The Role of Mantle

By Kevan

When a player wins a dynasty of BlogNomic, they become the Emperor for the new dynasty. In some cases they can instead choose to "pass the mantle" to someone else at that point, with a player of their choice becoming the new Emperor instead. Eventually players got the idea to sell shares in an imminent future victory with a "roll for mantle".

History

Mantle passing

The wording that the Emperor "may pass this role to another Player at this point, if they wish" upon victory appears to date from 2006, and over the next decade winning players would occasionally hand the role over to someone else when they didn't want to personally run the next dynasty, or when they felt that another player had a better idea or track record.

Mantle rolling

In April 2015, a team of three players agreed to work together so that one of their number would win, where the other two could not have won, on the agreement that the winner would roll a die after the victory to decide who the mantle would be passed to (with a 33% chance of the original winner getting to keep the win).

This idea was forgotten for a few years before reappearing in 2019. The concept started to become more tactical, with players making private deals such as "if you vote for my proposal so that I can win, I'll give you 15% of mantle" (i.e. the winning player rolls DICE100 and passes the mantle if they roll 15 or lower). This quickly became a dominant strategy, with 40% of dynasties over the next couple of years ending with some kind of mantle roll. Some would have minor players brought on board to perform one small crucial action for a few per cent of mantle, others would see players accepting a share of mantle as a "bribe" to keep quiet about a scam.

In October 2021 a dynastic rule was brought into restrict mantle passing, simply saying that "The mantle may not be passed."

In December 2021, it became a Special Case rule where mantle passing was allowed by default, but Emperors could choose to turn the option off at the start of their dynasty. And the majority of Emperors did: over the next 12 dynasties, 7 elected to disallow mantle passing.

In September 2022 players voted to have mantle passes switched off by default. Over the next 17 dynasties, no Emperor chose to turn them on.

In February 2024 players voted to switch the rule back to default-on, as part of a rework of metadynastic cooperation. In the next four dynasties, every Emperor either switched it off, or switched on the stronger "No Cooperation" Building Block which also prevented mantle rolling.

In June 2024 players voted to switch mantle passing back to default-off.

Analysis

In a dynasty without mantle passing, players can — like in a regular board game — only trade the resources and actions that they have available to them at that moment in the game. If I need one more unit of iron to win and the rules allow players to trade such resources, my options for swapping any from another player are limited. I could offer you 5 grain in exchange for 1 iron, but that grain will be worthless to you because the game is about to end. My only options are to trick someone into giving me 1 iron without realising that it would let me win, or to find someone willing to kingmake me for no reward.

Mantle rolling bypasses this by creating an additional game resource that persists beyond the end of the current dynasty. This means I can buy your iron with a promised share of the mantle roll, which will still have value after I win. We can haggle over what percentage is appropriate; if other players are also in a position to trade the iron that I need, a bidding war should theoretically get close to zero (if I've offered you X% of mantle to kingmake me, then the player to your left — who now has 0% chance of winning a dynasty which is about to end — may be willing to kingmake me for X-1% instead, and so on). Although in practice, the mantle seller will often settle for an early deal to end the dynasty quickly, before the rest of the group can discuss the situation too much.