Designer Diary: Sidereal Confluence, or A Trade Empires By Any Other Name

Introduction

Sidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant is an oddly-named trading and negotiation game. Chris Cieslik wrote an extremely flattering description of how it plays for its BGG page. More on him later. My friend Doug Hoover describes it as "a competitive game where the player who cooperates the best wins", "the single best trading game", and other unabashed compliments that make me uncomfortable to hear. More on Doug shortly.

In a nutshell, it's a trading game that allows extremely open and flexible deal making. It is also quite asymmetric what with all of the weird aliens; I like aliens. This is the story behind that game.

Inspiration

Like many stories, this one starts with a game of Advanced Civilization.

I was a sophomore in college and ACiv had been out for a decade, which gives a sense of its staying power. For those unfamiliar with it, ACiv is an eight-hour, 3-8 player trading game with a disaster management game wrapped around it and a huge heaping of history wrapped around that.

Having played it, I was a little disappointed that I hadn't designed it and soon set to rectify this lack. I wanted my own eight-hour, 3-8 player trading game, this time wrapped with aliens. I created "Trade Empires" and, well, it crashed and burned in the way that first prototypes almost always do — but between the slow start and the ending that locked up, the middle was actually quite fun, so I made a second version.

Some players play ACiv like a careful negotiation game. They seek to make the majority of the profits from each trade and avoid trading for disasters. We've found that the best strategy is to maximize the number of trades. This gives everyone much greater profits — so much so that we've had to implement house rules to prevent the game from crashing when the leaders purchase every civilization card one turn before the end of the game.

That's what I wanted to capture, not what most players saw in ACiv — a game of civilizations and risky deals — but what Doug and I saw: A game of free and open trade, unimaginable wealth, and unbounded potential.

The original Trade Empires, resplendent with plastic beads and garish graphics

When I first set out to design "Trade Empires" (which would someday become Sidereal Confluence), it was a game created for Doug and me. We both liked huge, long games, so it was designed to be eight hours long and support nine players. Doug hates randomness, so where ACiv (and most trading games) used card draws to generate resources, I had converters that produced the same things every turn. This meant that there was no good way to hide one's resources — but that didn't matter since this was going to be a game about open trading, not haggling from a position of ignorance.

A Decade

The original "Trade Empires" looks nothing like the modern version of Sidereal Confluence. We had a huge, sprawling board. There were combat ships; gunboat diplomacy warped trade in many games. Colonization was more about opening access to trade with other players than improving one's economy. Most technologies had strange rules effects: Cloaking hid ships while Unbreakable Code hid resources, Time Travel and Massive System-Wide Assault Strategy opened up alternate victory conditions, Hyperspace Jump Facilities and Hyperspace Bubble Sharing altered movement rules.

I had all nine species, and they each played very differently. The Faderan started in the center of the map. The Kjasjavikalimm had their military. The Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl used nullspace drives to fly strange paths around the board, colonizing and striking from impossible angles. The Eni Et provided additional hand limit — a bank to store resources between turns. The Zeth ran a protection racket. The Unity could choose which resources they produced each turn. The Im'dril nomads flew their huge fleets about, trading with whoever they were near.

The original board; orange lines are nullspace routes

For ten years, "Trade Empires" was played every few months at RPI's Games Club. Generations of students came and went. With each play, I would tweak one thing or another, refining the balance. My goal was always to make the game more fun for my friends and me; I never thought that it could be made into something publishable someday. After all, it was eight hours long.

During one of these plays, Doug did something I had never seen before in any game. He was playing the Eni Et. They were known to be weak. The fair market price to buy access to their bank was somewhere between the value of a small and a large resource, but with no way to make change, they either lost business by overcharging or lost profits by undercharging. Doug solved this problem by bringing in a bag of plastic coins and floating a currency so that he could make change. He used a whiteboard to track the value of each resource from turn to turn. Since he always honored his currency, Doug managed to get all but one of the players to accept it. In the end, Doug didn't win, but he did get the highest score for the Eni Et to date.

That left me thinking: This was a game that could support something as outlandish as a player floating a currency during play. I wanted to share this not just with my friends, but with everyone. But how could I deal with the insane length of the game?

