It’s a competitive multipolar game, like Eclipse or Root or so many others, in which your faction grows more powerful, acquires various abilities/resources/territories/armies/etc., triggers various cool combos, etc. Tends to snowball, as most such games will by default unless they have strong catchup mechanics.
In this game, the catchup mechanic—the thing preventing the game from quickly snowballing—is a collection of devil’s bargains available to the players. E.g. you can hire mercenaries instantly to help you win an upcoming fight, but then you have to pay them henceforth or else they’ll turn on you. Or you can do some black magic voodoo thing to get a permanent resource bonus but also, this runs some risk of later destroying the environment. Etc.
Also, in this game, it is possible for all players to lose. Only one can win, but all can lose. And many of these catchup mechanics basically increase the aggregate probability of this happening, e.g. they defeat the runaway snowball but make it more difficult for anyone to win in the end.
The game would be balanced so that while individual players winning sometimes happens (and perhaps even is more likely than not) the modal outcome is everyone losing due to the race to the bottom effect.
(I’m told that the game ARCS is somewhat like this in its campaign variant. This may have inspired the idea in fact. That, and AI risk obviously.)
You get something like this with competitive multiplayer commander in Magic. As your resources (mana) increase each turn, your ability to win the game grows exponentially, while your ability to restrict what other players are doing grows linearly. The reason this happens is because there are powerful combos available that allow one player to instantly defeat the other three players, and that your interaction (answers to other player’s combos) typically only stops one player at a time. On the face of it, it’s better to spend two mana tutoring your win condition instead of two mana stopping one other player, because stopping the other player puts you both behind relative to the other two people who are sitting at the table. On the other hand, winning the game stops everyone else!
As a result, the people who tend to win are those who attempt to combo off after someone else already has, because the other players have wasted their resources on stopping the initial threat and don’t have the mana left to interact with them.
While competitive commander doesn’t have the same lose condition you’re describing, this resource problem encourages a lot of bad Molochian behavior from a fun perspective. For example, you’re strongly encouraged to lie about not having answers and forcing other people to pay the cost to interact (usually through something called priority bullying), in order to get ahead. You’re also incentivized to misrepresent the severity of threats, so that people are less likely to interact with you and more likely to interact with your opponents. Depending on how much you want to push social boundries, you can also do things like commit to deals and then break them the moment it wins you the game, burning your immediate political capital for victory right now at the long term cost of distrust in every future game you play with the same people.
Another, rarer example of a molochian strategy is to force your opponents to play through an entire combo. Some combos can be extremely long and convoluted (usually because they’re the non-deterministic kind, Kraak forcing people to flip dozens of coins is a favorite example), so people will usually end the game to keep on playing something else once the see the opponent get enough resources that them winning is very likely. But occasionally, you’ll get players who want to see the entire thing executed by hand, in order for them to provide that it’s possible. This can happen because it’s RNG dependent (maybe all 15 coinflips end up tails and you fizzle), or because the comboing player is bluffing and doesn’t actually have a win condition. 95% of the time, the result of this is that everyone at the table gets to wait an extra 20 minutes for the match to end in the outcome of the guy winning (because they’ve already generated so many resources), and 5% of the time you find out that they were lying and trying to scare everyone else into conceeding because they don’t have an actual win condition.
TLDR: In CeDH, or competitive commander for Magic, the best strategies for winning are often a race to the bottom in terms of the amount of fun that people have with the game. Because there’s an incentive for lying to other players and getting them to waste their resources, players who pursue socially toxic strategies that drive people not to play again end up winning more.
The only magic format that I found consistently fun was draft. I think the game is just not very well optimized for expected fun. Like, you have to carefully balance LANDS with your real cards, and most of the lands are nearly forced to be boring, and even if you get the balance right sometimes you don’t get to place because the lands don’t come up. I guess this is partially a skill issue but I played for years and this happened to me and all of my usual opponents regularly as far as I remember. Why would you design a game so that you can get unlucky and not get to play, like, at all? And then on top of that often someone just gets a wild combo and stomps and it’s not fun to get stomped and it’s not that fun to stump either.
I also love draft, although I prefer to curate it myself. I like that it tests all of the skills of magic, including drafting, deck building, and piloting on the fly.
