Infamy

This was originally posted on GameDesignerWannabe.com on May 15, 2012. The game is currently on Kickstarter through September 18.

 Infamy is a game in early design by Travis Chance that centers around an order-fulfillment system (get goods X, Y, and Z and be the first to bring them to the specified location). It does so with a theme that crosses Total Recall with the three-gang system of Grand Theft Auto 2. Player interaction is brought about through both a race to fill the orders (complete the missions) as well as a Pirate's Cove-style simultaneous location selection where overlapping choices are resolved in a priority/bidding system. Accomplishing these missions will gain you special abilities as well as scoring in two parallel point tracks (Infamy and Status). The first player to reach the specified level of either one wins.

One of those point tracks, Status, deserves some examination. The designer had laid that out as three axes leading out from a center (representing the game's three factions) with markers for each level. A player's marker indicated both his or her current Status level as well as with which faction that player was currently aligned.

This layout gave a misleading impression. It made it seem like choosing to support one faction moved you away from others. In reality, anytime you completed a mission for a faction, you immediately switch to that faction without losing any levels. This meant that the factions were almost meaningless in practice. The only thing one cared about in mission selection was which mission you could accomplish, regardless of faction. Factions became irrelevant to your strategy.

To be fair, the designer had a goal of not wanting to penalize players for switching factions, as had been true in previous versions. It is true that players will object to mechanics that penalize them for adapting to the situation. If players were hurt for taking advantage of an opportunity in another faction, they might instead spend a turn or two gathering resources and waiting for an achievable mission in their current faction. This would slow the game down unnecessarily.

As a remedy, I proposed shifting to a bonus-for-loyalty system instead of a penalty-for-switching. When accomplishing a faction's mission, instead of gaining generic Status points, the player would receive tokens specific to that faction. Each token would be worth an increasing number of Status points if within the same faction, but all faction tokens would add up to your overall score. For example, if you had . . .

• 4x Corporation tokens (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 Status)
• 2x Rebel tokens (1 + 2 = 3 Status)
• 1x Mafia token (1 Status)

Then that would total 14 Status. A player would then be incentivized to be loyal to a faction, but could still work for other factions for a lesser reward. You avoid the psychological effect of penalties while still reaping the thematic and strategic benefits of incentivizing loyalty.

The game is divided into rounds. Each round has the following phases:

1. Bidding for five randomly chosen contact cards
2. Simultaneous-Action-Selection of missions or resource gathering
3. Simultaneous-Location-Selection of missions
4. Resolve Missions
5. Simultaneous-Location-Selection of resource gathering
6. Resolve resource gathering

The bidding system has some quirks. First, you are bidding on contacts that act somewhat like the specialists in Planet Steam. The differences are that you are bidding on a specific one (in their randomly determined initiative order) at a time and that players may win the bid for more than one. Also, you are not bidding with a resource used elsewhere. You are bidding with a fixed number of "bid" tokens that you get back every other round (which means every 10 items). This is coupled with each auction being a "Glum Losers" auction (where all bids, including losing ones, are paid).

This is a dangerous combination. While a Glum Losers auction is both extremely interesting and meets the designer's goal of eliminating frivolous bids, it is an auction type for which most people are unprepared and that severely punishes those unfamiliar with its results. A famous example of this is a professor who auctions a $20 bill to his students through this auction type where individual bids eventually go well beyond the value of the prize. While this seems impossible, it is the predictable result of rational people trapped by this insidious action type.

You can skip this part if you are already familiar with the story of how this happens. Michael bids $10 for the $20 bill, hoping to gain a $10 profit. Jeff then bids $19, knowing he will reap $1 profit by winning and assuming that no one will bother bidding more when they cannot net gain anything by doing so. However, Michael is already in the trap. Because of the Glum Loser rules, by losing the auction, he will end up down $10. Michael increases his bid to $20, because this will mean that instead of losing money, he breaks even. Jeff is now in the trap as well. His now-losing bid of $19 means that is is perfectly rational for him to bid $21 for the $20 bill. While that would mean he has a net loss of $1, that is $18 better than losing his previous $19 bid and getting nothing in return. Both players are now in a cycle where it is perfectly rational for each to come over the top as while both players are now guaranteed to lose money, neither wants to be the one to lose more money by bidding less.