Reimagining

If there were two ways to do something, I tried all three.

Two hours. If I could bring the game down to two hours, it would be marketable.

To shrink the game, I'd need to tear things out. I started with the board.

Trade Empires 2.0: Looks nicer, but circular icons for square pieces were a terrible idea

The board did a number of things that I didn't want to lose. It created topology for combat and colonization, and it was necessary for several of the species-specific rules. Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl nullspace movement was important, but so was the idea that the Faderan were centrally located and the Nomads could move around the board trading with different people at different times.

Inspired by 7 Wonders, I decided to use seating position as a placeholder for map position. Military and Nomad fleets moved around the board from one seat to the next. Colonies pointed some number of seats right or left to open a trade link. The Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl had an easier time trading with people who were farther from them, and their fleets moved 2-3 seats at a time, but not one. I tore out the old multi-step combat system and introduced a single-step combat system that was more flavorful and involved custom dice.

The game took four hours to play, far too long to show publishers. Still, when I got an invite to Alan Moon's Gathering of Friends, I brought a copy along to show anyone who was curious.

The Gathering

I'm an introvert. Introducing myself to new people makes me extremely uncomfortable. Convincing people I don't know that they should look at a game I've designed makes me want to crawl into a corner and hide. The Gathering is a very large crowd, and at the time I knew almost no one there.

About halfway through the Gathering, I worked up enough courage to set up my game on a table and wait until someone wandered by and expressed interest. Kristin Matherly was that someone. She saw potential in my game, and in turn introduced it to her friend Jacob Davenport. By the time Jacob could play, Kristin was busy, so Doug, Jacob, and I sat down for a three-player game. Jacob played the banking Eni Et and Doug played the militant Kjasjavikalimm. Around turn three, the following exchange happened:

Doug: "Jacob, I'm going to capture one of your colonies."
Jacob: "No, you aren't."
Doug: "I have this huge navy, of course I can."
Jacob: "No, if you do that, I'll never let you have access to my bank."
Doug: "Ah, I think I've misspoken. I'm going to rent one of your colonies. I'll conquer it so that we are close enough to trade with each other, and I'll give you its resource output for the rest of the game in return."

Trade Empires 2.2: Streamlined system for combat, and clearer iconography

That was the moment when Jacob realized that this was no ordinary trading game, but something that would support arbitrarily intricate deals. He happily charged a small fee to accept Doug's offer, and soon created increasingly clever trades that danced with the rules. Suffice it to say, Jacob won that game and nearly every game since then.

Kristin and Jacob are part of a gaming and playtesting group in Maryland. Much of that group was at the Gathering, and they spent most of the rest of the week playing "Trade Empires" with Doug and me. In the end, I gave them my prototype copy so that they could continue playing.

Spielbany

A few months after the Gathering, I had an invite to Spielbany, a local Albany, NY game design and playtesting group. I introduced them to "Trade Empires" to get their opinions. We didn't make it all the way through the first game. The combat system was too complex, there were graphic design and balance problems, and the game was still nearly four hours long.

So, back to the drawing board. I replaced the combat system with the simplest one I could think of: a single closed-fisted bid between the two belligerents (similar to how Dune does it). I removed the last vestiges of position; players now used "attack factories" to initiate combat instead of moving fleets, and everyone could trade with each other the moment the game started. Since the Faderan couldn't be centrally located, I gave them a deck of random Relic Worlds so they'd still have interesting flavor, focusing more on their history as an ancient race than their position on a map.

Since having your colony be conquered wasn't fun, I added rules to allow colonies to produce one last time as they are conquered. The quick influx of resources would reduce the sting of losing a world.

Every few months, I'd show up at Spielbany with a new version. Their feedback remained invaluable throughout the process of developing what became Sidereal Confluence.

Two different solutions to City Worlds before I introduced card flipping

Cthonian

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Life is messy, so it took a few months for Jacob to pick up the game again. When he did, it triggered an immediate flurry of emails, talking about the game's design philosophy and bouncing ideas back and forth.

