Introduction #1 from Congress of Vienna Assistant Designer & Editor Fred Schachter: I’ve had the fun and pleasure of helping Designer Frank Esparrago on his journey, now our journey, to bringing his labor of love CoV game vision from dream into reality.
This GMT P-500 game is now undergoing a wonderful transformation from playtest into production graphics thanks to the talents of Terry Leeds. For the latest status of Terry’s efforts and a host of Congress of Vienna game material see: GMT Games – Congress of Vienna .
But for all the content readers will find within GMT’s site for the game; there’ll be a dearth of current material relevant to Congress of Vienna’s Solitaire Version and Bots. Those rules and Bots are to the credit of CoV Team members: initially Jim Gutt and David Illanes and more recently David Schoellhamer, who is architect of those Bots’ latest rendition. Well done guys!
With that, I’ll turn further introductory honors to Frank…
Introduction #2 From Congress of Vienna designer Frank Esparrago: Previous InsideGMT articles explain how the CoV Team agreed to offer a version for solitaire play. However, Developer Dick Sauer and I did not have sufficient experience to address this creative task fully and properly. Our first approach was to consider emulating the Churchill game’s Bots. Alas, they were too simplistic for a CoV solitaire game which needed to deliver the kind of interesting, uncertain, fun to play gaming elements we sought and, above all, to put pressure on a human player and make attaining victory an entertaining challenge.
Consequently, we increased our development team with new members having experience in designing a solitaire game. As Fred mentioned, these CoV solo game developers were Jim Gutt and David Illanes. They created the game’s inaugural French Bot. Their tenacity, highly critical minds, detailed knowledge of the Congress of Vienna game system, as well as game design orthodoxy in general; allowed them to build a series of summary tables (in Excel or Word). This enabled me to convert those guidelines into suitable Flowcharts or rules which can be easily understood by future players.
In Spain, both myself and Ignacio Badal commenced efforts to create a 2-player CoV version. This would have similar concepts to what Jim and his United States team derived. We had to change a few game mechanics of this highly interactive multiplayer game to make it into a viable 2-player contest!
Once those design concepts were fixed; we realized if we created a good 2-player Congress of Vienna game; designing a derivative solo game could be easier than by advancing directly from 4-players to just a single “human” player! That worked out to be a good intermediary step. Serendipity!
With tables created by Jim Gutt and David Illanes as a formidable foundation, combined with previous 2-players game experience; we were ready to design a French Bot. However, the Team needed someone without prior knowledge of Congress of Vienna, someone with a kind of design/development “clean slate” who could improve and test the chosen system: which at this time was a complex chart-flow of decisions (containing a variety of nodes and tables).
To accomplish this, we sought help from the InsideGMT Community who read CoV content and were interested in lending a hand. To our great good fortune, David Schoellhamer appeared on the scene! He had read some of our articles and wanted to try CoV’s initial solitaire mechanisms to better learn and appreciate the game; and above all, he had the time, talent, perseverance, and initiative to adjust, improve and create a French Bot’s final configuration so to make it friendly and fun for future Congress of Vienna gamers!
David and I worked intensely for over a year: he from beautiful Oregon and I from the rolling holm oak savannah of southwestern Spain. Skype and Vassal were our communication tools: with a main challenge being the time zone gap!
4 Key Challenges in Deriving a Congress of Vienna Solo Game
Challenge One: How to keep a manageably sized Allied hand? During a typical 4 player game each Allied player can have a hand of 12 cards. If the three Allied Major Powers share a single consolidated hand, it would be 36 cards (rgh!!). This would give the Allies a huge, perhaps insurmountable, advantage because, unable to trade with a shared hand, the Allies could optimally retain and play about half such a single hand’s character and event cards during the War Phase. In a 4-player game, the Allies use some of their valuable Diplomatic Rounds to trade cards with each other seeking to improve their respective hands’ quality.
Challenge Two: How to retain some of the variability four independently minded players seek in attaining personal victory? The Allied Powers are not a monolith. When played by individuals they can diplomatically vie with one another over Absolutism/Liberalism, the Future Government of France, Minor Countries, and British Financial Aid among other Issues. The struggle for a single Allied Major Power’s victory starts long before they collectively defeat France on the battlefield… and even that’s not a certainty! Would a single Allied player care which of his Major Powers win so long as one of them does?
