In the earliest development of Rebellion: Britannia we were visualizing the systems in the form of various levers, so that the key elements of Briton Tension, Briton Warbands, and Legion Cohesion (which is rather fun to say out loud) all had mechanisms to both increase and decrease them. We might show this in the form shown in Table 1. (It did not look this neat in our original notebooks.)

Each faction always has one of two possible leaders that are always available in a set (historical) sequence. But when a faction switches between leaders is determined by the Events deck, and since not all cards from that deck are present in the same game it’s possible these events aren’t triggered and a faction never switches their leader.

There’s another systemic layer to the game we haven’t really discussed in the blogs before now, at least not in any detail, which is a source of potential Victory Points (VPs).

This element concerns indigenous British culture. It’s a later addition to the design and something we are still exploring in development. Early playtesting exposed the possibility that we weren’t giving the British factions enough interesting opportunities to earn early VPs. We also had a concern that we weren’t representing enough of indigenous British culture within the design – there was some reference to the destruction of it through the rise in British Tension as a result of Roman buildings and roads – ‘Romanizing’ the British landscape and scarring and irretrievably altering it – but no real reference to its growth or sustenance. These were omissions we sought to address through a new system. This system would incentivize a more pliant approach to Rome and discourage military resistance. British factions would now have a reason to focus on non-military actions, and to therefore highlight other strands of their cultural identity within the framework of the game. It would theoretically be possible to win without ever fighting, but through careful management of cards to secure hegemonies in trade, agricultural production, the generation of crafts, the protection and development of ceremonial sites and customs. But this system would need to have a light design footprint – meaning it would be easy to learn and to integrate into the existing game.

We are quite proud that Rebellion: Britannia can be played solo and, in our opinion, quite well. Some designs have solo playability enmeshed in them from the outset, and some have it built into them later. In this case, the solo mode was developed in step with the design as a whole. (Maurice: I personally have a strong tendency to do this – it helps me design/test rapidly in the early stages when everything is still in flux.)

Players can still choose to be any of the four factions: Rome, Silures, Brigantes, or Iceni, and the game system ‘runs’ an opposing faction. If players choose to play as Rome they will have a different kind of game depending on their selected opposing faction, given the various different British tribe asymmetries. If players choose to be one of the British tribes Rome must be selected as the AI faction used in the game – they’re the big dog in this fight so they need to be present. In fact, if players so choose they can add multiple factions into their game, including playing with all four factions, three of them run by the game system. We’ve not yet tried it, but in theory, the game could even play itself, playing all four factions together through its simple AI system – although it would need a willing human to mechanically turn cards, comply with instructions and move pieces (no such human is provided with the game).

In October 2020 Fred Serval (designer of GMT’s Red Flag Over Paris, and A Gest of Robin Hood) organized a ConSim Game Jam sponsored by GMT.  Participants had 3 days to make a game. As participants, we had to use a pre-existing GMT COIN game at its core and make something new from it. We weren’t able to use any more wood pieces than were boxed with the original game. We  were, however, permitted to apply stickers to the board, or to any of those wood pieces, and were able to add any amount of cardboard tokens and decks of cards  we might want. Initial discussions focussed on geographical milieu, and narrowed our choices down to India (Gandhi), France (Falling Sky), and Great Britain (Pendragon), and the latter won out. So from  Morgane Gouyon-Rety’s Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (2017) we  derived a game called Boudica’s Revolt.