The danger of the Glum Losers auction is even worse when you take into account the way bidding resources work (fixed number per player, regenerated every 2 rounds). If two or more players get caught in the Glum Loser trap early, they will all end up with nearly nothing to bid with for up to nine more auctions.

The designer felt that previous tests with this system had gone well. I felt that he was discounting the danger of a new player digging themselves into a deep hole right at the start of the game. Such an experience might turn that player off the game for good. I personally like alternate auction formats (the keep-goin'-round-forever bidding of Power Grid is the low point of one of my favorite games) but am acutely aware of how important first impressions are to a game.

The prediction of doom bore out. In the third auction two of the four players got into a bidding war and were essentially eliminated from bidding for the rest of that round and all of the next one. I was able to manipulate that into winning five of the ten auctions between the first two rounds and the opponent who had not been caught claiming three of them. These won auctions gave a massive lead in resources that could be used to complete missions.

The designer did not want to switch to normal bidding, because that would go against his goal of eliminating frivolous bidding. I suggested a switch to the Penny-Auction model. In this model, losing bids are returned, but merely placing a bid incurs a nonredeemable cost. This auction type ensured that:

• Frivolous bids were still eliminated, because merely placing them had a cost.
• Players were encouraged to bid their maximum value for the item immediately, as having to increase the bid after being overbid meant spending yet more just to bid a second time.
• Since losing bids (minus the per-bid-cost) were returned, the rationality trap of Glum Losers would disappear.
• Even if a player fell into a bidding war, he or she would lose at most half of his or her money instead of all of it. Only the price-per-bid was lost, the losing bid itself would be returned.

Another goal of the designer was to have a high rate of collision between players during the mission/gathering resources phases. One method of doing this was by hoping players would simultaneously select identical locations in an attempt to both get the resource (or mission) provided by (or completed at) that location. Two things got in the way of this goal.

The initial obstacle was that the selection of location was broken into three pieces. First, players simultaneously selected whether they wanted to accomplish missions or gather resources. Then, only players who selected missions would then simultaneously select locations and then resolve conflicts. Finally, only players who selected gathering would simultaneously select locations. This meant that you would only potentially be in conflict with about half of your opponents (on average).

The other obstacle to the goal was the sheer number of locations. The game started with 14 locations with the possibility of more being built. This meant that even if you were potentially in conflict with other players, it would still be relatively unlikely for you to collide with one of them.

Collisions are resolved by which player had won the auction for the highest-initiative item. However, the player who would lose that comparison may discard an ammo item to try to win the location. The other player may then do the same to cancel it out. Since effectively losing a round's action by failing to win a collision was damaging, players would be incentivized to go back and forth with this.

The problem with this resolution system was that since resources were public, both players could see who would win the conflict by how much ammo each side would have. Therefore, the player who could not guarantee victory should logically not fight at all, since that would just make them lose ammo without gaining anything. An argument was made that a player might do so anyway out of spite, but this is clearly not designed to be a take-that game. It is designed to be strategic, so it should be judged on the soundness of its mechanics subjected to strategy-focused players.

There is another argument for spending ammo when losing, but it was a marginal case that would happen in the rare event that a collision occurred during mission resolution with an ammo-requiring mission on the table that referenced that conflict's location.

Thus the location collision mechanism was both rare and, even when it did happen, strategically uninteresting.

I proposed an alternative system where, instead of simultaneous-action-selection, players would select a location in initiative order. You could only select a location already occupied if you spent an ammo to kick that player out. A player who was kicked out could then either choose a new unoccupied spot, or take an occupied spot (including his or her former one) by spending an ammo himself or herself. The benefits of this change would be:

• The value of ammo is identical to the old system.
• The value of initiative is identical to the old system.
• Collisions are no longer random but through tactical decision making.
• Collisions will be exactly as frequent as players want them to be.
• Even if you have enough ammo to win back a spot, it might be advantageous to switch to an empty spot instead of fighting back because you no longer lose a full round's action by forfeiting.
• Because of the previous point, it is tempting to initiate a fight even if you have less ammo, because the other player might not fight back.

