Game #66 - The Three Kingdoms by Seth Jaffee (sedjtroll)

Having orcs that spread and spawn is definitely a better approach. It also works for me to give tricolour armies an added power (destroying spawning points), while leaving other armies with some power too (shifting or removing orc cubes). Presumably you would need a large army to clear out the orcs before removing their spawning point.

Rather than have the players competing for political power, I'd give them a more concrete goal. Perhaps each player is responsible for protecting certain types of locations on the board (for example, one player must protect villages, another shrines, another farms). Everyone wants to beat the orcs, but each player has different priorities on where to fight first.

I'm not sure whether you'd want these locations printed on the tiles, pre-placed on the board, or placed by players or fate during the game.

Surviving locations give VP at game end or a few times during the game, perhaps with bonuses for clusters of locations of the same type.

> instead of players having Lord tokens on the board, they 'buy'
> (by spending followers) control of one of the three Lords

Yes, that's excellent. It was the competing lords that made the game too reminiscent of Tigris for me and thematically odd.

Lords should make it easier to move troops of that type, but you don't want to lock players out entirely, just because they can't win a Lord's ear right now. So perhaps you can move 1 elf if you're out of favour or 3 if you're in favour.

I wouldn't add another resource, such as gold. The followers are the resource of the game. They're produced, managed and invested.

Give each player a mat with the three lords. Followers "in your hand" are actually placed, visible to all, on the appropriate lord. Whoever is keeping the most elves on their mat gets the Elf Lord bonus. However, the pieces you drop onto the board or discard in a tricolour "alliance" must come from these pools, weakening your influence in the council.

By the way, I would try to integrate the bonus for discarding a tricolour alliance into the game more. Perhaps you can shield a village from destruction if you discard one of each colour cube from your player mat. If you don't have the cubes available, then the opportunity is lost. More tension and theme than being able to discard an alliance whenever you like.

> How should Income work?

As before, when you place a tile, you generate new units that reflect the terrain and the number of contiguous tiles of the same terrain. Placing the fifth forest in a row gets you 5 elves.

You can either place these units on the tile you just turned, in which case anyone will be able to control them, if they have the appropriate Lord's ear. Alternatively, you can take some followers onto your mat.

This way, when a player gets a tile, he or she has to decide "do I place it where I need troops on the board right now, or do I place it elsewhere for a bigger reward in my hand?" If the tiles have the villages/shrines etc on them, then there's another decision to make.

I like Jeff's idea about the problems of an imbalanced army. Perhaps you subtract the difference between the most and least represented races from the total strength of the army (a variation on the "Trade Winds" mechanic). Or not. Anyway, the racial conflict element is worth exlporing.

Yogurt

Seth,

I must be incredibly dense, but I continue to be confused about the basic definitions of spatial aspects in the game.

So the game is played on a board a la T & E. And you place tiles on the board. And then there's something called a "region". Is that just a group of tiles?

Let's assume it is. Now, the moving pieces can only move on tiles. Does that make the game's spatial aspect too restrictive? Not to mention that it's thematically odd. If we're all in a geographical region, why can we only move on certain places in that region?

To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced that thinking of this as a tile game is helpful to what you're trying to do. What if the board was just a grid, and instead of placing tiles, there were board features that you placed that are source sites for units, but that were placed with lower frequency and with less restrictedness in determining movement potential and such. It might move the game in a different, less-Tigris-like direction to imagine how the game could work with similar concepts but no tile laying.

-Jeff

I'm looking forward to the new rule book you mention. We've thrown a lot of competing ideas into the air.

More about discarding tricolour alliances from your mat... To recap, your original idea is to let players discard them for VP once on any turn. I suggested that they be spent to protect villages, saving VP indirectly.

Playtesting will tell, but I think the bonus for laying similar tiles (which I still like) will lead to lots of cubes. Players are canny.

