Overview

Previous Competitive, Cooperative, and Cohabitive, Cohabitive Games So Far, Optimal Weave: A Prototype Cohabitive Game,  Six Small Cohabitive Games.

After messing around with the theory a bit, and making a half-dozen simple games to test a few ideas and get a sense of what worked, I put together something a bit more complex.

Actually, that's an incorrect narrative: As I read the Jellychip game, I found I really wanted to play something like this but with more depth. I love games like Factorio or Victoria 3 or Tribal Wars, where there's an ebb and flow to the in-game economy. There was a particular shape to the game I wanted, so I was building the complex version alongside the simple versions.

The working title is Chaos Investments. At present, it's for 3-8 players, and games tend to run about an hour and a half to two hours (including teaching.) Up until now I've been present for every game and gotten to ask people how it went afterwards, and the feedback from the last three or four games has been generally positive with ~one person frustrated each game. This version isn't stable and I'm going to keep tweaking it, but it is tested enough I think it basically works and if the idea sounds fun you'll mostly have fun with it.

Feedback is appreciated, especially if you play it.

Ruleset

Objectives

Your goal is to get as many points as you can. Try to beat your personal record.

You don’t care how many points everyone else gets. It could be zero, it could be a million, it doesn’t matter. 

You do this by converting raw resources into refined products, getting better tools for gathering and refining resources, and trading with the other players for the products and tools you care about more than they do.

Setup

The game requires a stack of Device cards, a stack of “chips” of various colours (these can be poker chips, magic the gathering land cards, etc) a small stack of Values Cards, a handful of Visible Trade Tokens (I use circles cut out of pink construction paper) and a piece of paper to be the turn counter.

Values Cards:

Devices:

Deal each player one Values card.  This indicates how you score points: at the start of any turn game, you score based on your Values cards. Your Values card is open information and should be kept faceup.

Count 1 of each Production Device cards and 2 of each Special Device cards. Add 2 Common Device cards per player, then add enough commons you'll be able to deal the cards evenly among all players. Shuffle this, then deal them out evenly. Put all the remaining Commons in the Common Pile. Leave the remaining non-common Device cards in the middle of the table as the Uncommon Deck.

The Devices you have are your Hand. Your Hand is private information- you can show a trading partner any subset of your hand if you choose, but don’t have to.

Put a pile of Chips in the middle of the table, stacked by colour. Your Chips are open information, and should be kept where other players can see them. Players start with one chip of each colour, Blue, Red, White, Green, Black.

Put a Trade Token between every other player. If you are sitting in a circle, it should look like so

Bob 0 Carla X Dean O Emma X Bob

If there’s an odd number of players, there will be one player with no Trade Token next to them. The important thing is there are zero players with a token on both sides of them.

Draw ten circles on a big piece of paper in the centre of the table, labeled “Turn Counter.” This will track turns: fill in one circle at the start of each turn. Keep another piece of paper in the centre of the table marked “Pollution.” At the end of the game (after the 10th turn ends) each player will lose one point per mark of Pollution. (Unless they're an Oil Seeker.)

Choose who goes first. By default, this is the player who last paid money for something.

Flow of a turn

All players take turns simultaneously. Start by filling in a circle on the turn tracker.

There are three phases to each turn.

The first is called Trade Arrangements. You and the player on the other side of the Trade Token next to you may trade any number of Device cards and any number of Chips. The trade must be mutually agreed to. Agreements about the future can be made (“I’ll give you this device if you give it back to me in two turns”) but are not enforced by game rules. If you have no Trade Token next to you, you do nothing during Trade Arrangements.

The second is called Device Activation. Pick one Device in your hand, and do what it says. If a device says to show cards, reveal them to the table. After using or showing a Device, it stays in your hand and you can use it in future rounds.

The third is called Scoring. Anyone who wishes can exchange chips for points by returning those chips to the centre of the table, and keeping track of their points on a piece of paper. 

Then the turn is over. If you have a Trade Token on your right, move it to your left, and a new turn begins from the top. 

It is suggested to have a timer, such that Trade Arrangements takes two minutes, Device Activation takes one minute, and then the turn is over. Once you finish for a phase, put your hand down on the table to indicate this, and if everyone is finished you can advance to the next phase or turn.

End of Game

The game ends after ten turns.

Any unscored chips are discarded.

Each player loses 1 point for each Pollution anyone has marked, unless they are an Oil Seeker.

You want to have as many points as you can, regardless of how much anyone else scored. Aim to beat your previous high score.

Components

Production, Special, and Common devices.

Value cards.

Trade Partner markers

'Chips' of the five colours. Probably about fifty of each colour.

A turn counter.

Notes

As mentioned, this is in development. I've played about half a dozen games in the current iteration, and have some notes.

Balance

Ideally I'd want each colour to be, if not balanced and exactly fair, then not obviously out of balance. Right now I like where Red and Green are, but Blue is a bit weak and Black is regularly too strong.

But what is each colour doing?

The point of the different colours and different abilities for each is to add some more asymmetry. Each of the Production Devices has an alternate use based on colour.