Jacob's recommendations involved grander changes than I had experimented with before. Remove combat entirely; it's just not fun for the loser. Expand the bid system to include research teams; new players were being overwhelmed by the sheer number of possible technologies to invent: a short bid track would help their focus. Put every converter on a card and have them flip over when certain technologies were invented; this would reduce the table-space the game needed since some technologies would flip cards instead of playing them. That last idea had vast potential, but I should explain City Worlds first:

City Worlds represented the species industrializing their colonies. They allowed each species to develop their economy in a unique direction and were worth victory points. Previously, they had been represented by putting a small card over the colony or with their own card that cost the colony to put into play.

With the idea of card flipping to represent upgrading an economic sector, I now had a much better solution. To represent a City World, I could have one of the player's starting cards flip by spending resources and consuming a colony, producing a victory point as a byproduct. Something which had previously required a half-page of rules and its own step in the turn order became a minor variant of a more general rule without losing any of its impact.

This is the magnitude of refinements that Jacob's advice inspired.

But these changes were also scary. They meant losing combat and the last remnants of position. It felt like I was losing too many of the hooks that supported interesting trades. The exchange between Jacob and Doug where the Kjasjavikalimm rented a world could take place only in a game in which colonies were traded through combat and players could make deals with each other only if their colonies made contact. Would these changes be worth the loss of intricacy?

Quote:

Pegasid planet — A "hot jupiter"; a gas giant
close to its star and inflated from the heat.

Cthonian planet — The solid core of a gas giant
after its atmosphere has been stripped off
due to being too close to its star.

I didn't know, and my friends were skeptical, so I forked the project. The old combat and position version was named "Pegasid", and the new stripped down version became "Cthonian".

Cthonian's changes were so drastic that some of the species had to change focus. The Kjasjavikalimm's core strength couldn't be military in a game without war, so they became empire builders with an insatiable need for colonies. I tore out the concept of hand limit (which restricted the number of resources a player could hold between turns), so the Eni Et banks had to become entirely about the interest they offered. To make that work without having the Eni Et focus inward, I needed to keep them from using their powerful interest converters themselves, trading them only to others. Previously, the Zeth needed protection from other players attacking their colonies in retribution to theft. In several different versions of the game they had a "cross-colonizing" ability that allowed them to hide behind someone else's planets. Now, without combat, the Zeth could colonize normally (saving rules complexity). Their "cross-colonization" morphed into "Envoys", a means to spread around vulnerability while offering enough resources to the victim that it'd be worth it for the other players to bid for the opportunity to be more vulnerable to the Zeth.

Trade Empires 3.1: Cthonian — species tiles have been replaced with a set of cards

Quote:

In the middle of Cthonian, I accidentally designed an RPG in the
"Trade Empires"/Sidereal Confluence setting. I used it to flesh out
the culture of each of the species, which was good for naming
and illustrating the cards. On the other hand, it meant that I am
now overly-attached to the game's setting — never a good thing.

Ultimately, there were some failed experiments. I tried converters that could run multiple times in a turn, which was too complex and made the balance equations dangerously finicky. At the behest of Spielbany, I tried several different ways to turn leftover resources at the end of the game into victory points. The first were technologies that added additional end-game scoring once invented, then a card that could be filled with resources at the end of the game to grant just a few points. Much later, I would settle on the simplest option: Leftover resources became points at a poor rate.

Cthonian streamlined play, simplified away numerous special-case rules, and in the end managed to shorten the game to 2.5 hours. In the end, "Cthonian" was so successful that I didn't bother updating the "Pegasid" branch at all. "Cthonian" was "Trade Empires".

Seven Resources

A year had passed since the previous Gathering of Friends, so it was time for me to bring the newest version to show Jacob's crowd. He brought his own version, with his own experiments. We played a few games, and Jacob told me something that I really didn't want to hear: The game had too many types of resources. Reduce it from ten to seven, and it would become much tighter. Unfortunately, re-balancing the game after such a huge overhaul would take over a week of full-time work. Every single converter would need to be changed, and I'd need to re-do the balance equations almost from scratch. Worse, there was no way to be sure that reducing the number of resources was a good idea until I could test a fully-balanced version of the seven resource game. Either leave the game as it was, or spend those weeks in the hope that I wasn't wasting my time with a design dead-end.

