Category Archives: Walsingham

At Jason’s request, here are the current rules to Walsingham. I’m a little nervous about writing these down because I don’t want to become too attached to them as they are; however, getting them written out will probably help me explain the game more smoothly the next time I explain it, so here you go. Everything here is 100% subject to change!

Walsingham Rules

Here, as promised, is a short rundown of the changes I am planning for the next playtest of Walsingham. Everything is subject to change, of course, even mid-game if it ends up not working out.

• Theme: As I’ve been mentioning, the current title is now Walsingham, after Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster. Conceptually, the players are merchants buying and selling secrets to win favors from the Crown–but one is secretly a spy for the Spanish! I am relatively pleased with this theme and will probably stick with it if the game ends up being fun.
• Graphics and Terminology: The resource that the Spy wants is now known as Intrigue. Intrigue is now no longer harmful to non-Spy players; in fact, players get a small reward for stopping the Spy from winning by collecting more Intrigue. Victory Points are still Victory Points. Both of them have their own icons, which I got from game-icons.net:
  

  VP

  

  Intrigue

• Auction: The complicated simultaneous auction is replaced with a dollar auction in which non-winners pay half. The highest bidders get first choice of the rewards on offer each round. (This is the same mechanic as For Sale and similar to Steam.) This should speed the game significantly, since I think one of its largest weaknesses is likely to be an anticlimactic period in between when the Spy becomes obvious and the end of the game.
• Secrets: Several rewards allow the players to draw 3 / keep 1 card from a Secret deck. This deck contains both VPs and Intrigue. This lets players accumulate Intrigue without it being obvious; of course, since there are plenty of VPs available, a player going for VPs could attract false suspicion. A few cards let you peek at the Secrets an opponent has collected.
• Narrower Rewards: Previous iterations of the game featured a wide array of rewards. The only real rewards now available for bidding are VPs, Intrigue, and information. A few cards are worth extra VP or information in if you collect both cards of a set. Some of the reward chips do come in two different colors, and Loyalty cards reward players for collecting more of one than the other. This is to give the bidding some “texture” and cover for Spies to bid erratically.
• Stinginess of Information: At the end of the game, starting with the player with the least (public) Intrigue, everyone gets to make an Accusation of the spy. An incorrect accusation carries no penalty. A correct accusation gives two rewards: first, a sizable VP award, and second, the Spy loses both VP and Intrigue. On one hand, sharing one’s information about the Spy can help everyone correctly accuse the Spy and stop the automatic win. On the other hand, being close-lipped–or lying outright–can help a player reap the successful-accusation reward alone. Since there is no penalty for being wrongly accused, players may even choose to deliberately act suspiciously to throw off rivals.

I put together the first prototype for the game that would become Walsingham back in 2010. The idea was less focused then. I have always loved auction games, and I married the idea of hidden roles with another idea I had been kicking around: a simultaneous auction (as in, say, Homesteaders or Cyclades) that rewards players for being outbid. (Thematically, the auction house is paying out kickbacks, I suppose.) The auction drove a set-collection game: players were rewarded for having sets of colors as well as the majority of each color.

There is plenty of discussion as to how soon to give a game its theme. My opinion is that the game gets a theme as soon as it needs it. Montana was always a simple game, and stayed Space Poker until it needed art and a name to put on the box. By contrast, Invasion was Invasion out of the gate, and the theme helped drive both the names and abilities on the Gadget cards. (Likewise, it seems pretty likely that Ra was given its theme when it needed art, while it’s impossible to imagine the mechanics of Battlestar Galactica with any other theme.) This game didn’t need a theme yet, but it did need a working title. I was using colored cubes for the set collection: gems. Some of the gems were cursed, and only one role wanted to pick those up. Who likes curses, instead of being afraid of them? Witches, I suppose. OK, the working title became Gems and Witches.

So, Gems and Witches, 2010. Curses were negative points for every player except for the player who was secretly a Witch, who got positive points. One of the late-game resources available provided an Accusation, which gave a player big points for identifying the Witch, and nullified the Witch’s huge bonus points for spending the whole game blatantly picking up curses. The auction/set collection game was pretty solid if derivative–I think 1997’s Reiner Knizia could have developed it into a 1997 hit without too much trouble–but the aspect of guessing and finding Witches didn’t work. I had hoped that the players could use the bonus-for-getting-outbid auction mechanic to leverage their knowledge, but the math never worked out, and the Accusation always ended up an anticlimax.