While I liked this suggestion, I realized that the designer might not want to ditch the simultaneous-action-selection. So I suggest that, no matter what, the total number of locations had to be reduced to increase the frequency of collisions.

The designer's other collision mechanism was that each mission card had three missions, one for each faction. This meant that players could be going for two different parts of the same mission card, but whoever had higher initiative would get to do that third of the mission card and the other two thirds would be unavailable.

While this is a good way to accomplish the collision goal, it has the downside of making mission cards full of 15 pieces of information: Status reward, Infamy reward, special effect, and faction icon / location / required goods / faction reward for each of the three factions. Multiply this by three mission cards and there was so much information available that players were overwhelmed.

I ended up suggesting that the designer only have one mission per card to deal with the information overload. However, this would go against the designer's collision goal, so this suggestion was a failure. I still don't know how to square this circle of information overload versus encouraging collisions.

The takeaways from this game are:

• If players don't like a penalty, a good alternative is to reward the opposite behavior.
• Odd auction types make a game interesting, but they also risk players not understanding the subtle strategic differences between auction types.
• If you want players to interact, try to maximize their ability to choose to do so. On the flip side, minimize their chances to avoid interaction.
• Think about how a perfectly rational player will approach a mechanic.
• For playtesters: point out every problem you see, but when making a suggestion to fix it, keep the designer's own goals in mind. Help him or her make the game he or she wants to make.

Response from the designer:

After the testing session in which Michael played, many suggestions were proffered to address concerns I had about Infamy. Although the game seemed uniformly enjoyable by those who played during this session, this information had the clockwork in my brain whirring from the moment I left the meetup. The following is a summary of suggested changes and my verdict after some thorough consideration and testing:

1.) Bribing process: I have tried a few iterations of bidding on contacts. The only one of these that seemed to work consistently, as well as offer that risk vs. reward element I was after, was what Michael pointed out as the "Glum Loser Scenario." On the whole, this was a uniquely polarizing element of my game. The two camps of love and hate made it something I had questioned fixing by means of compromise. In prior tests, no-consequence-bidding where players got back what they put in if they lost proved negligent and far less strategic. On the other hand, the Glum Loser approach was punishing to those who committed too much on a single contact, resulting in two people effectively losing--though one would walk away with a contact.

Although this may seem like an easy fix, I was dead against anything that involved even rudimentary book keeping--no rounding up or down, halfsies, or the like. Michael suggested a great solution: for each bid, the player commits a bribe (this would include raising). The player that wins the bid commits all the bribes (spent, as well as the sum bid) and wins the contact; those that do no win only lose the spent bribes, not the sum bid This was just the answer I was seeking.

2.) Passing during the bribing process: This wasn't so much an issue, and, to be honest, was something I rather liked in terms of making bidding more strategic. Michael suggested that players that pass on a given contact can no longer bid on that contact. This expedites the process, simplifying it, as well as adding a different strategic element: get in or get out.

3.) The Saboteur: One particular contact in the game blows up a mission card before it can be attempted. This mission is not replaced until the end of the phase. This served a few purposes, which I likened to one of those suckerfish that cleans a fish tank:

a.) It is a countermeasure to stop a runaway leader that commits all their bribes to garnering resources. This allows other players to minimize options, as well as potentially control either or both of the victory paths in the game as means to catch up.

b.) I have an alternate end game trigger when a mission would be replaced but can't. This is expedited by this contact, and can potentially be used as a means to secure this specific victory path.

c.) It clears away missions that could not be accomplished because of game state (this is unlikely but COULD happen).

d.) Having less missions in a given turn promotes more collisions.

Admittedly, this contact always seemed lackluster in many situations, often a consolation prize of sorts for those who didn't win a bid on a more substantial contact. OR, he was an engine of spite that seemed almost overpowered. Michael suggested that by replacing the mission immediately with the top mission (which is always visible), this offered another strategic angle: get rid of a mission someone else was after to get one for yourself. In short, I agree with this quite handily.