Challenge Three: How to simulate for the solo player the “fog of war” of what cards the other Major Powers have, as both your potential allies and as declared enemies? One of the joys of gaming is the uncertainty of what a human opponent will do. A human playing against a Bot knows the Bot’s cards and options and thus can overly determine how the Bot will respond to every play.
Challenge Four: How to balance complexity and Bot competitiveness? As Jim Gutt’s work had shown, both the Initial and Government Phases could easily be “programmed” by simple flow charts. Furthermore, War Phase resolution by Bot could be approached with a flow chart and several associated tables. Therefore, this Phase is quickly done without excessive complexity (although we missed the uncertainty that determining use or non-use of military cards creates).
However, the Diplomacy Phase is highly interactive, with the players deciding which card to use, which Issues to negotiate, which Issues to debate. With 6 Rounds and four Major Powers engaged each game turn; this results in at least 24 decisions regarding which Issue to negotiate, which card to play (or pass), and 72 decisions on whether to debate and, if so, which card to play for debate. The system of decision nodes tables initially developed did the job but was desperately slow and tedious. It worked, oh yes it did, but it wasn’t fun to play!
Finally, we wanted the human player to be able to adjust the level of difficulty of playing against the Bot so the solo game could always be competitive.
Resolving the French Bot’s Diplomacy Phase Dilemma
When you design a game, you realize you’re going to incorporate your interpretation of the work historians have done to unravel events, characters, armies, their battles, economies of the historical period, etc… You consider different mechanics that successfully worked in other games: adapting those selected to the game you are designing.
Well, to solve our dilemma about how to make Congress of Vienna’s Bot-driven Diplomatic Phase exciting, simple and fast; we began a deep review of how other games accomplished that. We then discovered a “CDG Solo System” by Stuka Joe & Ken Kuhn (we had been waiting several years for its appearance!), fortunately in this very InsideGMT Blog there is an excellent article “The Madness Behind a CDG Solo System” where Stuka Joe describes applying his method for the most excellent Paths of Glory Game. Eureka! We found the Sorcerer’s Stone to solve our game’s Diplomacy Phase challenge!
After that revelation, problems of adaptation appeared; the main one being: How to turn a non-competitive system into a competitive one? The system preserves the uncertainty, tension, and anguish about which cards you and your opponent have available to play, which cards to reserve for use later in the Military Phase and whether/how to play a card to receive its bonus (if any).
We believe this problem has been solved in what CoV’s French Bot now offers.
The French Bot’s Diplomacy Phase
The Congress of Vienna Diplomacy Phase consists of dealing game cards, an initial wager, selecting Issues to place on the Negotiating Table, and then 6 Diplomacy Rounds, during which designated Issues are negotiated and debated in an intense way, with goal of securing their rewards for each player’s Major Power and where the method of Stuka Joe plays a key role.
The first modification we made is that the human player (who controls in one hand all 3 Allied Major Powers’ cards) receives fewer cards than in the 4-player game. This is because there is no trading of cards between the Allies (although trading a card with France is permitted). This is an aid to the French Bot! The number of cards the human receives can be increased or decreased to make the human stronger or weaker. This ensures a competitive challenging game against the French Bot as a player gains Congress of Vienna experience and confidence with the system. CoV also includes handicap cards that can be awarded the human or Bot to strengthen their play.
The next point to resolve was to classify the game’s Issues in order of priority (1st Priority, 2nd Priority, and 3rd Priority, or “Choices”). Of course, this was done for each Political Status into which we “arbitrarily” divided the game: Limited War (before Armistice), Armistice and General War (once Austria joins the Allies on the battlefield).
We also realized a skillful French Bot may select different Issues for initial placement on the Negotiating Table and for negotiating during the turn’s six Diplomacy Rounds. That is why we created the following table, which may seem complex, but when one knows how to use it and acquires related experience (our play testers learned that playing 1 or 2 games can accomplish that) it takes only a few seconds to find the Issue that must be selected.
As an example, to select 2-3 Issues to place on the Negotiating Table, the French Bot chooses the first Issue that appears in the Issues Selection list relating to the turn’s Political Status; except if it has already been chosen, in which case we select the next one, and so on.
