The Trouble with Victory Conditions
So I want to have an interesting endgame for Dark Forest. What I've settled on for my first prototype is the following:
In this game, you are looking for a super-advanced ancient civilization that is potentially hiding out somewhere in the universe. It may or may not exist. If it exists, you must find it, contact it, and forge a peace with them. If they do not exist, you must defeat all other players to become the only spacefaring civilization.
I settled on this endgame for a couple of reasons. First, as per my last entry, I want the game to have a narrative told by the players, and to end in a crescendo. Finding an ancient space civilization seemed like a cool goal. I hope that this would give players a cool story to tell at the end of it. Secondly, I needed to find a way to keep the game moving forward, so I tried turning it into essentially a race game with players searching for something that lies towards the “end” of the universe (i.e. map). This keeps players moving in one direction, towards the end of the game. I feel like, too often, 4X games can drag on because there's nothing pushing players towards the logical conclusion of the game.
I'm not at all sure that this will work. What I ended up doing is making the victory condition based on the final card at the end of the universe on the Omega planet. When you get to that planet, you'll be told the victory condition, which will require you to use a superpower (gained from some other planet) to win the game. So it is a race game, since the first person to the omega planet will have a better chance of fulfilling the victory condition first. But it is also just a strategic civilization-building game, since you'll need to have built up the resources and infrastructure needed to “do a big supernova” to win the game.
Again, no idea if this will work, but I'm excited to find out.