4.) Encouraging Collision: One of my primary goals with this design was player collision. I loved the idea of mercenaries going after the same objective, totally unaware of one another until that moment when they cross paths. While the level of interaction and collision (a term Michael used that is quite perfect really) is considerable, there could be more.

Michael's estimation was that the collision aspect was much more accidental than designed. At the time of testing, my board had 7 sectors, each of which contained 2 locations. There was a harmony to this, a nice overlap and balance that was quite intentional. But, upon closer examination, the collision could be increased while maintaining the majority of the aforementioned balance by reducing the sectors to 4 in total: one for each of the three factions and a single neutral sector.

The new neutral sector would house a location for each of the four resources. And the factions would now have only a single location (none of them henchmen) and a headquarters. I spoke with Michael about this after the session, and he suggested that the missions ONLY take place in these headquarter locations. I felt this was the extreme opposite of the 7 sector layout, where you could often avoid collisions, now they would be entirely inevitable. I wanted most of the missions to function this way, but not in such a narrow, binary fashion. The real fun of Infamy is in not knowing where someone is headed. This suggestion seemed a bit two-dimensional to me, giving players too few in the way of options.

The last suggestion was to not use simultaneous revealing, and do it based on initiative. This would make the game more of a strategic placement game, as well as fix an ongoing issue I have with the ability of one of my resource tokens: arsenal. Applying this edit to the rules would make the arsenal token much more useful and justified in design, as it currently feels a bit like a wash: I shoot you, you shoot me back, now nothing happens. This was something that I knew I didn't want to do before leaving said session. Despite my fiddly Strategy Cards and players sometimes messing up, on the whole this element works and creates an atmosphere of tension and fun that this deployment that would work akin to Cyclades bidding would not.

Sadly, I still have no solution for the arsenal tokens.

5.) Missions: While Infamy is quite easy to learn, one issue I have noticed is that my mission format can cause quite a bit of what I call "scanning paralysis." Technically, each mission is three: one for each faction. With 2-4 of these on the table (dependent on the number of players), the potential for collisions, and trying to ascertain who is eligible for what combination of missions, the amount of bribes each player has... well, things slowed down for enough players that it gave me pause.

The suggested solution was to have three separate mission decks, one for each faction. Mathematically speaking, this should encourage even more of these collisions, as it vastly reduces the number of variable for players to consider. This would also address another issue Michael pointed out: the current mission format would not allow for varied continuous effects on a single mission without some sort of way to track it as you switched factions during a game.

Michael also suggested that the missions be setup so that the level of difficulty was controlled--currently the missions are randomly dealt, sometimes high value/difficult missions coming out on the very first turn. Furthermore, the way status was awarded could also change: rather than have varied values, a player would be awarded an amount of status equal to the level of mission completed.

I left the session entirely convinced I would make these change, thinking them answers to what seemed precarious issues. However, upon actually working through what this would entail, this proved quite the contrary.

The first problem was the idea of levels. The driving idea about altering the format was to simplify the process and have less options out at any given time, but as I made some proxy missions to test this I hit a few walls:

a.) How would I handle the levels for each faction? Let's say there were 3 levels of difficulty per faction. Would you have a deck out for each, totaling 9 decks? This seemed even worse than the prior format, which was far more condensed. Additionally, it would cause even more scanning paralysis as players tried to plan ahead. Someplayers might attempt a mission in a higher level than they were permitted accidentally, causing a game play hiccup that is hard to reverse in a game where simultaneously revealing occurs.

If the levels of difficulty were not separate decks, then they would be within a single deck. This offered a sloppy set of operations at a glance: a level sat out for people to see, then one player moved on to the next level and this card was beside it? Would they have to dig through the deck to look at the card back until they found the appropriate level they were seeking? This seemed messy and counter-intuitive in execution, and when I tested this with two other players they were much more confused than I had expected.

b.) Levels created less interaction. If one player managed to get to level 2 in one faction, and other players had yet to complete a level 1 for that same faction, they had no direct competition until someone in the same faction caught up to them. This was the antithesis of what I wanted Infamy to be. Furthermore, this would sink players into a single faction, as switching over to catch up would be a protracted process with no guarantee of success.

c.) Separate decks created less interaction. The current mission format represented a single event or task that each faction shared. Separate missions did not have this same thematic strength, nor did they guarantee that players would cross paths--unless I severely reduced the variables to make it happen with absolute certainty. In doing this, I would be sacrificing my objective at creating tension based on potential collision, those "OH SH!#" moments where two or more people go after the same mission or different missions in the same place. Quite simply, this element was fun, and not something I wanted to throw by the wayside. That, and I quite strongly felt that the variable missions popping up made the game more interesting, adding to the replay value.

