Player interaction in a deck builder board game

Hey, that's great. I haven't seen this site before but it's fantastic. When I was first working on the game I'd done a lot of research into the largest and most well-known tribes in the U.S. I'm glad you found this one. It might give me a few more ideas along the lines of using the totems.

After doing some reading, I think I might try and use the totems as a means to unlock blueprints. It would be something like you're using a totem to unlock the mysteries of your clan's ancestry. Somehow I need to incorporate the totems, animals, the coup stick, the chaos, harmony and coup all in 1 so they play off each other. I'm thinking that maybe there's a whole chain effect that you are trying to link.

Maybe there's a ceck of totem cards and you draw a card. If you like the path you need to take then you're set on that path. You have to first build a specific totem (hawk). You need to first draw a blueprint for a coup stick so you can start accumulating coup: think of coup as bonus points that you can help "buy" things when you're short on chaos or harmony. You can take your 2 points of coup and add it to your chaos card in battle to overcome the other player. That player might have 3 coup that can use for a counterattack. Anyway, you build the coup stick. You also need to build a knife from bone and wood or metal and wood. Then you can build a tomahawk from wood metal and pelt. Now you need the proper animal card, lumber, and your tomahawk and congrats you have your first totem pole. Somehow that unlocks a piece of your ancestry giving you some kind of skill and allows you to build the next totem. You can have as many totems on the board at once but when you look at your totem path you cannot build totem #4 before #3. Also, if one of the other players or AI comes and burns down your totem (with fire arrows) then you must rebuild that totem somewhere before continuing down that pathway. Perhaps the objective is to completely unlock your ancestry by building all 5 or 7 totems or whatever it is.

This is when player alliances come in handy. If one of your enemies has 6 totems and you and another player only have 2 and 3 you can "team up" against that player. It would be a nonverbal agreement between the players so it's not a lasting alliance. You two would just head in the other player's direction and try to destroy some of all of their totems. That third player that is about to be attacked might start putting their focus on drawing from the AI deck in hopes that one of the AI cards is a temporary defense card. (maybe some of the cards say something like "if an enemy player is within 2 territories of land you own then spawn 3 AI warriors on 1 empty territory nearest yours"). Then that player would try to draw another AI card and hopes it is "Choose an AI and they will attack with 5 chaos to any northern territory". An AI deck like this could be part of your strategy but it is completely random and you never know what you are going to draw. In my opinion that would be very nerve-wracking or at least create more tension every turn.

What do you think?

Thanks for the comments mate. I appreciate all the time you take. I like your idea of using the totems as a checkpoint. I don't really want the game to be elimination either. It's always a possibility to add a second scenario so players can do that if that's how they prefer.

I was really trying to say you had to have "several" totems to win the game, not 1 big one that has been upgraded. You'd have like 5 totems to win and the other players could burn it down to slow down your victory. You'd have to rebuild that totem and complete any others to win. I could see how in just a few turns you could go from leading to last place if all your totems are burned down though. The checkpoint idea might work better, and I like players not being able to conquer that space any longer.

That is interesting. I wanted to do several animals per totems originally without it become over-complicated.