Eminent Domain: Modus Operandi?

Eminent Domain has been in a restful slumber for some time now, ever since Oblivion came out in 2018. Soon after that, TMG started a slow and painful demise, and along with it, any chance for further sales or content for Eminent Domain.

So, it's been a while, but last January's Rio Grande Games newsletter contained this little tidbit:

° We have also begun planning our new games for later in 2023. These include three rail games: Prussian Railroads, Wabash Cannonball, and Balkan Railways; Pacific from Donald X Vaccarino; and a new production of an old favorite Eminent Domain.

We're almost one year out from that newsletter, but I'm happy to report that I've seen some of the new artwork for the boxes and the cards, and it looks pretty great!

I had thought that after the base game, Escalation, Exotica, Oblivion, the standalone Microcosm microgame, the Bonus Planets promo, Chaos Theory (an unreleased EmDo dice game), and the Terra Prime reboot as Eminent Domain Origins (an EmDo prequel), that the well had run dry. I did not have any plans to further expand Eminent Domain.

However, in the wake of TMG, as I tried to find a new home for my titles, it seemed any publisher that showed interest in picking up the line wanted to do a Big Box version, or add some content to freshen up this decade-old game. And I get it -- it's nice to reach a new audience who never had the pleasure of playing EmDo the first time around, but it's also nice to offer something of interest to fans of the game who may be willing to buy it again (but not if it's the same thing they already have). new art alone is not really enough to entice those people, but even just a little bit of new content might be!

EmDo Solo

So, what to include? Again, the well had run dry... I am pretty happy with the amount of actual content that's been added to the game in the three expansions. I don't know that I'd be interested in creating more tech cards, or trying to shoehorn in another new mechanism (like Exotica's Asteroids, or Oblivion's Politics role). Well, I'm not much into solo play, but nowadays more and more players are. It so happens that prolific solo mode designer David Turczi is a fan of Eminent Domain.. maybe having him create a solo mode would be a nice chunk of new content for the game. Well, good news: he's working on it!

However, a solo mode might be better placed in the same box as the base game, so that people wanting to buy the game to play solo don't need to buy both the game and an expansion box. Then again, maybe keeping the base game box more affordable, and keeping the solo mode separate would serve a bigger proportion of the audience. Ultimately that'll be up to Rio Grande Games. 

EmDo: Legacy

Some years ago (2014) I ran an "EmDo Legacy" tournament at Strategicon in L.A. -- here's a description of how it went from a blog post back then:

Round 1 was a normal game of EmDo - players started with the basic starting decks.

After Round 1, I recorded the contents of each player's decks - the number of each standard role card.

For round 2, You started with 1 fewer card in your deck for whichever Role card(s) you had the fewest of at the end of round 1, and you started with 1 more card in your deck for whichever role card(s) you had the most of at the end of round 1.

After round 2 we did the same thing again, but didn't count any card that you started with 0 of... i.e. if you started with 0 Warfare after round 1, then after round 2 you look at the card you had the fewest of BESIDES Warfare.

There were some really interesting starting decks in the final round!

I never tried that again, but I've always thought that format had some potential. When a couple of prospective publishers mentioned wanting to add a sort of campaign mode to freshen up the game, this Legacy format immediately came to mind. I am not sure what else could be added, but I did discuss it with someone who did a TON of playtesting for the expansions back in the day, and he had some really good ideas as well.

So who knows, perhaps the materials needed for a campaign mode could be placed into a 3rd box

EmDo: Coalition

Another potential mode that could be added to the game would be a cooperative mode. Orleans: Trade and Intrigue did that - added a cooperative mode in an otherwise competitive game - and it went over pretty well as I recall. I'm not the biggest player of cooperative games (though there are some I enjoy), but I put a little thought into what a cooperative EmDo might look like, and I stumbled onto something that I think might be the key to make it work!

Imagine that the players have formed a coalition (like a galactic United Nations or something -- United Empires?), and are working together to complete an ambitious project - perhaps a Dyson Sphere:

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its solar power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone.

The goal of the game would be to complete the project before the game ends (when one (some?) stack runs out). The key mechanism is that whenever you flip a planet, or buy a tech card, you will choose whether to keep it for yourself (like normal) - powering up your engine, or to commit it to the project, placing the card in a slot on a Project board, representing progress toward victory.

In the meantime of course, there would be a deck of "bad stuff" cards that would come up after each round of player turns, representing some antagonistic force (hostile aliens, or space pirates). Players would need to defend against this force, lest they get "curse" style cards in their deck, or lose progress toward winning.

I'm actually pretty excited about this co-op mode, and I'm anxious to get a prototype together and give it a try, maybe this Thursday!