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While creating Mysterious Locations, I had come up with about twenty locations I wanted to test. For me, as in all design, it is critical that pieces in my games not only make sense and work mechanically, but that whenever possible the theme they represent is tightly tied to how they work. For example, whoever controls The Bermuda Triangle in Mysterious Locations can make one card disappear, removing it from play for the hand. One of the twenty test locations was Chichen Itza, which for those not in the know is where the most famous of the crystal skulls were found. The way I envisioned the location working was the following: When Chichen Itza was in the game, a number of Crystal Skull artifact cards were added to the deck based on the number of players. The person drawing a Crystal Skull would be able to get any card they wanted out of the draw deck by playing it, but after they used it, they would hand the card to the owner of Chichen Itza, who could then use it on a later turn.
While playtesting, I fell in love with Chichen Itza and its Crystal Skull artifacts. This lead me down the path of brainstorming what other strange artifacts I come up with and what powers I would associate with them, things not that well known like the Kecksburg Object or the Voynich Manuscript as well as more commonly known strange/cursed artifacts such as the Hope Diamond. This spiraled out of control to the point where I removed Chichen Itza because I felt the entire artifact idea could easily be its own expansion. Mysterious Locations was successful, and though I did not immediately return to the artifacts, I instead did a direct sale expansion that added a fifth player to Legends and Lies called Headlines and Hoaxes.
It's not unusual for me to have several game ideas going at once, so I started developing another expansion for Legends and Lies along with the artifacts expansion idea. As with all my games, I spent a good deal of time researching, so this meant reading up on all the various strange artifacts — both real and imagined — that I thought would work well for the expansion I had envisioned. This is always a fun part of the design process and not surprisingly this little project spiraled even further off course to the point where it was clear that what I was working on was more than an expansion; it was its own game.
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Once it was decided to make the strange artifacts their own game, I needed a theme that would work with it. My husband Nick (author of Looting Atlantis) and I brainstormed a bit, and it was not too long before I suggested and we settled on the world of conspiracy theories. As a theme, conspiracy theories are not often seen, and this choice not only fit, but it also allowed me to carry over what I think is the coolest mechanism from Legends and Lies: discrediting.
Discrediting, as far as I know, is a mechanism that I actually came up with. The way it works in both games is that at the end of each hand, the person who went out picks up the discard pile — the "Tabloids" in this game because it represents old tabloid newspapers such as Weekly World News — and "reads" the tabloids. Every "story" (card) in the tabloids that matches a conspiracy that a player is trying to "prove" discredits that conspiracy, thereby causing the person with the most cards in that conspiracy to lose a card from it. Discrediting is important because after the tabloids have been read, any conspiracy that still has ten or more points revealed scores double for any player that has it in front of them. Discrediting is, if I do say so myself, an interesting mechanism that gives both games a unique way to interact with the other players.
With a plan in place, Nick looked at a way to change and streamline how the suits were going to be laid out in Conspiracy! as opposed to Legends and Lies. In L&L, suits could have different numbers of cards in them, which made explaining the game more difficult than it should have been and in hindsight added an unneeded level of complication. We agreed on five cards for every conspiracy, along with one "Proof!" card.
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To keep it simple and streamlined, I limited the abilities that a given conspiracy could have to three categories: one-shot effects that would happen only when a conspiracy was revealed or strengthened (added to), continuous effects that grant you something as long as you have them in play, and scoring effects that matter only during the scoring phase.
Once the conspiracies were done and the action cards added, the artifacts were mixed in and we were ready to go. Since the original concept for the artifacts involved a player location, that was not going to work. These artifacts were built to be extremely powerful game-changing type cards, so I did not want them as random deck draws for the obvious reason. They had powers such as allowing a player an additional turn at the end of the round or having them reveal a conspiracy with two cards rather than three.
What was settled on was an auction mechanism, but I didn't want to add another element to the game as some form of currency, so instead I proposed that when an artifact was drawn, players could bid how many cards they would be willing to draw in addition to taking the artifact card. Since cards in your hand count against you at the end of the hand and you're restricted in how much you can play on a given turn, my thinking was that people would shy away from bidding too many cards. In practice, however, this turned out not to be true; no matter what kind of restrictions were placed on bidding or how the bidding worked, it turned out more often than not to result in large bids. Even though the cards counted against the player at the end of the hand and they always ended up with cards left, what they could get out of the artifact more than made up for this penalty.
Once the artifacts were removed, the game worked flawlessly, which was confirmed by our various playtesters. It was amazing how perfectly the game worked at that point, and it was clearly our desire to insert artifacts into the game that had been holding us back. (Don't worry about the artifacts, though. We haven't totally given up on them yet and will soon be testing another game designed to work with a new bidding mechanism.)
That is the official story of how Conspiracy! came to be. I could go on and on about the selection process and mechanisms of each conspiracy, my love for inserting Easter eggs into my games, and how the Reptilian Overlords were indispensable in the design process — All Hail the Reptilian Overlords — but I'll save that for another day.
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