cards, one at a time, and the Dutch auction), but updating or improving on the rest of the game, which was essentially just different area control battles? Well, as I said above, I missed the mark that the publisher was going for, but here's how I approached the problem:
Thought #1: Multi auction
Waiting for one player to assign cards each round is a little boring... If assigning cards is one of the fun parts of the game, why not let everyone do it each round?
Furthermore, it would be cool if the auction kept going after someone claimed an item. If everyone had chosen a card to auction off, then there would be more than 1 thing to go for, and the bid could be for the opportunity to pick first.
This seemed so obviously the right way to go that the idea made it from the initial thought process all the way through to the current version of the game, and I can't imagine cutting it and going back to one auction at a time.
Though I will say in retrospect that if the highlight of the game for you is that auction, then having more, smaller instances of the auction could be favorable, and that did seem to be the publisher's POV on the subject.
Thought #2: Remove money
20-30 years ago, auction games were all the rage. More recently, you don't see as many of them. This may be because back in the day, players didn't have a lot of other options of which game to play, and they would play the same game over and over. Auction games are difficult for new players, because you need to try and evaluate the lots so you know how much you should bid. This is doubly true in a game where you are bidding victory points, as an overbid directly costs you progress towards victory! Nowadays, games need to be more new-player friendly, and I think that accounts for a drop in popularity of auctions.
That said, I considered how else you could bid for something if not with money, and one answer that sounded good to me was action points. Instead of starting at a high money value and counting down, you could start at 1 action point and count up. Instead of saying "I'll take that card for $60,000," you'd say "I'll do that action with 3 action points."
When jumping in early, you could claim the action you want, but a less effective version (fewer action points), or you could wait and get more action points, but have less say in what you get to do with them. This sounded good to me, and it just meant replacing simple "place influence" actions with whatever the new actions would be (I already wanted to differentiate the areas and make them more distinct from each other, see below)
Thought #3: Diversify areas
Merchants of Amsterdam has 3 areas you can influence: Colonies, Amsterdam, and the commodity tracks, and there are 4 segments of each. Each of those areas scores the same way when they score -- you rank them from most to least total influence, and then you reward money based on a chart for 1st/2nd/etc majority. I thought it would be neat to make each area unique, and give each one a different feel, maybe a whole different mechanism. Some of the ideas I wanted to try were Community Defense (like the wildlings in Game of Thrones, the defense league in Comuni, or barbarians in Cities & Knights of Catan), Laws (like in Lancaster, Warrior Knights, or EmDo: Oblivion), and Set Collection
Community Defense
To be honest, I've never really seen Community Defense work well in a game, but I thought I'd try it here. Players could send ships to defend planets from hostile alien invasions, and when an invasion event occurred, you'd get rewarded or penalized based on how many ships you sent, and whether enough ships were sent in total compared to the alien strength. Perhaps predictably, I didn't like any of the iterations I tried, and in the end, I made it area control (most ships defending each delegation gets a benefit from that delegation), with the area(s) defending against the most aliens being worth double - in a way, this is kinda like the original game, where the areas aren't worth the same amount, so you may want to control the better area, but it may not be obvious which area is better until the event happens.
Laws
I really like how some games have laws that come into play (usually by player vote) that have some effect on the game. Sometimes the effects change the rules of the game, other times they offer a scoring opportunity, either immediately or at the end of the game. In this case, I thought the laws could offer scoring opportunities at each political event. Players would vote these scoring conditions into play, and then could either try to do a little bit of each, or really specialize on one or two of them. For a specialization strategy, players would also have to increase their approval rating because that caps the number of points you can score from any given law. Players going for a diverse strategy would not have to worry too much about approval, but might have a hard time getting big scores.
After several iterations, I believe I landed on just dealing one law to each delegation that represents a law that delegation wants. During a policy event, whichever delegation has the most senators will bring their law into play, then each law in play will score. That way, players will know what conditions are available, and may wish to support the ones they're doing a good job at by sending senators to that delegation. If the laws are diverse enough and distinct enough, then I think this mechanism works pretty well.
Set Collection
My first attempt at set collection was to deal tiles showing 4 different resources to each delegation. Via trade actions, you can collect these resources, thereby making a "trade agreement" with that delegation so that they like you better (bump up on their track). During a trade event, you would turn in the goods you've collected for points. The more different types of goods you had, then more points you would get.