Therefore, while the Armistice Political Status is in force, the Bot would select the “French Recruitment” Issue, unless it is already on the diplomatic board, per the turn’s Initial Situation Card), or there’s a condition (a) making it ineligible: e.g., when the French Force Pool is close to empty as almost all French military units are already on the map.
If the French Bot must select another Issue, it would be the next one in sequence, that is, “Liberalism”, except when it is already placed or that condition (b) is met, in which case the player would select the following “British Financial Aid” Issue, and so on until selecting the 2 or 3 Issues France must place at the start of Diplomacy.
The French Bot must in each of its six Diplomacy Phase Rounds: negotiate an Issue, trade a card with an Allied Power, or pass (if it debated previously). Moreover, in each of the six Rounds versus three Allied Powers, the French Bot must decide whether to debate or to refrain from doing so. For this we built two tables, one for Negotiation and another for Debate. Here, in this article, we only present one of them because their sequences are quite similar.
How does the French Bot determine which Issue to select and which card to play? It does so by performing, in sequential order, the following seven steps using the Card-Driven Game Solo Method for the Congress of Vienna (CDGSM) to determine eligible cards that can be played. This table is key to understanding this fast and effective procedure for the Diplomacy Phase of CoV solo-games!
1. Card-driven Game Solo Method for Congress of Vienna (CDGSM): There are two sides and two displays of cards: France and the Allies (also CoV referred to as “The Coalition”). The Bot makes decisions for France and the human player controls the Allies. When playing a card for a side, only 0-5 cards possessed by the other side, that controlled by the Bot, are known. When playing a card, not all visible cards may be eligible for play, so this is another “fog of war” uncertainty mechanism.
The CoV Solitaire Game has a French Card Display, pictured by the following illustration, which has only 5 spaces available to place selected cards in accordance with a dice roll. Only some of these spaces (A, B, C, D and E) have face up cards (the human player does not know the rest of the cards).
According to this dice roll only certain spaces are eligible to select a card. In space C, you place the additional cards received by the three Allied Major Powers through the Initial Phase, and then establish a face-down deck with the rest of the cards received and not placed in the A, B, D and E spaces.
This C deck starts out at a very respectable size: sometimes more than 20 cards are in the Allied Display, but this quantity drops dramatically as cards are played in negotiation or debate. Thus, the human player suffers similar tension regarding what cards he has available to play as in the 4-player game experience!
We modified Stuka Joe’s original design because in CoV there are Leaders’ cards (which are always known and available to play) and an “irrepressible desire” by players to save some of their hands’ military cards for use during the War Phase. These cards are placed in a Potentially Useable Military Card (PUMC) deck, which are military cards that could be used for the upcoming War Phase.
The French Card Display during the CDGSM
1) Roll method die (1D6) to determine eligible cards, between 2-4 cards will become available according to this die. In this example only A & B spaces
2) Flip up any face-down eligible cards. In this example only A & B spaces
3) Move one Possibly Useable Military Card (PUMC) for this player from A-E to the PUMC deck. In this example the only face-up cards are A & B and only “B” is PUMC. It is therefore transferred to the PUMC deck
4) Play one of the eligible cards. In this example only the “von Humboldt” card in space A remains available and useable to negotiate or debate
5) Fill any open spaces with cards from Draw Deck (C). Keep the face up/down cards as is, do not flip them. In this example, the Initial card “Martin Gaudin” is moved to fill the space A” while another card from the deck (C) moves face down to fill space B.
Whether PUMC cards become War Phase usable is dependent on Political Status, Front situations, Generalissimo, and other Issues being negotiated. For example, before Armistice, all Austrian Military Cards are not PUMC. During Armistice, they are PUMC, and their ‘potential’ becomes reality only if France does not win the Austria at War Issue during the Diplomacy Phase. Saving PUMC exhausts the draw deck C quicker. Below is a Q&A example:
Q) What happens when deck C is empty?