For example, this is a synergy cube I created a few months back. The overview page has examples of decks that emerge naturally while drafting certain synergies, although there are plenty more for someone creative to find. I think you’d like this sort of experience, because none of these cards wins individually, and the mana curve is so low that your threats will very rarely end up bottlenecked by land drops.
If I am playing against a stronger player, do I have an incentive to be or not to be omnicidal? Is “everyone loses” preferable to “I win with probability 10% and lose with probability 90%”?
I think your idea is that “everyone dies” is an outcome that is possible but everyone wants to avoid, but is it true?
I guess that the dynamics of the game would depend on how relatively expensive is it to build a doom device—something that reliably kills everyone, including you. (Can I borrow zillion dollars from Satan, build zillion robots and kill everyone, and the next turn Satan takes me because I am unable to pay back? Or is my capacity to make such deal limited by my current resources, so if I get poor, even my capacity to make deals with Satan is limited enough to make me harmless.)
There is no intrinsic incentive to use the doom device, but there is also no intrinsic incentive to not use it when your loss is guaranteed. So it would be used for blackmail: “don’t create a situation where my loss is guaranteed, or I will use the doom device”. Given that only one player can win, if two of them build such device, they are stuck. (They could possibly negotiate to destroy both their devices.)
This again depends on how predictable the situation is. Whether it is something like “you have 10x more resources than me, you are virtually guaranteed to win” (so I know when to use the doom device) or like “you can win by a surprise, such as using a resource I don’t know that you have, or by a random outcome, such as having a spell that wins the game depending on a coin flip” (so I am never sure whether this is the moment to use the doom device until it is too late).
tl;dr—I think the dynamics would depend a lot on implementation details
Right, we wouldn’t want it to be possible to easily build doom devices. Good point.
I think the right balance would be something like “If player 1 is snowballing and invading player 2, player 2 can sell their soul to get a decent chance of defending against player 1 and a small chance of outright turning the tide and beating them, but even if they maximally sell their soul they still might lose, and if they push Player 1 too much then player 1 probably has a chance to retaliate by selling THEIR soul...”
High-level idea for board or computer game:
It’s a competitive multipolar game, like Eclipse or Root or so many others, in which your faction grows more powerful, acquires various abilities/resources/territories/armies/etc., triggers various cool combos, etc. Tends to snowball, as most such games will by default unless they have strong catchup mechanics.
In this game, the catchup mechanic—the thing preventing the game from quickly snowballing—is a collection of devil’s bargains available to the players. E.g. you can hire mercenaries instantly to help you win an upcoming fight, but then you have to pay them henceforth or else they’ll turn on you. Or you can do some black magic voodoo thing to get a permanent resource bonus but also, this runs some risk of later destroying the environment. Etc.
Also, in this game, it is possible for all players to lose. Only one can win, but all can lose. And many of these catchup mechanics basically increase the aggregate probability of this happening, e.g. they defeat the runaway snowball but make it more difficult for anyone to win in the end.
The game would be balanced so that while individual players winning sometimes happens (and perhaps even is more likely than not) the modal outcome is everyone losing due to the race to the bottom effect.
(I’m told that the game ARCS is somewhat like this in its campaign variant. This may have inspired the idea in fact. That, and AI risk obviously.)
You get something like this with competitive multiplayer commander in Magic. As your resources (mana) increase each turn, your ability to win the game grows exponentially, while your ability to restrict what other players are doing grows linearly. The reason this happens is because there are powerful combos available that allow one player to instantly defeat the other three players, and that your interaction (answers to other player’s combos) typically only stops one player at a time. On the face of it, it’s better to spend two mana tutoring your win condition instead of two mana stopping one other player, because stopping the other player puts you both behind relative to the other two people who are sitting at the table. On the other hand, winning the game stops everyone else!
As a result, the people who tend to win are those who attempt to combo off after someone else already has, because the other players have wasted their resources on stopping the initial threat and don’t have the mana left to interact with them.
While competitive commander doesn’t have the same lose condition you’re describing, this resource problem encourages a lot of bad Molochian behavior from a fun perspective. For example, you’re strongly encouraged to lie about not having answers and forcing other people to pay the cost to interact (usually through something called priority bullying), in order to get ahead. You’re also incentivized to misrepresent the severity of threats, so that people are less likely to interact with you and more likely to interact with your opponents. Depending on how much you want to push social boundries, you can also do things like commit to deals and then break them the moment it wins you the game, burning your immediate political capital for victory right now at the long term cost of distrust in every future game you play with the same people.
