Checking Your Endgame

By Kevan

A checklist of questions that you might want to ask yourself before a dynasty has reached its endgame, rather than during it.

What happens if there's a tie?

If your winner is whoever has the highest score at a particular moment, what happens if it's a tie? (Even if you're dealing with big numbers, it's still possible - after a lot of random-number combat, the Boss Fight dynasty nearly ended with two players being tied on 2352 points.) If the goal is to reach a target score, what happens if someone does that, but another player manages to do it as well, before the first player has posted their DoV?

Always add a tiebreaker, however arbitrary. And add tiebreakers to your tiebreakers to make absolutely sure that even if there's a huge chain of coincidences or bugs, it will still be possible to pick a winner without calling a vote. If the goal is a finish-line situation, you can clarify that only the first player to reach it wins (although that may open up timing problems, described in the next section), or give victory to whoever moved furthest past it.

If you don't notice the potential for a tie until too late, the group will find it hard to agree on something that the likely-to-tie players will all be happy with. If it's a game about collecting gold, sheep and lumber and the most gold wins, the obvious tiebreakers of "most sheep", "most lumber" or even "most other stuff" will be a hard sell to the player who - at this late point in the game - has fewest of those because they didn't think it would matter.

Could the endgame be all about timing?

If two or more people can reach the victory condition simultaneously (either because they fought their way there and are waiting for their next action to become available, or the rules have shifted and victory is suddenly within reach of several players), then the game simply comes down to whoever can react quickest. Which could be down to luck, to being online more frequently, or just being the enacting admin.

Similarly, if a victory process will likely involve a sequence of discrete actions in an open world, would it be possible for an alert player to interrupt them and derail the victory? Even if the actions only take a couple of minutes, a lucky (or technically assisted) player may be able to react to the first action of the sequence.

In both cases, somebody winning or blocking a win because they were able to react quickly enough might not be a satisfying endgame.

For a fastest-reactor-wins situation, consider reframing the victory condition to require the winner to sustain their victorious position for a few hours or days - giving a chance for others to knock them off the perch if it's not sufficiently protected, or to achieve a higher-scoring victory that beats the previous one. For an interruptable sequence of actions, you could either structure the rules to disallow interruptions, or slow the actions down so that everyone has enough time to react to a player starting up a sequence, and it's not a surprise when someone does.

(Also generally consider avoiding action systems where the quick reactions are rewarded.)

How much power would a coordinated team have?

As a player, consider the possibility that a number of your opponents are secretly working together. Are the rules generous enough that a coordinated team would be able to perform a rapid sequence of actions to let one of their number get greatly ahead, or even win the game?

If you're not planning to join such a team yourself, consider proposing rules to break up the rewards of teamwork. Limit how much players can trade resources, and minimise the rate or scope of actions which can be used to help or hinder specific players.

If you're running your own team, look at it through the prism of timing issues - if a rival team openly initiated the first step of a plan after arranging it in secret, would they be able to complete that plan and win before anyone could realistically react to it? Even a complex chain of actions could be done and dusted in a couple of minutes, if a team was sufficiently well-coordinated. Writing rules that force teamwork to play out at a slower speed will give players time to react with counter-strategies, and the game will reward the more skilful team, rather than the quickest or the luckiest one.

How much effect would a last-minute arrival have?

This is an obvious one but is sometimes forgotten. What would happen if a new player joined the game a few hours before it was about to end?

If you've got a "last player standing" victory condition where a few bruised players are crawling around with 2 or 3 hit points left, a new player probably shouldn't be able to freely join the game with the default 100HP.

But to a subtler degree, the starting resources and available actions of a new player may unbalance the late-game economy if the rules weren't anticipating it - particularly if the new player has already privately agreed to become part of a coordinated team, as per the previous section.

Consider whether the default values for new players should be changed to give them less influence upon arrival. Or simply add a rule to say that new players can't join the game beyond a certain date, or are placed into some kind of limbo upon arrival (so that they need to make a proposal to join the game proper, and the group can decide how they feel about it).

Does the victory depend on secret information?

If a victory condition relies on secretly tracked information (such as villagers winning when werewolves are eliminated, or a player winning if they have more secret coins than everyone else combined), will players be able to immediately vote on a DoV that's made on that basis? Or would it require the Emperor to confirm that the claim was valid?

If confirmation is needed, it needs to be part of the ruleset. Since 2021, it's been against the rules for an Emperor to reveal privately-tracked information without a rule explicitly allowing them to do so, so the Emperor can't just step in and confirm a DoV's claim in comments.

Rather than saying "If a player has more secret coins than everyone else combined, they achieve victory.", write it as something like "If a player has more secret coins than everyone else combined, the Emperor should announce this in a blog post. Upon doing, so that player achieves victory."