This worked okay, but as you'll see in a minute I changed what it meant to have points in this game, and that made me reconsider how set collection is rewarded.
Thought #4: Knizia Scoring
Scoring victory points was okay, but it occurred to me that there are four delegation tracks, and the story of the game is to get those delegations to like you... so why not use the delegation tracks as the measure of victory? And furthermore, as this is based on a Knizia game, why not use Knizia scoring: whoever gets the most bumps on their worst track is the winner?
I liked this change, and it meant everything that you do is in service of getting track bumps. It did mean revisiting some of the rewards in the game, for example the set collection. I went through several iterations and tried different ways to reward sets: diverse sets, sets of the same resource, etc. I assigned each delegation one of the resources, and in the end, during a trade event, you could turn in one set of goods (either all the same, or all different) to gain one bump on the appropriate delegation track for each. If you turned in a set of four different goods then you could turn in an additional set. Because of how the scoring works, a diverse set is usually better than getting a bunch of bumps in one track, unless you're way behind in one track!
In addition to those 4 major thoughts, I had made a few other changes as well:
Event/Scoring Timing
In Merchants of Amsterdam, there's a time track around the edge of the board, and mixed into the deck are cards with sand timers pictured... each timer card that comes up advances the track one space. Certain spaces on the track indicate scoring rounds, so they come up at semi-random intervals, but always in the same order. That felt a little old fashioned to me, so I looked for a way to trigger the scoring rounds in a more variable order in an organic way.
Discarded Cards Affect Game State
When resolving the 3-card mechanism (KEEP, AUCTION, DISCARD), it seemed like a wasted opportunity not to have the discarded card affect the game state. So I added Event icons to each card, and then placed all "discarded" cards into event stacks by icon. This changed the 3-card decision to KEEP, AUCTION, EVENT, which I thought would make the decisions more interesting.
I went through a few iterations of how exactly to trigger events based on this, and took input from the publisher on how frequently events should occur (how many events should occur each round). What I ended up with was that the event (or events) with the most icons occur, then those cards are discarded, and now the other events that have cards building up are more likely to have the most next round. In addition, to make sure each event did occur at least once, and so you could plan for them a little bit, I added scheduled events: each of the four different events would occur once in rounds 1-4 (in random order, decided in setup), then at the end of round 5, all 4 events would occur once more.
For the most part, that was it. At the time I had been playing games like Ark Nova, and thinking that maybe I ought to try my hand at a heavier game, and that particular thought may have contributed to this game being out of scope for the publisher, but the feedback I got during the process sounded positive -- I failed to read between the lines though, and when the publisher started to balk at how the game was going, I didn't take as much note as I should have.
Fate of the Game
So there you have it, a game intended to be a revamp of Merchants of Amsterdam, but turned out really very different in every aspect than the original game. At this point I would describe it more as "inspired by" than "revamp of."
Seeing as how this did not meet the needs of the publisher, what can I do with the game? Well, with their permission, I have added it to my
pitch list, with some further development:
Cutting the 3-card Mechanism
The 3-card mechanism was in the game because it was a key mechanism from Merchants of Amsterdam, and the publisher wanted to maintain it. To be honest, that's not my favorite mechanism in the world because I hate the idea of choosing to keep a card, only to draw one I like better next, or discarding an OK card in hopes of drawing one I like better, then only drawing worse cards.
I do see the appeal of the mechanism though. I even used it in a
game jam design more recently (18 card point salad). I tested a "more strategic" version where you just draw all 3 cards at once and assign them freely to KEEP, AUCTION, and EVENT, but it just didn't seem as fun. Now that I'm not tied to using the mechanism, I have decided to streamline the game a bit by removing it altogether! Instead, I'll just deal out N+1 cards into a draft pool, auction off turn order with the count-up multi-auction, and rather than building up Event icons, simply resolve the event on the one remaining card that doesn't get chosen. This is a trick lifted from a TMG title I helped develop by designers Matthew Dunstan and Chris Marling called
Pioneer Days (which I used again in the thematic sequel by Stan Kordonskiy,
Old West Empresario). Removing the 3-card mechanism reduces duration by a lot, and focuses the game more on the auction.
So that's where I'm at... looking for a publisher to pick up this galactic politics themed game inspired by Merchants of Amsterdam (but in the end, very fa removed from MoA). Know anyone for whom this would appeal?
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