Until you have a community playing you don’t know how good of a job you’ve done.

Richard Garfield

A good half a year has passed since the publication of the COIN Series Volume X, All Bridges Burning. The reception has been amazing. The game was nominated for the Golden Geek Award, several good reviews have appeared (see here for a selection), and generally the feedback has been really positive. It seems that All Bridges Burning was able to bring something new and captivating on the table in the tried and tested COIN Series.

I want to thank everyone for their engagement with the game. This means a lot to a first time designer such as myself. I also want to thank the GMT Games team and playtesters for making it all possible in the first place.

Following publication, the game has received a much larger number of plays than we were able to conduct pre-publication. Players with very different play styles than our playtesting groups have had a chance to play All Bridges Burning and have suggested some variants to change the way that the Moderates faction functions. Depending on your gaming group’s metagame, the variants detailed below may be worth exploring. Consider all of these to be official designer approved variants for All Bridges Burning.

In fact, I consider some of these variants to be such exciting modifications to the game that I would consider trying them out regardless of whether you have experienced problems or not. In a curious way, the game continues to live and develop even after its publication ―or as Volko Ruhnke likes to say, games are never finished, just published.

Making the Personality a VIP

A number of players have felt that the Moderates’ Personality does not play a large enough role in the game. This variant seeks to ensure that the Personality is in play, with all the risks and opportunities that it brings.

The variant rule adds the following section to the start of the Politics Phase (6.2) of each Propaganda Round of the game:

• 1) At the start of the Politics Phase of each Propaganda Round, check whether the Personality (1.4.4) is on the map. If it is, end this step without effect and proceed with the rest of the Politics Phase normally. If the Personality is not on map, adjust the Moderates’ Resources by -3 and the Moderates player must place the Personality in a Town with at least one Moderates Cell. If there is no such Town just deduct the Resources. Then proceed with the rest of the Politics Phase.

This rule is something I would suggest everyone to implement and use, regardless of whether they’ve found problems in their plays to date. The addition of the Personality check feels like a rule that could always have been in the game because it so well accentuates a number of other aspects of the design, for example certain event card effects.

Countering the Moderates

Groups which are seeing an unusual number of Moderates wins may adopt either of the following variants 2a) and 2b), with or without the Personality variant 1) above. The rule 3) below should probably be used without 2a) and 2b), although it may be combined with 1) above.

Here is the rules variant 2) with two parts a and b:

• 2a) Remove the rule pertaining to the Moderates’ Rally Command (3.3.1) according to which the Moderates get a discount to their total Rally cost, one Resource per level of Polarization when Polarization is at “6” or more. They receive no such discount.
• 2b) Change the order in which ties are resolved in 7.1 to: “Ties go to Non-players, the Senate, then Reds”.

Finally, the most radical rules variant ―this one developed by the COIN players’ discussion community on Discord― goes as follows:

• 3) Change the Moderates’ Victory margin passage at 7.3, third bullet point, to: “Moderates: Lower of Moderates Resources minus 14 or Resolved Issues plus Networks plus one minus Polarization”.

The purpose of the variant 3) is, firstly, to force the Moderates to participate in the process of lowering Polarization towards the game end. By contrast, in the published rules, the Moderates can pursue a strategy that tolerates high Polarization focusing instead on Resource accumulation as the way to victory. Secondly, the variant will probably cause the game to end more often to a collective loss by all three player sides and a win by one of the foreign powers, which some groups felt was not a pronounced enough possibility in the published rules.

We look forward to hearing about your experiences with these variants.

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