Quid for your Quo

NOTE: This essay was originally posted as the fourth Designer Diary on the John Company: Second Edition Board Game Geek page

One of the priorities of the new edition of John Company was to expand and enhance the game's negotiation space. I wanted to give players more tools they could use to make deals and make it so those deals were actually worth the time they took to negotiate.

This is much easier said than done. Negotiations are a very tricky space to design in, and, while easy to tack on a few rules about what a player can trade (or not trade), it's much harder to make those exchanges a meaningful part of the game's decision space.

I learned my lesson in this regard while working on the first edition of Pax Pamir. In my original conception of the game, I wanted Pamir to be primarily a noisy negotiation game. Early drafts of the game offered players a dizzying array of privileges that players could use for leverage. For instance, rather than roads, the game had passes which players could block or transit through. This is a fine thing to design a game around, but I found it was impossible to give that mechanism the support it would need to make it a central part of the design.

Still, by the time the game was done, a few negotiations rules hung around. Most groups ignored them outright. I wasn't offended by this as there was plenty of other tools to use in the game. However, a few groups did use them, and their games took on a very different, warped shape. Every game always went to the final topple as players would always be able to pool cash to stop someone from winning sooner. It was exhausting and against the spirit of the game.

The trouble with negotiation rules is that it's very easy for a badly conceived rule about negotiations to ruin many good rules.

Designing for Leverage

I had the experience of Pamir very fresh in my mind when I started working on the first edition of John Company. Unlike Pamir, I wanted to keep negotiations central to the design.

John Company was always going to be primarily a negotiation game. When I first set out to build this game many years ago, I wanted the game to feel like a dinner conversation or drawing room debate. No other genre seemed as well-suited to creating this feeling than a negotiation game.

The first step was to make sure that the negotiations didn't get too tied up in the game's pacing and end-game trigger. By that I mean that I didn't want negotiations to break the games flow or, as things got close to the end, for the tensions of the game to become derailed by players forming a lobby to stop one player from winning. This was mostly accomplished by linking the end game trigger with the performance of the Company and putting some sensible limits on victory point trading.

I also tried to be clear-eyed about what sort of negotiation game John Company was. In many negotiation games, players trade because they have different competitive advantages. There's a lot of space for win-win deals and negotiations are usually about making marginally better deals than your opponents (Catan and especially the recent Sidereal Confluence are like this). John Company's negotiations are sometimes like this too, but it's only half of the picture. John Company is about leverage. The negotiations are less about trying to figure out exactly what a shipyard might be worth to you than figuring out how much power you are willing to let me have over you in order to get what you want.

In the first edition, this leverage was often expressed in promise cubes. Players could trade cubes from their supply for any number of things. These cubes could be purchased back for a flat cost, but, if any were outstanding at the end of the game they would lower their owner's victory points by 2.

At their core, promise cubes were a imperfect solution to a complex problem. Though John Company was a negotiation game that offered players a lot of options, there were actually only a few things players could trade. Players were very frequently broke. Promise cubes provided these players with a currency they could use in their hour of need. However, because they were so expensive, players traded them less and less as they learned more about the game.

When I started working on the second edition, I badly wanted to rehabilitate the concept of the promise cube. But I couldn't make it work. Part of the problem was that the second edition re-balanced the game's cash economy. Players had a steady flow of income (and expenses) throughout the game and it was easy for players to sweeten a deal if they needed. In addition, I had gone into the second edition with the intention of expanding the range of deals players could make. Rather than fix a players manors (now luxuries) or shipyards to zones on the board that couldn't be changed after they were built, players now held onto these deeds in their player area and they could be transferred like anything else.

I loved how these little changes opened up the negotiations. But, those improvements made the promise cubes feel tacked on. Well, not entirely tacked on. Promise cubes had one very important job in the first edition: the nepotism rule. It worked like this. You were only allowed to promote your own family members during hiring if you gave every player you passed up a promise cube. In addition, if you promoted another player over yourself, you could take a previously promised cube back. In essence, it provided players a way to short circuit the hard cash-out of promises.

