THE SOCIAL LIVE GAME
Coalition was born out of two of my great loves: 1) social deduction games where predicting others’ behavior is key to winning; 2) large-scale live action games.
Only two games that I am aware of fall into the category of what I would term the “social live game:” Speakeasy and Two Rooms and a Boom. Both of these games are an absolute blast to play. They both support large player counts. Their roots lie in folk games of secret roles and social deduction like Mafia and Werewolf. Instead of taking place around the table, they require a large space where players move and talk to each other, bouncing from conversation to conversation in real time. They involve social deduction and live action, which is why I find “social live game” to be useful shorthand for these games.
Coalition is my attempt to add to the genre. Both games involve two teams directly opposed to each other. 2R1B does have grey roles with individual objectives, but still, in both games, players with mutually exclusive win conditions rarely have a reason to talk to each other. In Speakeasy, once a Mobster and a Fed discover each other, the conversation usually ends: they have nothing in common. Likewise, in 2R1B, Reds and Blues never have much reason to talk, either, with the exception of a few roles like the Spy.
What sets Coalition apart from these games is its core mechanic: the shared scoring system. In Coalition, there are four teams, and no team scores alone. The primary means of scoring points in this game is by passing policies that align with your Party’s Values; each of the four Values is assigned to two Parties. The Parties and their Values are as follows:
Clergy: Justice and Order
Nobles: Order and Wealth
Merchants: Wealth and Freedom
Revolutionaries: Freedom and Justice
COALITION: THEME AND THESIS
In this setup, you have reason to work with most players in the room as the game unfolds. A Merchant can score points via Wealth policies, which also scores points for Nobles, or via Freedom policies, which scores points for Revolutionaries.
The game’s message is a double-edged sword. On the positive side, Coalition posits the idea that to get anything done, you must work with others. No player will win the game without cooperating with members of at least one of his sister Parties. But, there’s an edge to this message: only one Party will win at the end of the game. A rather cutthroat reality compared to the game’s cooperative premise.
So, is Coalition’s thesis an idealistic, “let’s-get-along” message of non-partisanship? Or is it one of harsh, hyper-partisan pragmatism? Maybe a little bit of both. I prefer to think of this as an open question that the game poses that players can attempt to answer however they’d like.
OF POLICY AND CITY-REPUBLICS
When I first hashed out the core mechanic behind Coalition, I was taking classes on US public policy. I felt particularly inspired by the levers one can pull to shape policy. To pass policy, you have to jostle for influence, manipulate established systems, and, most importantly, build a coalition large and influential enough to see your cause through into law. These are the foundational ideas upon which Coalition is built.
Players should feel as though they are savvy politicians, lining up dominoes to fall exactly the way they want by negotiating with opponents and manipulating parliamentary procedure. When you play Coalition, you should feel as though you are in The Room Where it Happens. And it worked. After a couple of preliminary, stripped-down playtests, the core mechanic worked to deliver just that experience. More than that, it felt like bottled lightning. The next thing to be determined was theme/setting. The “skin” of the game, if you will.
Currently, Coalition is set in a fictional, medieval city-republic, not unlike Florence or Venice as they existed in the middle ages. This setting was also inspired by my coursework, this time a class on medieval Italy. This may be subject to change, but currently, I believe that this is the best setting for Coalition.
My knowledge of the medieval Italian city-state is admittedly limited to the scope of a single undergraduate survey course, but it seems perfect for the game. The political systems of the city-republic were complicated, perhaps needlessly so in the modern eye. Councils would elect smaller Councils, which would then be narrowed down by lottery into even smaller Councils, in order to elect a single official such as a Doge or Gonfaloniere of Justice. What better historical setting exists to implement my own convoluted system of elections in order to produce desired gameplay?
The city-republic offers an accessible setting evocative of Shakespearean icons such as Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice. Even better, it provides a setting rife for political intrigue that does not risk alienating a player in the 21st century by drawing too clear a comparison between the game and real-life politics. At the same time, the game’s very nature invites an exploration of the political process, something undoubtedly valuable for civic engagement in our modern age. An enticing setting, indeed.
