Why make a Second Edition?

NOTE: This essay was originally posted as the first Design Diary on the Pax Pamir: Second Edition Board Game Geek page. 

I am wary of second editions, especially those that make promises about having cleaned up their act. I tend to like wonky first editions. I admire them for all of their woozy sharp edges. A Born-again board game with a tucked-in shirt and a face brimming with healthful sobriety does little to inspire me. You can have your polish, give me the unalloyed weirdness of an idea done not quite right. I'll spare you all my predilection for strange, pre-Catan euros and the odder wargames. Suffice to say, I'm the kind of person who after playing Lords of the Sierra Madre (Second Edition) decided to spend a few years hunting for a copy of the much stranger Lords of the Sierra Madre. It's a bit of a problem.

And yet here I find myself, about to embark on a series of essays about the design of a second edition. A design that I accept full responsibility for. It was the other guys who wanted me to republish the first edition with minor adjustments here and there. I was the one who demanded space for radical redevelopment. What the hell happened?

Well, my opinion about second editions didn't really change. Most of them, like remastered editions of a certain famous science fiction film series, are awful in concept and execution. Usually second editions fall into one of two traps. They either take the source material and make it needlessly baroque (*cough* Dungeons and Dragons) or they attempt to make the game more accessible and just happen to sap all of the tension out of a design as a result (*cough* Steam). In other words, you can get into trouble by trying to cater to your game's fans too much or you can get into trouble by extending your player base in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with the design of the original game.

Taken in this light, there's nothing horrible about second editions per se, it's just a difficult thing to do well. Even when well-executed, there's every reason to believe that the new edition is going to make someone unhappy. Consider the development and reception of new iterations of Twilight Imperium, Squad Leader, Study in Emerald, Brass, and a host of other titles. I'd dig into these right now, but I don't want to start a riot. And, anyway, I'm supposed to be writing about Pax Pamir. Okay, let's get to that.

I hope to recount the fuller history of how Pax Pamir came to be later. Both the first and the second edition have long, tangled pedigrees. I'll get to those stories in due time. But, right now, I need to make sure folks realize absolutely what I hope to accomplish with this edition. Pax Pamir second edition is a second edition of Pax Pamir in the biggest, scariest sense. It's dramatically more approachable, easier to teach, and contains literally half of the rules of the first edition. It is also the perfect introduction to the Pax series for players who were often curious about what Phil and company were cooking up in those small boxes but were afraid to jump in for fear of their rulebooks and cluttered card designs.

But, if the new edition of Pax Pamir is all those things, it is also harder, meaner, sharper, and more opaque than its predecessor.

When I set out redevelop Pamir, I didn't care to make the design more accessible. The priority was to make the game-state more transparent. I wanted players to be able to glance at the board and better feel the pressures the other players were putting on to them. The accessibility of the new design was a side-effect. I wanted to make a better version of Pamir for folks that were interested in these kinds of games. If it brought more players to the fold, all the better, but this was never going to be a game with a big, general audience.

Now, before everyone starts deciding to bury their old copies of Pax Pamir in the desert somewhere, I should say that here I am speaking about intentions only. I set out to make Pax Pamir a harder, better game that was more smartly realized both visually and mechanically. However, in that process, the game changed. It's still Pamir, but it's also fundamentally different. I think the core of that difference boils down to two big changes, which I'll describe below.

First, the game's focus changed. For all of the original game's differences from Pax Porfiriana, at it's core, both were games about regime control. For those unfamiliar with the series, it works something like this: players collect different “suits” of victory points. Which suit ends up being the “correct” suit depends on the current climate. So, to use Porfirana as an example, if Mexico has erupted into Anarchy, the player with the most Marxists in their coterie is going to be victorious. Controlling these climates (or Regimes, as they are called in Porfiriana) was managed simply by hoarding special cards which had the ability to change the climate when played. Basically, for all its arguments about simulation and history, Pax Porfiriana was a hand management game (a damn fine one too).

This system makes a lot of sense in Porfiriana both mechanically and thematically. But, I had wanted Pamir to disrupt it. To do this, Pamir added a new layer to the victory calculation. Basically, players worked together in formal coalitions to accrue the right kinds of victory points, and, when their coalition won, the player with the most “influence” (yes...another currency) would win the game. I had hoped these bad marriages would provide the game with it's central drama, but it turned out to simply be too hard to track in the vast majority of games. Climate control (basically making sure it was Anarchy when it needed to be Anarchy) was ultimately more important, and that's where players focused. I wanted to flip this. The climates were still in play, but I wanted to make them less important and to elevate the coalitions to be the game's most critical element. The forming of alliances and sudden, painful betrays needed to be the heart of the game.

The solution was ultimately simple, but it took me a long time to come around to. In order to decouple climate control from victory I simply had to make it so that the dominance conditions never changed. Dominance would simply be decided by roads and armies, regardless of current climate. Thomas Hobbes would have been proud. Now, in assessing the standing of each coalition, players simply needed to glance at a single track. Look ma, no bookkeeping!

Simplifying dominance allowed me to "spend" the game's complexity elsewhere, and I decided to spend it building out the victory point system to be more dynamic and responsive to the game state.

Originally Pamir was envisioned as a sudden-death game. However, with the victory condition being as complicated as it was, all this meant was that the game ground to a halt when the cards that triggered the end of the game appeared in the market. Then, after a big stall, a whole barrage of betrayals and plot-twists would unfold in a few actions and one player would likely run away with the win. Victory points allowed me to extend this drama over a much larger period in the game because they could allow players to see the endgame unfold in slow motion and react to the shifting fortunes of the players. Victory points were like a spotlight that allowed me to point the attention of my players on the two things that mattered in the game: loyalty and influence. Basically, only players loyal to the dominant coalition would be eligible to get victory points. And, the number of victory points they got depended up their standing in that coalition. The player with the most influence points in a coalition would get five points. The player with the second most would get three points. The player with the fewest would get one. If no coalition managed to secure dominance, a lesser amount of points were doled out to those players who had built large bases of personal power.

To my thinking, this mechanical imposition gave the game a much more epic narrative range. With each dominance, few points were dolled out and the players inched to victory, adjusting their partnerships based on the standings of the players. By the end of the game, players got the sense that they finally unified a fallen empire in conflict that spanned a generation.

But, I needed the pressure of a sudden-death condition as well to fuel some of the original game's riskier strategies. I did this with the “4 or more” rule. Basically, if, after scoring, a single player has 4 more points than every other player (individually), they immediately win the game. So, if a single player manages to gain dominance all by herself in the first check, she'll have 5 points and everyone else will have nothing. Game over. Likewise, if a partnership is dominant twice and the influence race between them isn't disrupted, the lead partner will have 10 points (5+5) and the secondary partner will have 6 (3+3). Game over.

Fans of the original Pax Pamir will see that these rules, while looking quite different superficially, actually mirror the end game conditions of the original Nation Building variant. This, I think, represents the core ethos of the new edition of Pax Pamir best. Most everything from the original game is still in this design, but those mechanisms are to be found as organic consequences of a new set of rules, not through bits of chrome scattered here and there.

I have a lot more to say about integrating the first edition's chrome-y rules about baggage trains and capturing secret battle plans into a single, more robust action system, but that will have to wait for another day.