This is the sixth in a series of InsideGMT articles from Paul Hellyer about his board game Tsar, currently on GMT’s P500. You can view the previous article here.
When I designed my first published game (Prime Minister), I didn’t originally plan to include a solitaire system at all, but GMT recommended adding one when they accepted it. At that point, I already had a well-developed prototype that was not designed with solitaire play in mind. Luckily, the design relied heavily on numbers, and that made it easier to integrate bots into the game. The result was reasonably efficient, but like a lot of solitaire systems, it relied on separate automation cards for the non-player characters.
With Tsar, I had the chance to take a different approach, building the solitaire system into the multiplayer game from the ground up. I worked to minimize the system’s complexity so solitaire players could focus on the underlying game, and I tried to retain as much of the multiplayer experience as possible. The result is a simple automation system that’s subtly baked into the multiplayer components, without the need for any separate automation deck.
The game’s unusual “Favorite” position is a key part of this. The “Favorite” is the playable character who is closest to the Tsar and who has the most control over sequence of play, resource management, worker placement mechanics, and the assignments of other characters. The position exists in large part to keep the game running efficiently in both multiplayer and solitaire modes. The Favorite takes on a lot of decisions that would be overly time-consuming if decided collectively in multiplayer games, and that would be difficult to automate in solitaire games. In multiplayer games, the Favorite position passes to another player when you lose the Tsar’s Favor; in solitaire, a simple rule change substitutes other penalties so that the human player always retains control of the Favorite and we simply avoid the most difficult automation problems.
In contrast, the role of the Tsar himself is always automated in both multiplayer and solitaire games. You track his location and state of mind on the game board, and he responds to your choices with Influence bonuses and Favor effects. Card text frequently refers to him and images often feature him, so his presence is strongly felt even though he’s not a playable role. The Tsar’s automation is simply built into the cards, with two examples shown above. When you play Tsar’s Name Day, the Tsar decides whether to make a gift to his troops or sailors depending on the amount of gold in the treasury—and if there’s not enough gold, the Tsar rebukes the Favorite with a Favor penalty. In Counterintelligence, the Tsar might react to a decision made by the Interior Minister. If you control the Interior Minister and “feed the spy ring disinformation,” the Tsar rewards you with an Influence Cube bonus, but if you “allow the spies to escape with valuable intelligence,” the Tsar punishes you by taking away any Influence Cube that was protecting your office from reassignment.
All the playable characters in the game belong to one of four different factions within the Tsar’s government. In 4-player games, each faction and its characters are controlled by a human player. In 3-player and solitaire games, all four factions are still present, with simple automation taking over the characters who belong to non-player factions. Most importantly, this automation controls the way that non-player characters handle their ministerial office assignments. There are seven offices in the game such as the Minister of War or Minister of Industry, and because each faction has only three to four characters, a single human player can never control all the offices.
Many cards assign a decision to a character who holds an office, such as the Blight Card shown on the left. In this situation, non-player characters simply apply the first valid option on the card, and the options have been designed and ordered with that in mind. So if the Minister of Agriculture is controlled by a non-player character, you apply option 1 (“Coordinate containment measures”) if the requirements and spending can be met. Otherwise, you apply option 2 (“Do nothing”). A human player still retains some control because it’s largely your prior decisions that determine whether the requirements and spending can be met. If you managed to place competent characters on the board, kept Russia’s transport network well maintained, and left transport points available to use on this card, you can apply option 1 and avoid the problems presented by option 2. The main difference between automation and a player decision is that a human player might sometimes prefer option 2 to create problems for other players. A non-player character won’t be this devious.
Corruption in the War Ministry is another example. If the characters on the board give you a Total Adviser Rating of 7 or less (meaning that the government is not very competent), you’ll suffer a setback as your non-player Minister of War embezzles naval funds. In this instance, automation is more distinguishable from human decision-making. Human players usually focus on the scoring effects of corruption, but non-player characters will just respond to the Total Adviser Rating because they don’t score or have victory conditions.
For some cards that are assigned to offices, outcomes vary depending on which characters hold the offices, and that opens another avenue for the human player to shape outcomes. When you draw Students Organize Against the Regime or Maxim Gorky, the outcome depends mostly on the Minister of Interior’s attributes. By appointing an Autocracy character to be Minister of Interior, you can expect more oppressive outcomes, while appointing a Reform character would generate more liberal outcomes. A character’s skill at running offices can also make a difference, as seen on option 2 of Students Organize Against the Regime (indicated by the “★★” requirement). In assigning offices, you might reserve the more skilled “★★” characters for the offices you think are most important at that point in the game.
But some office decisions aren’t suitable for automation because they involve too many variables, like the Reassign Squadrons Card shown above. For these decisions, a player icon appears next to the office, with the Favorite (Ф) listed as an alternative. This means the decision is made by the character holding an office only if that character is controlled by a human player; otherwise, it becomes a decision for the Favorite. In a multiplayer game, Reassign Squadrons facilitates collective decision making by giving a player other than the Favorite a chance to jump in, whereas in solitaire games it shifts back to the Favorite to avoid unwanted automation complexities.
In multiplayer mode, Council Decisions are the most interactive type of decision, with different players potentially bidding against each other. The solitaire rules replace the bidding aspect of Council Decisions with a simpler action point mechanic: you can’t be outbid by other players, but you still need to use the minimum number of Influence Cubes as indicated on the card. However, non-player factions still retain some involvement: in some Council Decisions, a minister can remove Influence placed by other players, and non-player ministers retain that removal function. For instance, the Turkish Straits Card (shown above) allows the Foreign Minister to remove 2 Influence. So if you’re trying to seize control of the straits for Russia (option 2), you need to use 3 Influence if you control the Foreign Minister position, or 5 Influence if you don’t. For this reason, solitaire players have to consider their Council objectives as another factor in office assignments.
Solitaire players pursue the same scoring objectives they would in a multiplayer game, with victory points counting as a personal score that you can compare to other solitaire games. The non-player factions don’t score. Your key victory condition is to play to the end of the game without triggering revolution, and some rule alterations make this more challenging. In solitaire games, the regime’s stability starts at a lower level in game setup. More importantly, your relationship with the Tsar affects the regime’s stability. As mentioned earlier, control of the Favorite doesn’t pass to another player like it would in a multiplayer game; instead, triggering the Tsar’s anger destabilizes the government and edges the regime closer to revolution. In any game of Tsar, players have to balance their factional ambitions and the Tsar’s expectations, but solitaire games are weighted more heavily towards the latter. Finally, we plan to develop a way for solitaire players to adjust the game’s difficulty level, so that more experienced players can continue to challenge themselves.
Previous Tsar InsideGMT Articles
Author: Paul Hellyer