I listen when my playtesters tell me that I need to change something, especially those playtesters that have repeatedly demonstrated a deep understanding of the game.

Quote:

The game has always been balanced for three players. The box says
4-9 because the three-player game is extremely cutthroat.

Two of the nine species (Unity and Yengii) consume all resources equally; that leaves seven species that don't. The combination of seven resources and seven species that need them has some interesting properties. There's an arrangement in which each species consumes three of seven resources, each resource is consumed by three of seven species, and any pair of species overlaps consumption at exactly one resource. This fixes a problem with the three-player game: extreme resource imbalance between the species. If, in a three-player game, one species had no competition for any of their resources, they'd win; a species in which every resource was competed over would lose. But with this new dynamic, I could ensure that each species had exactly the same amount of competition as the others, especially in low-player count games where this was the biggest problem. Some resources would be over-produced, others over-consumed, but everyone in the game would feel the impact equally, keeping the game balanced.

The seven species and the resources they consume; I printed this 7x7 arrangement in the background of the

Unity copy of Clinical Immortality since it also has the property of having a Hamming distance of four

The new spreadsheet accounted for things that I hadn't bothered to model before, such as how frequently a player was expected to be able to run a converter. Better equations allowed me to balance the technology costs over time much more precisely, giving me better control over the game's arc of development and its steadily escalating emotional impact.

When balancing asymmetric games, there's something often overlooked: the effect of two factions on each other's balance. The Kjasjavikalimm have an insatiable demand for colonies; the Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl can supply cheap nullspace colonies. This is a synergy that makes the two species stronger when they're in the same game, and weaker otherwise. When I switched to seven resources, I also changed the costs of everything. Now, both the Kt' and the Kjas would use yellow (power) resources for their expansion; they can cooperate by trading colonies but must compete for the resources needed to play and use them. This resolves the synergy.

While I was making the seven core resources, I also introduced Unity wild resources. Previously they produced whatever they wanted, but now their resources stayed wild even after trading other players. Wild resources became much more valuable, allowing me to further focus their economy toward ludicrous flexibility and away from actual productivity.

Trade Empires 4.1: Seven resource types

Quote:

By this point, I had been working on the game full time for months.
I took a week long break to create a two-player wargame in the
"what-if" scenario where the Faderan don't start the Confluence and
the Kt'Zr'Kt'Rtl and Kjasjavikalimm fight over dominance of the
galaxy. This is where the fleet art for the Im'dril came from.

Finally, I shortened the game by removing the first four-and-a-half turns! Every player now starts with a pile of resources, representing what they could have produced over that time. This avoids new players making a mistake on their first or second turn and costing themselves the game before they have a chance to understand what they are doing. It also — finally — brought the game down to a little over two hours.

After a flurry of refinement and tweaking, the game was finally ready for publication.

The Extra Year

For those unfamiliar with tabletop game publishing, it's a slow process. Publishers are inundated with far too many games, so it takes forever to review all of them. From their perspective, I'm an unproven first-time game designer, so there's no reason to fast-track my game. Suffice it to say that the first round of talking to publishers didn't result in any interest in the game, so a year later I tried again with WizKids and Asmadi Games. In the meantime, I found myself with an extra year of development on a game that I considered to be complete.

This extra time lead to a number of major refinements, the biggest of which was the phase order. Previously, the phase order was Trade-Bid-Research-Economy-(Zeth Steal). Players would trade for resources to run their economy, but also to invent technologies, and they'd trade for ships to bid with. Then, they'd bid for the research team of the technology they wanted to invent, pay for it, and get the benefits during the economy phase. This had some unfortunate consequences. Players could collect all the resources to invent something, then fail the bid for the research team, wasting that turn's efforts — or a player could prepare to run a converter someone else was about to invent, only to have them decide not to invent it at the last moment.

Chris Cieslik from Asmadi Games very much enjoyed "Trade Empires". He wasn't part of my first round of publishers, but he got a prototype copy and sent me useful feedback anyway. His big recommendation was to change the phase order to Bid-Trade-Economy-(Zeth Steal) and combine technology Research into the Trade phase. This let me streamline numerous timing rules. More importantly, players didn't need to plan for anything that wasn't physically in front of them. If a player didn't win a bid for a research team, they could always get a different one and trade for the resources to invent that. No longer would a player's turn be wasted by a bad bid.