6.) Status: With the idea of levels came the idea of scaling status to be proportionate with them. I intentionally created two separate scoring paths to have some diversity and promote different strategies. Infamy points were always the abstract victory point element; they did nothing but win you the game once you had enough of them. Status, on the other hand, was intended to be a potential victory path, but one that offered pros and cons. In this way, Status was more powerful, therefore, in my eyes, could fluctuate. Most importantly, players would score varying levels in both of these, giving them room to adapt and start tailoring their designs for victory. Variable point values pushed this a step further. This more structured Status scoring made Infamy points feel irrelevant, as though Status suddenly was the ONLY way to win the game. I didn't like this for a number of other reasons:

a.) It detracted from the theme: a player amassing such a reputation that upon victory they assume the role of a fourth faction that rivaled the other three. Why are these factions so complacent with you working with their bitter rivals?

b.) One scoring path made the game feel less strategic. I quite liked that players were working their way up two different paths early on and then would commit to a strategy once they hit a rhythm. The system was forgiving and pliable in this way.

c.) It would half the pros and cons Status currently provided--granted, I could rescale the scoring to accommodate this, but I always wanted 3-4 missions to give you victory in one way or another.

d.) There was no incentive for players to ever switch factions. Why would a player ever want their second mission to be for a different faction for 1 Status when staying loyal would give them double and put them at 50% victory. This would mean that in a 3 player game, each player would more than likely assume the role of one faction and Euro game their way to a relatively non-interactive victory. In a 4 player game, the two players that ended up in the same faction would have a much more difficult time than being a one-man-wolf-pack.

e.) It gave rise to a feeling of mechanical contradiction in terms of retaining Status for more than one faction. I liked that in my current incarnation, players had to consider the pros and cons of switching sides. Maybe they were after Infamy points so they would take an easier path for a mission, switching factions in the process, and foregoing Status advancement. Some players ping ponging between factions was something I very much wanted to happen throughout a game. I couldn't really imagine this happening if the Status scored cumulatively rather than variably.

7.) Factions: Michael made a comment about how the factions alignment was in fact "fake." I think what he meant by this was I had made the conscious decision to make all the Status advantages symmetrical, meaning that the factions had no inherit difference. Beyond the factions having access to 2 of the 4 resources in their home sectors, they seemed identical. But this is something else with which I disagreed. The flavor of the factions, their identities, and the incentive to be in them, was in the missions. The Cartel are ambivalently after money and quick turnaround for profit, using Compound to grease the wheels; the Conglomerate can't rise above their horrid reputation so they drag their rivals into the muck with information, often sending henchmen to do their bidding, and spending their funds without hesitation; the Militia are extremists of the most violent variety, finding a way to make a gun a necessary part of any mission, desperate for recognition and respect, and quick to light the fuse on a home-made explosive.

The incentives to be in a faction are entirely based on two factors: game state and mission availability/benefit. If two other players are in two of the factions, the last guy in will inevitably join the third to steer clear of competition. If the payout is juicy enough for one faction over the others, it could entice even a Status hungry player to jump ship. This paradigm offers a massive amount of replayability. These elements make Infamy different than the usual fare of FFG-centric games, not predetermined notions that motivate decisions before the game even starts. In doing this, I also have avoided balance issues.

I have in fact tested faction-specific Status advantages, and it proved more complicated and imbalanced than I wanted. Even when I found what seemed to be a balance within this concept, players would not even bother to see what advantages they had, whereas before they were very aware of their pros and cons (because other players shared them).

This is the part where I thank Michael for allowing me to participate in this series, for his tremendous insight, and for offering genuine solutions. It is a rare and wonderful knack in a world where most people just point a stick at what's wrong without offering any notion of an alternative.