A) When the Draw Deck is empty, flip PUMC deck face down, shuffle it, and transfer cards to Draw Deck (C). This causes your precious PUMC to be spent on Diplomacy Issues. This happens with both the French Bot and Allied (human) player hands of cards. We believe this mechanism makes the Congress of Vienna Diplomacy Phase unpredictable for the solo human player, an uncertainty similar to the 4 player game. This overturns the false idea that this Bot is a kind of “puppet”. Here it is a ” damned rascal”. Play testers report that at the end of the Diplomacy Phase they take a deep breath and feel good to have survived!
2. Check if Napoleon’s card is used in the Diplomacy Phase. This usually does not happen, as Napoleon, who is one of the most powerful CoV military cards, is generally reserved for the War Phase. But you must still check the table that determines whether Napoleon should be used to negotiate an Issue!
3. If a French cardcan be used to receive its bonus and is in the French hand eligible to be played: this is decided by the Card-Driven Game Solo Method for the Congress of Vienna (CDGSM), as explained by the preceding item #1.
4. Except for the French 6th Round, France demands to trade a card with an Allied Power if an Allied card is face up on the Allied Display and is a low-rated card (per the card bottom’s C or D squares). It is therefore eligible to be played by France as an offered trade (the CDGSM again decides for you!). The Allies then use CDGSM to determine if their French card is eligible to be traded. If it is eligible, the Allied Major Power must trade, just as in the 4 player game.
Rating Congress of Vienna’s Cards (Letter Codes at Card Bottom)
We classify cards by Major Power from excellent “A” cards to very mediocre “D”. Basically, the main way to classify them is by a card’s upper left corner numerical value; but that overall value can be affected by card modifiers for certain Issues.
Some cards also have an additional bonus (such as awarding a Resource or an additional military unit). Furthermore, there are military cards which can be used during the War Phase. These also effect a card bottom’s letter rating.
We want to note this long-written explanation of this game aspect lasts only seconds between Rounds. The method does not choose a card, it only determines 1-4 cards that become eligible to be played. This is fundamental because prior to including this method, the player had to laboriously check card by card to determine which one was the best to play (a process which could take as much as 10-15 minutes!). Now, this decision-making is very very fast. The CDGSM creates uncertainty and such tension to the player that this solo CoV game Phase is almost as fun, unpredictable, and intense as the 4 player game’s!
5. Determine the top 2 French Priority Issues that are not on the French Diplomacy Track and can be moved onto the French Track with the best available card. Negotiate the Issue that can be moved furthest up the French Track. Determine the eligible card (see item #1) that can move one of these Issues the furthest towards its goal. Most cards have modifiers for some Issues, so perhaps the #2 Issue can be moved further up the French Track than #1; so, we let the French Bot determine that to make it a bit smarter. There are only 1-4 eligible cards to evaluate, so it does not take long to select one.
Selecting French Priority Issues
1) The three French High Priority (hp) Issues are available for this Diplomacy Phase. However, only the top 2 issues are considered: “Future Government of France” and “French Recruitment” (as indicated in the Table of Priority Issues for France).
2) Then the best eligible card (by the method described) for these Issues is selected to be played. In this example, Fouche (#11) is the best eligible card.
3) Fouche is used on the Issue that can be moved furthest up French track (“French Recruitment”).
6. Sometimes, no French Priority Issues can be placed on the French Track. In that instance you must negotiate the French Priority Issue that can be moved closest to the French Chair (its space seven).
7. Finally, when there are no French available priority Issues whatsoever; you must negotiate the Issue that can be moved closest to the French Chair (even if it is an Allied Issue).
Although we are not going to explain the debate procedure since it is similar to negotiation; we want to highlight that the French Bot chooses to debate according to the number of cards remaining in the French hand, the number of Rounds remaining to the end of the turn’s Diplomacy Phase, and the priority of the particular Issue for France. A die roll adds uncertainty to this Bot decision, so when the human Allied player negotiates an Issue, he does not know with certitude if France will debate it.
This is a frenetic and tremendously fast, fun, and interactive system which we adapted from the 4 player game’s Diplomacy Phase. You’ll only miss your fellow players’ “trash talk”!
Next Time…
In the following InsideGMT article to this, Part 2 of 2, we will describe the Government and War Phases as conducted by Congress of Vienna’s French Bot, as well as the means you, as a Solo Player, have available for adjusting the level of difficulty in playing against this Bot!
Previous Congress of Vienna Articles
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