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Introduction
I walked over to see what game Kristin Matherly was playing at the Gathering of Friends. She said, "Sit down, you need to play this." She introduced me to TauCeti and Doug, and TauCeti taught me this negotiation game called "Trade Empires". Wait, did you say "negotiation game"?
Like many gamers, my first non-kid board game was Monopoly. Monopoly is a terrible game in which the first thirty minutes are spent rolling the dice and buying every property you land on. Then you have five minutes of negotiating to get color sets that you can build on, and then two hours of rolling the dice to see who wins. I loved the five minutes of negotiating, and if I could get a game which was all negotiating, I was there. Kristin knew this.
Kristin wisely gave me the bankers (Eni Et) on my first game. I took to it immediately and saw the essence of the game, even if it wasn't perfectly presented. In that first game, I noted two rules I didn't like and I subverted them immediately. TauCeti had this rule that you could not negotiate with a player you were not "connected" to, and sometimes I was the connection between two players. I could have demanded tribute on each deal they made through me, but I didn't like the connection rule and suspected I'd want to avoid a tariff on myself in this game or others, so I imposed no tariff at all.
TauCeti also had combat in the game, and when Doug decided to attack me to steal a colony, I told him I'd not make any deals at all with him for the rest of the game if he did attack.
"You're just saying that. You'll make deals with me later", hoped Doug.
"No, he's not bluffing", said Kristin.
Thus, no combat. Even in this first game, I was focused on what I wanted from "Trade Empires": constant negotiation with all players.
I think I won that game. It was awesomely fun.
Second Game
Kristin and Doug and TauCeti had just finished playing "Trade Empires" when I spotted them. I was disappointed that I had missed it, but they were willing to play again. I think we started at 11:00 p.m. and finished at 3:00 a.m. Nobody was tired.
This time I asked for a race completely different from the bankers and was given the mob (Zeth Anocracy). I didn't need to be told that I was to bully and intimidate the players into giving me free stuff to avoid my attacks. I think I won that game, by a lot.
The next day, TauCeti was headed home, and I went over to talk to him. I was prepared to ask for files so that I could print my own copy of his game, but secretly hoped he'd give me his prototype. He did the latter, and I was very pleased.
Playing in Maryland
After lots of emails with TauCeti about rules questions, I finally put together a group of people to play this game. I'm well aware that negotiating games are not everyone's favorite, but people were willing to humor me. They were fun games, which led to more rules questions and suggestions, but I was worried that the nine races you could play were not balanced. I mean, I lost my third game — to a 14-year-old. Can you imagine me losing?
What quickly became apparent to me was that TauCeti was a game designer willing to try out my outlandish suggestions. That is startling. Most game designers don't want to mess with their baby and are not really interested in suggestions from playtesters, and many game designers realize that playtester suggestions usually point to a problem, but the suggestion itself is terrible. But TauCeti was open-minded and enjoyed talking game design as much as I did, so hundreds of emails went back and forth between us about "Trade Empires".
Simulation
I decided to figure out whether the races were actually balanced, but with nine races and so many combinations of three to seven players, it would not be possible to play enough games to know. Thus, I wrote a computer program to play the game for me. To simulate trades, my program would randomly generate thousands of possible trades, and each race would evaluate whether it liked the trade or not. If both sides agreed, the trade happened. This well simulated human players. Simulating combat was important, and decisions about which research to go after or which colonies to take were easier. My program could play a complete game in about one-tenth of a second.
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For several weeks, I'd set the computer to simulate all possible games a hundred times. It would take all day, and when I got home from work, I'd load the results into a spreadsheet to see which race was doing too well and which was getting crushed. Sometimes I'd just change my program to play better, and often I'd make a tiny change to a race to bring it back in line, then I'd set the program to run overnight and I'd wake up in the morning to check it again. Checking twice each day to see how the simulations went, I had all the data I needed.
Every time TauCeti updated his rules, I updated my program and ran it over and over. I sent him many spreadsheets with long discussions about the tiny tweaks I made.
Massive Changes
After a six-player game with some friends, all of whom are good game designers, we made some radical suggestions.
We officially came out against combat. Players did not use it to go after the winner; they just went for targets of opportunity. That was officially No Fun™ and we wanted it out. We suggested instead that some ships be for colonizing, others for research.
We suggested that each race not have a board, but instead a small deck of factories, and that factories can be flipped over to the improved side with some inventions. We suggested those factories can be traded, but must be returned after each turn.
And TauCeti listened to us and seriously considered all our changes. Unheard of! He essentially accepted all those changes, and adjusted the rest of the game to fit. This man is open-minded in a way I can only hope to be.
Simulation, Again
These changes required rewriting my simulation software from scratch. Every few days I'd send TauCeti a new spreadsheet and lengthy commentary about how to change the cards to work. It's amazing that I managed to squeeze in work, sleep, and eating with all the effort I was putting into "Trade Empires".
I even wrote a separate program that would take the set of cards and create PDF documents with them, ready to be sent to a professional printer. I had at least four full sets of the game printed, which at several hundred cards was a lot of printing.
Less is More
Time and again in game design, the best final product takes the good original idea of a game and strips out everything that gets in the way or is unnecessary. The final game: no hand limit of pieces, all players can trade with any other player from the beginning, one kind of ship, no two-way factories, no multi-choice factories, no points for colonies, only two kinds of factories at all (white for economic engine and purple for upgrades), and no damn combat. Just two hours or so of glorious negotiation.
How I Play
I have a confession. I love games because I love systems. I want to see systems work well, and while I also enjoy pitting my wits against others, in "Trade Empires" — now called Sidereal Confluence — I have a different goal. I want all the systems to work brilliantly. I don't want any resources to sit idle; I want them to be used as efficiently as possible, including those resources owned by opponents. My scores are regularly over 60 points, but I feel great if I can get everyone else's scores just as high. As Doug says, "Trade Empires" rewards the player who cooperates the most. If I play poker with you, I'm going to con you out of your money. If I play Sidereal Confluence with you, I'm going to offer you a fair deal, and I'm going to work with a third player to get just a bit more out of that cool factory that a fourth player has, giving us all a tiny bit more resources to work with.
Unless I'm playing the Zeth Anocracy. Then you are screwed.
Jacob Davenport
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