Boldly charging down the wrong road in 2011, I added more roles: unaligned Merchants that got better bonuses for certain colors, a Hunter that got a bigger bonus for correctly accusing the Witch, a Decoy that got bonus points for being falsely accused. I added special gems that players got big points for having exactly one of at certain intervals. The reasoning for those was to give players a cover for otherwise-erratic bidding. Again, it worked out interestingly from an auction perspective, but fell flat from the hidden-role perspective. There was just no happy medium between the Witch playing coyly (and not getting enough curse points to win) and playing openly (and drawing an obvious accusation from whoever pounced on it first).

2012 came and I tried again. First, a retitle. Montana had been published with its working title of “Space Poker”, so, ok, let’s use “Space” to mean “working-title name for a prototype game”. Honest traders don’t want contraband, because they don’t have the contacts to sell it; smugglers do, but they have to stay hidden. Hence, Space Smugglers. I ripped the set-collection and points-for-being-outbid mechanics out entirely; this isn’t the right game for them, and they took too long to explain and didn’t fit with the game. Most of the cards gave VP and Trouble, as the the curses became known, directly, although there were still some “flavored” VP to give Merchants the incentive to bid on one rather than another.

The Space Smugglers playtest was possibly the most disastrous playtest I’ve ever conducted, and I think I redeemed myself only by cutting it short after about 15 minutes when it was obvious that everything had gone to hell. Sorry, Matt, Eric, and David. What didn’t work about the game that time? Well, everything. There were a lot of hidden roles, and they all had to be explained up-front so that players’ action in the game could make sense. And then they didn’t anyway, because the auctions didn’t work. The auctions had too many moving pieces–bids going back and forth, chips gained, player pieces moving on tracks. Most of the scoring happened only at the end, and it wasn’t at all clear how any game turn related to the next. The set collection, which was the strongest part of the previous iteration, was gone with nothing to replace it. I wrote up some notes, shelved the game, and procrastinated working on it until now.

Tomorrow, I should be finished prototyping the latest changes to the game, now working-titled Walsingham. I’ll discuss what I believe I learned from the previous iteration and the changes I made (many!) as a result.

The new prototype of Invasion is ready to try out, modulo some color printing that I need to get out to OfficeMax for. So today I’ll pick up work on what I consider a Holy Grail design, Walsingham.

The Holy Grail I am questing for here is for a hidden-role deduction game where the hidden roles are the foundation of the game, not an add-on or just another piece of the puzzle. In other words, players are playing a basic game, one that probably seems very simple–but one or more of the players has a secret goal. The business of covering up and ferreting out secret goals needs to be the point of the game; otherwise, you’re just playing an ordinary game with different VP conditions.

The reason I call this a Holy Grail is that I believe it’s a very difficult goal to achieve, and one that has never really been done to my satisfaction yet:

• If the only consequence for having your secret goal found out is that it’s somewhat easier to work against your goals, that’s not terribly interesting. I’m used to having my goals worked against. The good news is that you can still have a fine game; it’s just that the deduction isn’t an interesting part of it. Consider, for example, Lords of Waterdeep. Usually most players’ Lord cards are pretty obvious by the end; keeping them secret just helps to throw a little bit of uncertainty into the scoring.
• By contrast, if the penalty for having your secret goal found out is devastating, it means that having goals revealed needs to be the climax of the game. Because information should ideally drip out slowly during the course of the game, I take this to mean that the Holy Grail game needs to be fairly short–30-40 minutes or so–so it doesn’t drag on past the climax.
• Because of the physical nature of board games, it’s very difficult to achieve any kind of fog-of-war effect: to have information available to some players but not others. About all you can do is have cards or chits that are concealed and allow some players, but not others, to look at them. In all but the simplest situations this also introduces an element of memory, which I don’t particularly care for.
• The game should not allow enough direct spying to deduce what player is what; that’s blunt and boring. (I think this is one of the main reasons Shadow Hunters falls a bit flat.) Rather, most of the clues should come from players’ actions in the base game: what resources or opportunities you value or ignore.
• All players should have a reason to lie or otherwise not share information freely. This adds the element of mistrust and intrigue that makes the game compelling. Consider One Night Werewolf, where the secret swapping of roles makes originally non-Werewolf players need to lie to figure out what others know; or Two Rooms and a Boom, where a huge number of the advanced roles either reward, punish, require, or forbid sharing information in different ways.

I believe, by the way, that The Resistance, Two Rooms and a Boom, and One Night Werewolf are all fine games, but these games are driven by the team and social aspect. By contrast, my Grail is free-for-all where players might well choose either to lie (to throw others off the track and reap the rewards of successful deduction alone) or tell the truth (to catch a runaway leader that can’t be brought down any other way).

Next time I’ll talk about the history of Walsingham and some of my lessons and failures along the way.