Oil (Black) is a negative externalities problem. In a four player game, if Oil gets what it wants then it will make (for example) two black chips, each two points for each chip, and lose nothing to pollution. It got four points. In doing so, it made one Pollution, which collectively lost everyone else three points. Everyone else would be interested in finding a way to not have that happen. This includes not trading Oil the Production it wants.

Food (Green) is a trust problem. If Food trusts its neighbors, it can make two green chips instead of one. That extra chip is pure value, and there's lots of ways to divide the gains. But if Food doesn't trust its neighbors, then Food should just make the one green chip for itself. 

Transportation (Red) is a bit of a workhorse. Transportation Production is everybody's second favourite pick, unless you're a Transportation Seeker in which case it's your first. You can make a decent amount of margin by trading for colours nobody cares about and trading back colours people do care about, though you want to do your colour swaps in as large a single swap as you can for turn efficiency reasons. 

Research (Blue) is an investment problem. Remember, if you don't have a Production Device of some sort, the best you can do with your turn is make one White Chip with a Common Device. Research Production's alternate mode is the only way to get more Production Devices into play, which is a bit useful if you can't trade for the one you want (say, if there are three Oil Seekers at the table and only one Oil Production) and very useful if you can't get any production device. (Say, if there are five players, and only four Production Devices in play.)

Liquidity

In an earlier version, chips were (depending on your Values) worth twice as many points if you scored them before turn 6 started. This created some time value, and also got players to cash in chips. As it stands, the only reason to cash in chips before turn 10 is because the bank is running out of chips to hand out. It's kind of annoying.

On the other hand, chips are much easier to subdivide than Devices and trade around the table. I like that part. 

There was also a version where Devices often used Chips as input. That didn't really solve the problem, as they'd produce more chips of other colours as output eventually and made for some really big piles of chips appearing at once on turns 8 or 9. It was also kind of over-complicated, though a lot of fun if "Magic: The Gathering meets Factorio" sounds fun to you. (It did to me!) At the time I wound up just keeping track of chips by writing on a piece of paper.

Most likely, a proper version of this would have some chips marked with a 5 or a 10 or the like and that would mostly solve this. If absolutely necessary, a rule saying you can't hold more than X chips at a time and any excess is immediately Scored would solve it.

Sizing

My observation is that the game plays best at five or six players, and takes about an hour to an hour and a half. That's kind of an annoying size to get together- many games only go up to about four players. At this point I think that's kind of unavoidable though. Trade negotiations are a very different beast with only one other person to negotiate with, so I think aiming too hard at the two player version isn't worth the time. Even at three, there's just not that much going on. I'd like to get the time down, though I think that's largely a matter of practice; turns are usually going much faster at the end of the game than the start. 

Something I'm excited about, but haven't gotten a chance to try, is very big games. Because everyone takes their turn at once, in theory the time it takes to play is constant regardless of the size of the game. In practice I expect a bit of slow down, but if people already know how to play then I don't expect much slowdown. Around the ~7 player mark, I want to put more Production and Special devices into circulation, but I don't know how many yet. (Earlier versions assumed 1 Production and 2 Special devices per player, before I started wanting to use Research Production as a solution to some people not having the Production they wanted.)

The end game sprint

The last few turns, everyone usually knows exactly what they're doing and zeros in on it. There's no point building more Commons, everyone just cares about Production.

I'd mildly like to have the production of the tools be still going on until closer to the end, but without re-complicating the range of Devices I'm not sure how.  It isn't a big deal as it stands.

Pieces of other games

The bones of the scoring system was tested in Dealerchip. Disordered Interests has a version of the Trade Partners setup, but I eventually realized taking turns simultaneously allowed the size of the group to get larger without slowing down play. Commerce & Coconuts was an attempt to create Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage setups, though I didn't like quite how random the scores could wind up and so switched to cards with more manageable probability. Handlink is me messing around with a hands based idea after staring at a completely different Cohabitive game Shaked K. came up with.

Next Steps

I want to rein in Oil and prop up Research. I'm thinking of doing that by removing Specials from the Uncommon Device deck, and by removing Oil Production from the initial cards. That would make drawing more Production cards easier, and force Oil Seekers to use Research to get any of their Production. I could also remove Oil Seeker's protection from Pollution; they don't need it for making Black Chips to be worthwhile for them but it makes that less of an amazing deal than it is. (And also gives smaller groups an easier time buying Oil Seeker off.)

I want to add a little more randomness. As it stands, it's mostly possible to math out the whole game by turn four or five, even earlier if people are open about their cards and paying attention to those who aren't their trade partner. I don't have an answer jumping out at me; one idea is to go more towards a deckbuilder like Star Realms, where you have a personal deck you're drawing from and discarding to. Too much randomness in a longer game like this makes it hard to compare against your past scores as a benchmark.

I want to fix the Liquidity problem, either by changing the Chip values or by giving a reason to cash in chips early. 

If I figure out a great way to do it, I wouldn't mind making for faster games. Maybe by making build up and investment still worth it at a 5 turn game. Unlikely but possibly by making this a hands based game like Handlink.

Then it'll be time to print out another version and do some more playtesting :)