As both a libertarian and a fan of strategic nation-building games such as Civilisation and Diplomacy, I am continually annoyed by the assumption that by acting as the government of your people you are somehow causing progress and development. As such, I aim to design a nation-building game in which activity is generally bad for you, but since players are still aiming to take over the world you will need to act at some point in order to win and a certain level of activity is required pretty much throughout in order to avoid being destroyed by other players.
My initial ideas for the project are as follows:
• Each player represents a group of influential citizens within one of a number of tribes, with each player dominating a different tribe. The players can collect Policy cards (on which more later) and they keep track of how much wealth is stored within their tribes’ economies.
• At the beginning of each turn, a player draws a Policy card. Cards would be divided up into eras – Prehistoric, Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Enlightenment, Industrial, and Modern perhaps? Each era would be a separate deck, and over time players would move up through the ages. Progress from one stage to the next would be achieved by drawing a particular Policy card; when a player draws this card, he replaces it in the deck, shuffles it, and from then onwards draws from the next deck up.
• At the end of each turn, a player’s Wealth increases. The more Wealth a player has relative to other players, the faster it will increase: I’m thinking that as a rough scale, all players start with 100 wealth, and increase each turn by (10%, minus 2% for each player with more wealth than them, to a minimum of 2% growth. Fractions are rounded down, but a player will always get at least an increase of 5 each turn).
• During their turn, players may play Policy cards. These would have varying titles and effects, e.g. establishing national health care (modern), anti-union legislation (any time between enlightenment and modern), etc. These will cost Wealth to implement, and in many cases the costs will tend to outweigh the benefits, particularly in the medium to long term; however, there should be a possibility to combine them and create effective combos.
• There would be a board, upon which players could keep military units and the buildings that they create using policy cards. I’m not certain how exactly the board or military system would work, neither of them seems a hugely important detail to begin with. This might be somehow randomly generated, since it would be likely to affect gameplay (e.g. access to certain resources might increase your wealth).
• As a possible tie-breaker if no-one can wipe out enough opponents to claim victory, there could also be a measure of how much you’ve managed to take advantage of your people for personal benefit, with the most corrupt player winning if a certain time or progress limit is reached, e.g. when technology becomes sufficiently advanced or people sufficiently peaceable for anarchism to be a workable system. Alternatively, when a Single World Government is established. Many cards would award Corruption points to a greater or lesser extent, with some such as construction of palaces giving plenty but not doing much else, while for others the corruption might be incidental to the main effect of the card.
• The number of Policy cards in a deck increases as the eras go by; when a Policy is used, it is returned to the bottom of the deck. Some policies would be ongoing; in these cases, the cards would be kept out but there would be several of the card available to be collected.
• Over time policies would tend to become more expensive and far ranging; you can still play cards from bygone eras that you have held on to, but they will be less powerful.
• Players can trade Wealth and cards; these might also be exacted as tribute from militarily inferior neigbours.
This is, of course, a very rough outline of gameplay, but I’d like to hear your thoughts and suggestions. It's probably best to avoid any discussion of the effects of individual Policy cards (in any case, in producing such a game I would aim to include as wide a range of policies from as wide a range of political viewpoints as possible) in order to avoid a flame war, but what do people think of the mechanics of the game? Could anyone provide ideas for a military system or map type that might work well with this?