If the board is 10x10, three players drawing a tile a turn will each get 33 turns. That's a lot of opportunities to discard a tricolour alliance, especially if cubes do turn out to be rare. You may never have to face the choice "do I spend my last dwarf to make an alliance?"

I know in my gaming group, this is exactly the sort of planning for the future that we are terrible at. Yes, we should be saving for retirement, but we never do. Maybe next turn.

So those are two reasons why I like the idea of having use-it-or-lose-it moments.

However, I suspect my real problem is that discarding three cubes for straight VP is dry thematically. What are they doing? Being allied, okay, but come on humanoids, there's a war on! Go fight!

I did wonder about that too. I like the tile-laying income mechanism though, and it would be a very different game without it, so I might try to save tile-laying.

You could simply have a set board with pretty hexes and then have the tiles or chits you turn over be recruiting tiles that show who lives where. You'd lose the sense that your troops are tied to the land, but the income function would remain exactly the same and movement would open up.

A fixed board would make the idea of having villages/shrines easier too, because they could be set out at the game start.

For replayability, I'd have a few board elements that do change. Maybe some impassable lakes and mountains that are in different places each game.

It would be nice if the tiles on the board had some other purpose other than recruitment, but I have no ideas there yet.

I thought this was a ridiculous idea at first. What would be left for players to do? But it moves a lot of the action into the "airdrop" part of the game. Where do you send reinforcements? Decide well, because they'll be there forever.

If the orcs always took the path of least resistance toward their target citadels, then players would still be choosing where to fight, shaping the path of the battle. They'd be guiding ooze. You'd need a lot more cubes for this to work though, since so many would be twiddling their thumbs. And you'd need a new use for the tricolour alliances on the board. But it's an idea I haven't seen before, and it's intriguing.

Tim

My first impressions from reading the journal only:

It looks like an easy game to teach and to play. Simple choices but big potential for strategy. Most of the gameplay depend on emergence: the content of the tiles and what defines a territory, the mechanics of connecting regions. Unfortunately, you have not talked about that much. It would be nice if we could have some sketches!

I really like the way you're using the same tokens to represent military and political power. It's elegant.

The fact that you must play an Orc tile when it's up is great. A special action or reward could be to skip that rule once, effectively passing the chore to the next player.

The theme is weird and not very original. Who is the player exactly? What does he represent? I think I got it... they have many lords who control all three races? (Not listed in the component btw) I have a hard time believing multiple armies of mixed race fighting against each other.

The races should have special/specific actions associated with them. Maybe even combos like "an army composed of only green/red can do that".

For the endgame, anything could work well. Will the VP be hidden?

Right now, I think the base idea is great. But it's not a game yet. It could be taken in so many directions! My advice is to work on a crude prototype to define how the tiles work and the regions and the connections.

Good luck

If it's costly to move cubes from hex to hex, but players need to protect certain hexes, then it matters a lot if the cubes are currently close to where you need them. Think about the game Tikal. I end up stranding my grad students all the time in that game, accidentally leaving them too deep in the jungle to be useful.

In your game, if I can only move two cubes one hex a turn, then it becomes very important to (1) either paradrop troops to where I need them, (2) get the movement bonus from the lord, (3) shut down spawning sites in areas where I am running out of cubes.

Tim

Of course, that's what the GDW is for. Will the tiles have restrictions in connecting them? How big will be the regions? Typically, how many regions do you want?

What do you find on a tile? A general type (forest, lake, river, swamp, mountains, village, castle) or combo of them with a path? How do you delimit the regions, is that directly on the tile? Or maybe it's defined by your "trains" of armies connecting to your lord. It could be weakly defined like in Go, and sometimes strongly defined... like in Go! Strong influence where your Lord but also where your armies are, but less. The type of the tile could affect the armies, your lord, your choices during that turn. The choices thing could be cool.

Quick note: I was just reading an overview of Feurio, a firefighting game, and thought of Three Kingdoms, because they both have tile-laying, unit placement, and spreading threat elements. The games are quite different, but it might be worth looking at if you haven't seen it before.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/22290