[heads of state] Coup d'Etat

[redivider]

Josh, Judson & I playtested Coup d'Etat, the 7th of my 9 Short Games about Tyrants to get a try-out.

Players each control a member of a junta of military officers who are trying to overthrow the exisiting government. (In our test game Josh and Judson each made 2 characters since I thought the character creation auction would work better with 4 characters than 2.) We decided the characters would try to overthrow the Duke (who has previously appeared in our play tests of Rest & Relaxation and Subversive Words.)

Players try to work together to gain enough collective strategy points to succeed in the coup attmept while also trying to gain enough individual rewards to come out on the top of the heap in the new post-coup regime.

Characters are created by a flash back to the character's graduations ceremony from the military academy. Players bid for academic and personal honors (as in the rpg Amber) which give them commands in different branches of the military and security services, different amounts of money, violence, and persuasion powers, and special abilities.

Judson's Col. Albrecht, for example, came out of the auction with way more violence points than money or persuasion, top honors in military history, a primary command in the nation's armored divisions, and influence in the Officer's Cademy and Palace Guards. Judson chose "that others should fear me" as Albrecht's personal motivation, and "pansy diplomacy" as his qualm. Josh's Col. Charles Basquet earned honors in civics, english, and math and was considered the altar boy of his class, earning most of his power points in money and persuasion. He chose to take his primary command in the Chaplains Corps and reinforced it with the motivation "lead nation to faith" and the qualm "spill faithful blood."

Once the characters were down, the players conferred for a minute on a coup plan, then we launched into the 3 day coup.

The game is essentially a board-less, card-less strategy game. There are no set targets, locations, etc. Players invent these during the game. If you think that kidnapping the son of the minister of agriculture, postering the capital with unflattering portraits of the Leader, or bombarding the opera house will help overthrow the government and/or fit with your character concept, go for it.

I was worried that the game would be over-complex. There are five main sub-sytems to keep track of.
1. Players write down all their actions on a calendar
2. The GM calculates how much it costs to succeed at, fail at, or cancel the action (the formula is based on the number of people you are trying to impact, the highest rank of any of those people, and how much advance time you spent planning the action) and then players note down if they want to succeed, fail, or cancel
3. Actions are written down in secret. Acting players reveal the actionsto the other players at different times based on how notorious and visible the action is (immediately, in the next morning's newspaper, etc)
4. The GM awards actions strategy points, story points, and notoriety points
5. As players accumulate notoriety, the current government strikes back at them according to a pre-determined schedule of repression

Our test game worked out decently. The calendar use and revealing of actions during or after they went down lent a nice structure to the game. The GM fiat involved with calculating costs and awarding actions could have caused problems but seemed to go ok. (Although I was gm so the players can speak better to this point).

I kept grinning and making asides under my breath when J&J handed me their calendars because they came up with some fun actions, that however bloodthirsty or odd, seemed approriate for their characters. It should be no surprise that Col. Albrecht used most of his coup actions to blow up, run over with tanks, or otherwise wipe out giant chunks of the capital city. Col. Charles seized the radio station to broadcast religious propaganda and arrested all clerics from dissident sects. The other 2 characters massacred foreigners, declared martial law, and even "kidnapped Deiter's wife, whose affections he stole from me in academy."

They barely succeeded in carrying out the coup ( I ranked most of Col. Charles' spiritual actions high on story but low on strategy). The end game, where players tally up their awards which become votes to elect the new Leader, 2nd in command, etc, didn't really work because there were two players with four characters (bargaining with yourself for votes isn't exciting).

I was happy with how the game turned out. As always, we had some changes that could improve play:
* poker chips or tokens could be used to keep track of money, violence, and persuasion points
* the players' total strategy earned should be tracked in the open so players could see progress towards victory
* a character creation work sheet and a flow chart showing the phases of play would help a lot
* successful actions hold earn characters additional power. Maybe actions with high notoriety should bring money in the form of 'investors.' Actions with high strategy awards should bring violence as additional forces enlist with your command. And actions with high story can bring persuasion as you use anecdotes to win over support. Or some variation.
* make sure to do character auction before defining character concept
* if a player doesn't win any commands during the auction (unlikely but possible), make sure they have at least one
* 3 days is probably a good minimum length for coup. 7 days would probably be near upper limit

Some more speculative options
* think of end-game equations to shape post-coup outcome, Like if you have the highest notoriety and earned more story points than strategy points, then X happens
* if you gain power from success, should you lose some from failure?
* could work as a LARP
* could pre-set people, organizations and locations, with each player inventing 10 or so and writing them on cards with set strategy values. This would make game more like a board game.