Another, rarer example of a molochian strategy is to force your opponents to play through an entire combo. Some combos can be extremely long and convoluted (usually because they’re the non-deterministic kind, Kraak forcing people to flip dozens of coins is a favorite example), so people will usually end the game to keep on playing something else once the see the opponent get enough resources that them winning is very likely. But occasionally, you’ll get players who want to see the entire thing executed by hand, in order for them to provide that it’s possible. This can happen because it’s RNG dependent (maybe all 15 coinflips end up tails and you fizzle), or because the comboing player is bluffing and doesn’t actually have a win condition. 95% of the time, the result of this is that everyone at the table gets to wait an extra 20 minutes for the match to end in the outcome of the guy winning (because they’ve already generated so many resources), and 5% of the time you find out that they were lying and trying to scare everyone else into conceeding because they don’t have an actual win condition.
TLDR: In CeDH, or competitive commander for Magic, the best strategies for winning are often a race to the bottom in terms of the amount of fun that people have with the game. Because there’s an incentive for lying to other players and getting them to waste their resources, players who pursue socially toxic strategies that drive people not to play again end up winning more.
The only magic format that I found consistently fun was draft. I think the game is just not very well optimized for expected fun. Like, you have to carefully balance LANDS with your real cards, and most of the lands are nearly forced to be boring, and even if you get the balance right sometimes you don’t get to place because the lands don’t come up. I guess this is partially a skill issue but I played for years and this happened to me and all of my usual opponents regularly as far as I remember. Why would you design a game so that you can get unlucky and not get to play, like, at all? And then on top of that often someone just gets a wild combo and stomps and it’s not fun to get stomped and it’s not that fun to stump either.
I also love draft, although I prefer to curate it myself. I like that it tests all of the skills of magic, including drafting, deck building, and piloting on the fly.
For example, this is a synergy cube I created a few months back. The overview page has examples of decks that emerge naturally while drafting certain synergies, although there are plenty more for someone creative to find. I think you’d like this sort of experience, because none of these cards wins individually, and the mana curve is so low that your threats will very rarely end up bottlenecked by land drops.
That’s interesting—I used to play with my brother’s cube but never thought of building a cube as part of the game.
If I am playing against a stronger player, do I have an incentive to be or not to be omnicidal? Is “everyone loses” preferable to “I win with probability 10% and lose with probability 90%”?
I think your idea is that “everyone dies” is an outcome that is possible but everyone wants to avoid, but is it true?
Everyone loses is supposed to be exactly as bad as someone else winning.
I guess that the dynamics of the game would depend on how relatively expensive is it to build a doom device—something that reliably kills everyone, including you. (Can I borrow zillion dollars from Satan, build zillion robots and kill everyone, and the next turn Satan takes me because I am unable to pay back? Or is my capacity to make such deal limited by my current resources, so if I get poor, even my capacity to make deals with Satan is limited enough to make me harmless.)
There is no intrinsic incentive to use the doom device, but there is also no intrinsic incentive to not use it when your loss is guaranteed. So it would be used for blackmail: “don’t create a situation where my loss is guaranteed, or I will use the doom device”. Given that only one player can win, if two of them build such device, they are stuck. (They could possibly negotiate to destroy both their devices.)
This again depends on how predictable the situation is. Whether it is something like “you have 10x more resources than me, you are virtually guaranteed to win” (so I know when to use the doom device) or like “you can win by a surprise, such as using a resource I don’t know that you have, or by a random outcome, such as having a spell that wins the game depending on a coin flip” (so I am never sure whether this is the moment to use the doom device until it is too late).
tl;dr—I think the dynamics would depend a lot on implementation details
Right, we wouldn’t want it to be possible to easily build doom devices. Good point.
I think the right balance would be something like “If player 1 is snowballing and invading player 2, player 2 can sell their soul to get a decent chance of defending against player 1 and a small chance of outright turning the tide and beating them, but even if they maximally sell their soul they still might lose, and if they push Player 1 too much then player 1 probably has a chance to retaliate by selling THEIR soul...”