It turns out this rule was really, really important. When we were working on the new edition, I followed my best impulses as a developer and made sure to pull out any game elements that were vestiges of the first. When I pulled out the promise cubes, a bunch of systems immediately fell apart. It turns out that the steep penalty for nepotism was absolutely central to the design. I was quite surprised by this for a few reasons. First, figuring out how to set up situations where you could promote your own family members was a key challenge of the original game. While not common, it still happened somewhat frequently. I hadn't realized how truly steep the penalty was (such are the hazards of doing design work slowly over many years!). If I wanted to pull out promise cubes, I was going to have to replace this penalty with something that could bear the load.

Promise Cards

In the end we opted for a very blunt solution. The new nepotism rule works like this. You can only promote yourself over another player if ALL of the players you passed up consent. This basically gives everyone in the hiring pool a veto on your plans to give your idiot nephew a cushy job. In the context of the first edition, this rule would have been far to harsh, but the second edition had dramatically revised the hiring pools so that players could be a lot more precise with their job-seekers. This meant that usually you were brokering deals with a couple other players rather than the full table. There was space to make a deal.

With this alteration the game started working again, but I was still left with the question of promises. I took a step back and thought about what I actually needed the promises to do within the larger context of the design. In their original conception, promises had two jobs. First, they were a currency that players could rely on in those moments when the game was cash poor. Second, they were something that a player without leverage could offer to those players that did have leverage.

Part of the problem then was that the promises were especially sensitive within the design to the requirements of that second goal. What would a negotiation tool look like if it were built from the perspective of a player who has very little?

With this in mind I thought about the promissory notes in Twilight Imperium 4e. While I love the mechanic in the abstract, I find that they often aren't used in practice. (There are complex reasons why I think this is the case, but I'll spare you my TI ramblings.) However, one thing that they do really well is that they can provide some ballast to the game's negotiations. They help stabilize the sorts of deals by establishing meaningful fence posts that allow players to ask each other earnestly, “how serious are you about this, really?”

Their specificity and stability seemed like just the tools I needed in the promise design of John Company. So, I went and built a set of cards working in that general design space that would replace the old promise cube system. I went in with a very simple set of goals: the cards should be ideally things that were more valuable to players who were in good positions so that players in bad positions could get some value with them. They could also serve as soft reminders of the many different things players can negotiate in the game.

The promise cards would have no end-game cash out. If a player was given a promise card and didn't find a way to use it in the game, it was their loss. This was critical because it created a sense of ultimate uncertainty around their value and put the onus of clever play upon the players actually holding them.

Okay, let's take a look at a couple:

Consent of Nepotism

This is probably the promise card that has been most-debated among my playtesters. Basically, it's a quiet echo of the old hiring system. All job candidates have a nepotism veto, but, if a player gives away this promise, it can be cashed in to force that player to consent to nepotism. On the face of it, this is a very weak promise. However, because it's relatively easy to get into a hiring pool, it means that the nepotism veto is a fairly accessible point of leverage for players who find themselves in a bad position. This means that a player who is struggling can meaningful offer this promise to a more powerful player. It's not an empty promise.

But the promise is more than that. Because players are routinely confronted with several nepotism vetos, this promise works best when you have “sets” belonging to each player in the hiring pool. This gives this promise a lot of dynamic value, especially on the secondary market. So, while they have very low value in the early game and are often used as sweeteners, in the late game they can become prized objects that are usually so value it's worth speculating on them just for their resale price.

Child as Ward

No matter how much money you have in John Company, you never get more family actions (children). Depending on the turn number and player count, you'll either get one or two young scions that need assigning each turn. When you have money and power, this number is never enough, and if you're on the ropes, the prospect of splitting your meager estate among your children can seem ill-advised.

Thankfully, you can do what any out-of-luck member of respectable society would do: send the kid to a rich uncle and have them deal with them! This is direct action trading and it's always possible in the game, even if you don't have the promise necessary promise card. However, because action trading on this scale is so rare—even in negotiation games, I wanted to use the promise card as a soft reminder that, yes, you could pack off your children to a well-placed relative.