Lesson in Humility

The Spy, a Rebel character

THE STATE OF COALITION

Coalition: Councils of the Republic matured in 2024. The addition of Party Objectives was a huge step forward. The prototypes are real. We have a real game in our hands. I’m proud of how far it’s come. However, there is still development work to be done.

In the period between BGG CON in November 2023 and our appearances at Origins and Gen Con in the summer of 2024, we didn’t have any public playtests. I was happy with what I was seeing in my games at home. Some numbers and language might have needed tweaking, but the game felt good. Sure, we had a few new players try out the game, but the vast majority of testers were part of our core group of testers who have played many iterations of Coalition over the years. 

Once we released the Coalition back out “into the wild” beyond our core group it became clear that the game had a balance problem, weighted decidedly in favor of the Order factions. To illustrate this, the spread of Party wins at Gen Con was: Nobles 8, Clergy 5, Merchants 2, Rebels 1. I don’t have the numbers from Origins, but reports sound like the spread was similar.  

The Merchants and Rebels were too tough for new players. In fact, I think that the Rebels were just plain underpowered. Sure, their abilities were powerful on paper, but in practice, they didn’t have much to offer other parties. Part of this problem came from their role abilities, but the Edicts were also a big contributor. 

MECHANICAL PROBLEMS

The main culprit was the Lesser Order Edict, Sumptuary Law:

“The Council Chair chooses a player and a type of Influence. That player reveals their hand, then discards all Influence of the chosen type. That player then gains Influence equal to the number of cards discarded this way, but may not gain Influence of the chosen type.”

The problem was that, in the early game, the Council Chair would likely be one of the Clergy or Nobles. The strength of the Chair meant that whoever was at the top was strongly incentivized to stay there, which meant avoiding the Freedom Edicts, which depose the Chair. The easiest way to accomplish this was to use Sumptuary Law to strip Freedom Influence from other players’ hands (rather than targeting any other types of Influence). 

Discerning Merchant and Rebel players realized this and aligned on Freedom early. They still had a tough fight, since ties are overwhelmingly likely in the early rounds, and the Council Chair would break the tie. Avoiding such situations required both finesse and luck; if you give your Freedom cards to a teammate to concentrate it on one or two Councils, odds are you can win the bid. The problem was, Freedom also has to win the tie on the scoreboard in Round 1 as well - otherwise, Sumptuary Law would still happen, making it hard to push Freedom in Round 2. 

All of this presented the Rebels and Merchants with a painfully small margin of error within the first couple of rounds of the game. What’s more, even if the Rebels managed to squeeze in a Freedom Edict in the early, they’d often be starved for Influence by Round 3. The Iconoclast was woefully outclassed by other Influence-generating cards in the game. 

To guarantee that the Iconoclast could use their ability, you’d either need a Freedom Edict to happen, or for the Council Chair to change by other means. Barring role abilities, the only way to pull off the latter would be for the Chair to be the Highest Bidder (meaning that they’d move Councils at the end of the round). A discerning Iconoclast might bribe the Chair to do so, but when the payoff is only two Influence, it really wasn’t worth it for either the Iconoclast or the Chair.

Rebels were most successful when they could get other factions to bankroll them. This meant cozying up with Influence-generating roles in other Parties, like the Friar or Investor, or even one of the Independents. The problem was that the Rebels didn’t have much to offer in return; the Advocate is a great mid-late game bargaining chip, but she couldn’t help her fellow Rebels in the first couple of rounds, where they needed the most help. The Iconoclast didn’t generate enough Influence to be able to effectively bribe the Chair into stepping down.

In summary: the Rebels had a terrible needle to thread. Sumptuary Law would almost always be used to hose Freedom in the early rounds; avoiding this would require pushing Freedom through an unfavorable tie break both at your Council and on the Scoreboard. Even if the Rebels managed to push Freedom, they were often at the mercy of the Clergy and Merchants to make sure they could stay stocked up on Influence. 

In our home games, Clergy and Merchants were usually pretty good about propping up the Rebels. I think there were still problems with the Rebels, but it wasn’t as egregious as our convention games. Regardless, I think if we had tested more at home, we would have eventually realized that Sumptuary Law was powerful enough to “solve” the first round or two of the game. Sometimes it takes new eyes to learn something about your game.

LESSONS LEARNED 

I needed to playtest the game more outside of my core group, plain and simple. In fact, I think that at this point in the game’s lifecycle, my playtesting needs to be much more methodical. It is fortunate that we decided to delay our launch; I needed more time to balance the game.

An aside on balance and difficulty in games: it is perfectly fine if not all Parties are equally-accessible for a new player. However, it seemed like all of our convention games played out in a similar way, which I find dull. To a certain extent, negotiation games like Coalition self-balance, since you usually need help from your opponents to accomplish anything. The problem was that situations would arise where the Merchants and Rebels couldn’t help each other.

Since Gen Con, we’ve been experimenting with balancing fixes that involve changes to the Edicts and the Rebel role abilities. I wouldn’t have been able to crack this nut without our wonderful Gen Con GMs - shout out to Ryn and Audrey for doing the mechanical deep-dive with me to cook up some solutions. 

We’re testing changes every week. I want to have something that I am confident about to stress test at BGG CON in November. After that, I will issue updated components to our prototype holders so that they can test the updates in the winter and springtime. By the time Coalition is ready to launch, it will have been tested by many groups across the USA. 

This process has been humbling. I was confident enough in Coalition to spend hundreds of dollars on a batch of beautiful prototypes. Those prototypes will require significant updates to their components. I was rightfully proud of my design, but I was fundamentally wrong about how close it was to its final iteration.

I’d like to thank all of my wonderful friends who have run Coalition at conventions across the country - without you, I’d never know how to fix the design flaws. I’d also like to thank everyone who has come to playtest the game time and time again; you are the ones best at discovering those design flaws.