While hammering out Values and the Parties that would hold them, I realized that medieval thinking offered a perfect framework for the game’s four factions: the “Three Estates.” The Three Estates are a framework for thinking about how medieval society was organized, and are as follows:
- First: Clergy (those who pray)
- Second: Nobles (those who fight)
- Third: Peasants (those who labor)
The emergent merchant classes of the city-republics troubled this three-caste system. Here were perfect, easy touch-stones to serve as models for my Parties. With a more anachronistic bent, I dubbed those representing the Peasants in the game to be Revolutionaries, those fighting for the rights of proletariat at the convention.
COLOR WHEELS AND COMPASSES
Before settling on Parties, I had to come up with Values. Two pairs of conflicting ideals to oppose each other abstract enough to implement into the game. The first was Freedom vs. Order, or in more modern terms, libertarianism vs. authoritarianism. A classic, timeless struggle. The other ended up being Wealth vs. Justice, an allusion to the Biblical idea that money is the root of all evil. Considering the work of the Franciscans and other mendicant orders of the time and their oaths of poverty, this seemed a fitting paradigm for the setting. More than that, this seems like a relevant conflict, as conversations about the cost of human greed become increasingly prominent in our modern day.
The idea of shared values is pulled directly from Magic: the Gathering‘s color wheel. For the uninitiated, magic in MtG comes in five schools, or “colors:” White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. Decks in the game are usually comprised of multiple colors, reflecting a spellcaster’s use of different schools of magic to accomplish their goals.
More than schools of magic, each color reflects a school of thought. Each color has a different way of thinking about the world. Some values they share with their “ally colors” adjacent to them on the wheel. Likewise, they fundamentally disagree on an issue with the “enemy colors” across from them on the wheel.
For example, Red is the color of passion and freedom. Red shares with Green its appreciation for listening to one’s own instincts, and shares with Black an emphasis on individualism. Its primary conflict with Blue is one of “head vs. heart,” its passion coming into sharp contrast with Blue’s cold intellectualism. With White the conflict is of “chaos vs. order,” as Red’s oft-unbridled passion and individualism contrasts White’s emphasis on society and selflessness.
I love thinking about the philosophy behind the color wheel. Its brilliance is one of the reasons that Magic: the Gathering has such staying power. I believe that it is a useful heuristic for understanding values and conflicts between them. MtG lead designer Mark Rosewater has written extensively about this, and it’s been very influential on my thinking about design and about life. Seriously, go give it a read.
Once the Values and Parties had been established, I realized that I had inadvertently created a political compass. The two axes I had created can be mapped onto the Political Compass. The obvious comparison is Freedom vs. Order: libertarian vs. authoritarian. The one that is likely more debatable, depending on your own political affiliation, is Justice vs. Wealth: economic left vs. economic right. These mean that the Parties map as such: Clergy (AuthLeft), Revolutionaries (LibLeft), Merchants (LibRight), and Nobles (AuthRight).
Though it was not intentional, the Political Compass’s framing of issues as axes likely influenced my design. I didn’t realize it until one of my playtesters pointed it out to me while he was looking at the scoreboard. Now, I fully embrace it. Of course, comparing modern Communists or Libertarians to medieval clergymen and merchants is preposterous. These comparisons are not meant to be 100% accurate. It’s simply entertaining to think about.
INFLUENCES ON MECHANICS
In any form of art, the first piece of advice given to any aspiring creator is to consume a lot of that art. So, the director watches a lot of films, the musician listens to a lot of music, and the game designer plays a lot of games. Beyond what I’ve discussed already (MtG), here are other games that had strong influence on Coalition:
⁃ Speakeasy. Secret roles, a large player count, and an economy of Point cards that are constantly changing hands all factor in to Coalition’s core mechanics.
⁃ Two Rooms and a Boom. Again, secret roles, but particularly the idea of designating mechanical spaces for players to inhabit in a sort of “area control” type of competition. Instead of Rooms, we have Councils. A central part of the Coalition experience involves jockeying to build alliances on your Council and deciding which players to send away in order to push your agenda through, much like 2R1B. Additionally, this creates microgames that allow players to focus on a small group of other players (fellow members of their Council) while still contributing to the overall macrogame.
⁃ Secret Hitler. This game showed me that I love games that simulate a form of democracy and center voting behaviors as a central mechanic.
⁃ Twilight Imperium. Particularly, the idea that, in a game with mechanisms to abstractly represent politicking, one player != one vote. Influence is a resource to be managed, and spending it is always a gamble.
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