Introduction by Congress of Vienna (CoV)’s Assistant Designer & Editor, Fred Schachter: This article is a description of efforts made by one of the CoV Teams making fine and appreciated contributions to the game… “Gutt’s Guysâ€â€¦ who’ve come up with a set of rules converting CoV’s 4-player game into 3 and 2-player versions. Furthermore, they’ve created a fun, exciting, and engaging solitaire game for it!
In this first article, designer Frank Esparrago describes, the efforts made to make Congress of Vienna into a completely competitive solitaire game with all the intensity and competitiveness of its Standard multi-player versions. The focus is on the game’s cards and how their ratings influence solitaire play. Later articles will describe CoV’s Two Player version and how CoV’s Bots were created for solo play enjoyment. These articles shall provide descriptions, with examples, of how they work.
Understanding Congress of Vienna’s basic game system(s) should enhance readers’ appreciation of this article and its ensuing follow-ups. To that end, GMT’s site for the game contains a wealth of material: GMT Games – Congress of Vienna
Enjoy and take it away Frank!
General Introduction
When we established collaboration with GMT, we agreed to offer a CoV variant for solitaire play. However, Developer Dick Sauer and I did not have enough experience to fully and properly address this creative task. Consequently, we increased our development team with new members with experience in designing a solitaire game.
At first, they had to spend a lot of time getting familiar with all the ins and outs of CoV. This was necessary, for until you get to know both the game’s system and possible strategies for the different players’; as well as the various measures “human†players can apply when opponents make certain diplomatic and military plays during each game turn for the four Major Powers (France, Russia, Britain and Austria); how can a good solitaire system be devised?
Our main coordinator for development of a prototype CoV solitaire game has been the talented and veteran gamer Jim Gutt. He is a good friend of Dick Sauer (they both live in the area of Phoenix, Arizona). He is a conscientious person, highly critical of ambiguous or unclear rules, and now has an incredible detailed knowledge of the Congress of Vienna game. I speak with him via Skype (from Europe) and Jim is always a cataract of ideas, concepts, creativity but also of gaming orthodoxy.
However, when he writes or sends summary tables (in Excel or Word) that material is extremely brief, which makes me need a small dictionary for Jim’s frequent use of abbreviations. This enables me to convert his guidelines into a suitable Flowcharts or rules which can be easily understood by future CoV players. I don’t want to think about the many hours Jim devoted and continues to commit to this project. The results of his efforts sometimes generate better play results by his CoV Bots than an average human player can accomplish!
Actually, the task of making a solitaire game from four-player Congress of Vienna is a herculean task, especially when we are not talking about a pure wargame, but a game that, in addition to its wargame elements, has diplomacy, negotiation, and debate.
Our first approach was to consider emulating the Churchill game’s Bots. Alas, they were too simplistic for a solitaire CoV game which needed to deliver the kind of interesting, uncertain, fun to play gaming elements we sought and, above all, to put pressure on the human player and make victory an entertaining challenge to obtain.
Rating Congress of Vienna’s Cards for the Solitaire Game
The first thing we did was modify cards so they have a good use during the game (we want to indicate with “good use” that they behave the same as players could use them in a 4-player game). For this we classify them by Major Power from excellent “A” cards to very mediocre “D”. Basically, the main way to classify them is by a card’s basic numerical value, but a value effected when they have modifiers for certain Issues. Some cards also have an additional bonus (such as awarding a Resources or an additional military unit). Furthermore, there are military cards which can be used during the War Phase.
Of course, a card can be excellent in the hands of a player, really pernicious if used against a Major Power, or really with little effect when played by a player. This resulted in our placing four different rankings: A, B, C, or D for each player’s Bot.
For example, Suchet’s card is a really bad 2-value card. That is why we classified it as “D” for Austria and Russia. However, for France it is above all an excellent battle card when used during the War Phase in battles with Spanish military units for a +2 DRM or a -4 DRM inflicted on the British player, with an additional French +3 DRM for a battle on track D, the Mediterranean Front. Note the “crossed swords†indicia used to identify CoV battle cards. This card also has a +2 for two diplomatic matters of interest for France. That is why it has been improved to a rating of “B” if it is used by the French Bot.
How to evaluate Suchet if it is received by the British player? In principle it does not contribute much to him (for it is only a bad 2-value card), but if, for example, trading with France is mandatory, the French player would have in his hand a powerful battle card for any battle in Spain and in particular if that battle involves Spanish units. For this reason, we classified it as “B” for the British Bot. In this way, and as far as possible, it will not trade Suchet to France as long as Britain has another lower-rated French card to offer!
Here are some other Russian and French card examples so readers can appreciate how we rated different Congress of Vienna cards.
After classifying cards, we were able to move on to the next stage, which was construction and testing of the game’s Bots. At this effort’s commencement, the advance was fast and the first Bot created was the Austrian Bot. We designed this in a very short time. So fast that some play testers developed a parallel version for three players (the Russian player controls Austria).
That three player game works very well, it has practically no additional rules and for this reason we included this version in the Playbook for when three regular CoV players want to play if a fourth player is unavailable. In this case, the duration of the game is slightly shorter than with the Standard 4 player game since the Russian player is making decisions for two Major Powers! The formula for Victory Points takes this into consideration so all three players have an opportunity to win the game.
However, these developments were nowhere near providing an exciting and challenging solo game. This was just the end of the beginning!
Hopefully, the preceding provides readers some insight regarding the design logic behind Congress of Vienna’s solitaire game. This attitude is intrinsic to the game’s Bots and other solitaire game elements.
Coming up next… Congress of Vienna’s Two Player Game!
Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.