Spielbany discovered a problem with this order when it comes to teaching the game. New players would need to start the game in the Bid Phase. In order to bid well, they'd need to understand the full consequences of everything they were bidding on (colonies and research teams), and that meant understanding every rule of the game and their full implications before starting the first turn. Most players couldn't hold that all in their head without having seen the game be played, so new player's initial bids could be bad enough to put them in an untenable position for the rest of the game.

I fixed that by simulating the first turn's bid. Instead of starting with a Bid Phase, players would start with random colonies and research teams and with fewer ships, as if they had just finished a Bid Phase. Certainly, that randomness meant that some players might have a research team or colony they didn't particularly like, but they could always trade it with someone else. Since the first Bid Phase was simulated, I rotated the turn boundary up one phase, making the phase order Trade-Economy-Bid-(Zeth Steal). Now, the game would start immediately in the Trade Phase, and all the players needed to understand was how their economies worked and that they'd need ships to bid later. By the time the players reached the first real Bid Phase, they had a good sense of the entire game loop and could safely judge the value of the things on which they were bidding. It did mean that the last turn of the game was abbreviated; there's no reason to bid at the end of the game, so that's skipped. But a shorter last turn means a shorter game, so that's not really a bad thing.

Trade Empires 4.3.6: The final version before publication

This extra year included a slew of minor refinements: balance tweaks to the Unity and Eni Et, plus lots of graphical improvements. To streamline thinking about the game, I added text under each converter telling the player how valuable it is to run, and the lower-right corner of each card now showed the benefits gained from flipping that card. A "donation good" box was added to the player aid to make it more obvious which resources needed to be traded or given away.

Finally, I finished the "doodles", the line art hidden in the background of each card illustrating the technology, culture, or economic sector that card represented.

Publishing

The second attempt to get a publisher was much more successful. Chris Cieslik was interested, but wanted to see how well the game did in practice. He gave me a table in his room at Gen Con 2016, and I ran demonstrations constantly for three days.

The responses far exceeded either of our expectations. They included quotes like "this is the best thing at Gen Con this year", with people coming back to play multiple times and bringing their friends.

After that, both Chris and Zev Shlasinger from WizKids wanted to publish the game. I ended up going with WizKids as they have a larger distribution, but I truly wish that I could have accepted both offers.

The actual publication process didn't involve much in the way of game design; the game was a year beyond finished and had achieved a level of polish that I simply couldn't improve. The only major change was the name. Zev correctly pointed out that "Trade Empires" was uninteresting (aside from several existing games having the same name). I heartily agreed; I'd been trying to come up with a better name for years with no luck. We sat down and brainstormed something that (a) sounded interesting, (b) got the science-fiction and cooperative competition feels across, and (c) felt like something the Faderan would actually name the setting. Sidereal Confluence is certainly a weird name, but it makes internet searches easy.

The actual process of developing a game for printing is involved, but most of the work was done by people other than me. Unfortunately I used CorelDRAW to do all of my design work, which is incompatible with the Adobe industry standards, so the graphic designer had to create everything from scratch. Added to that, there's no standard form factor in any of the cards, so most of the techniques to reduce the graphic designer's workload simply don't apply to Sidereal Confluence. That is something I'm going to have to fix before I get another game published...

We expected the illustrations to have more problems. I had an overly-fleshed out setting (from the RPG I had put together two years earlier) with perhaps too much thought into what the aliens looked and behaved like. For each species, I ended up giving the artist three to four pages of sample art and descriptions, and I found examples of texture and color. To my amazement, Nakarin Sukontakorn managed to capture them perfectly in his first try.

From there, things have moved beyond me. The game was manufactured in China (I helped with color proofs during the Gathering in 2017), demonstrated at the 2017 Origins Game Fair (I very much enjoyed showing it off), and should be on the market within a week of this writing.

I don't know what the next chapter of this story will be. Maybe I'll finish that two-player wargame in the dark version of the Sidereal setting. All I need to do is refine the design so that it's not eight hours long...

TauCeti Deichmann

Sidereal Confluence in all its glory