Artist’s statement
With Mandate of Heaven (MOH), our team sought to create an asymmetrical, hybrid negotiation/deception game that appeals to anyone who’s a fan of Catan. Considering that two of our designers took CHINA 93 in winter quarter, we decided that a fitting theme for an asymmetrical game of this nature would be imperial China, as advisors to the emperor would usually be wholly dependent upon their ruler in providing for them; this runs counter to a feudal structure commonplace in Europe, in which nobles very well might have more power than their ruler.
MOH was designed with the intention of encouraging every player to want to be emperor, which was accomplished through awarding the emperor valuable “legacy tokens” for remaining in power; we further sought to make it difficult to remain emperor for protracted periods by reducing the quantity of resources the emperor has for each consecutive round, which hastens that dynasty’s fall and gives everyone at the table a shot at being emperor in the same game.
We approached the game’s development with the philosophy of keeping the rules as simple as possible without sacrificing fun – we believe that simple rules which encourage emergent, dynamic social interaction to be best for the party game experience, as they make a game which is easy to pick up and terribly difficult to put down!
Concept Maps, Mind Maps, and other Gameplay Maps
Our concept maps, mind maps, and other gameplay maps can be found below or via the following link.
Formal Elements/Values
Our initial decisions regarding the formal elements we wanted Mandate of Heaven to exemplify were as follows: we first sought to inspire multilateral competition, which we found to be very effective in encouraging cut-throat decision/deal making; we wanted a relatively simple system of procedure with intuitive starting action (emperor asks their advisors what it’ll cost to solve their crises) to allow people to get started with MOH quickly; we wanted the outcome of deals to be positive-sum to encourage as much negotiation as possible, which we saw through by forcing the emperor to solve deals and by giving advisors cheap crisis cards (with which to embezzle easily) as well as other side-bonuses. Regardless, we wanted the outcome of the game to be negative-sum in the sense that only one person should win, which we figured would lead to a heightened sense of drama. Finally, we wanted a resource system such that they were limited in quantity, critical in solving crises, randomly issued, and easily stockpile-able to allow advisors to trade their extra resources with the emperor for profit.
Testing & Iteration History
Playtest 1
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In the earliest stages of Mandate of Heaven’s development, we sought to lean heavily into asymmetry – a powerful emperor negotiates deals with advisors/nobles who are entirely dependent on their ruler. To be more fitting to our historical theme, we began at this stage to lean moreso into the emperor/advisor dynamic centered on late imperial China rather than a king/noble one with a European theming, due to the fact that nobles were often themselves quite powerful in feudal Europe. This theming would be finalized much later in our final prototype.We quickly decided that the emperor would draw a card and decide between doing what’s instructed on said card, or completing the public default objective of solving 5 levels of crisis, which was almost always an option at this stage. We did explore the idea of “star cards,” which were emperor cards that replaced the default, and as such became both mandatory and public. We ended up removing these star cards later, not because of a lack of faith in the mechanic per se, but because the objectives on the star cards just weren’t fun (or were overshadowed by newer, better emperor cards!).But how would the advisors earn points? We bounced this idea around a lot in the first few days of ideation, but settled on keeping it as simple as possible – advisors earn points by embezzling resources made in deals with the emperor, in contrast to the emperor who earns legacy tokens. There were other, much rougher ideas thrown around – should advisors get points from successfully launching a coup, for instance? However, in pursuit of simplicity we struck most of these ideas down, but
ended up keeping the idea that certain crises should reward bonus points to their advisor.
Our first playtest was conducted by our team using a crude prototype of index cards (for crisis types and emperor objective cards), Catan resource cards (wheat, brick, and ore), and golden “legacy” tokens (taken from Catan Game of Thrones edition). On each crisis card, the number of resources required to solve it were written on the front, and the level written on the back. Our goal with this playtest was figuring out how to best handle the role of emperor. We wanted to allow for as many people as possible (ideally every player at least once per game) to don the imperial robes, and initially had two diverging approaches for accomplishing this task: either we rotate the emperorship around the table as rounds end, or make it harder to maintain the emperorship from round to round. We ended up deciding to take the latter approach because the thrill of maintaining a legacy was too compelling to do away with. After our first playtest, which involved a single emperor remaining in power for a protracted period, we realized that legacy tokens were too valuable compared to embezzle-able resources and reduced their value. Moving forward, we made it a priority to continue adjusting the role of emperor in a way that made it difficult for a single emperor to dominate by staying in power for too long. At this stage of development, we resolved to begin addressing this problem by adding an emperor-deposing mechanic to some of the crisis cards which allow advisors to sneakily usurp the throne.
Playtest 2
For our second prototype, we drastically increased the number and variety of our crisis cards. This change allowed us to ensure that each tier of crisis had a larger overlap with the cards in other tiers. In our first prototype, we found that it was hard for Advisors to embezzle resources because the Emperor knew the very tight range of possible resource requirements each tier of crisis cards could have. By expanding the range and allowing for a larger overlap, the Advisors had much more flexibility in how much they could attempt to embezzle from the Emperor. This change was made in response to feedback we received from playtesting our first prototype. Specifically, this change was in response to a TA saying they felt they could not really lie effectively to the Emperor. Additionally, we made each crisis card a different color based on their tier level. This change was added to allow for quick recall of crisis type as opposed to needing to read the number on the card’s back.
One of the first things we learned while playtesting this version was that everyone really appreciated the different colored crisis cards! In addition to identifiability, they also turned out to be a lot of fun in general! As such, we decided to keep this change going forward. In future iterations, we modified the specific colors that each tier is represented by to accommodate red-green color blindness. This accommodation was added after a roommate of some of our teammates playtested this prototype and was unable to differentiate between the Tier 1 and Tier 3 crisis cards.
The next thing we learned was that the addition of flavor text names on crisis cards helped players get immersed in the game’s world and themes, and that lead to players being more involved and roleplaying through the game. This prototype only had two cards with flavor text names on them, but they made the game much more lively when they were in play. Due to this, we decided to keep the names and expand that concept so that every crisis card had their own flavor text name at the top.
Additionally, playtesting this prototype also revealed a major flaw in our design: higher tier crisis cards were a death sentence for the Advisors holding them. Since they were so much more expensive to solve than lower tier crisis cards, Advisors had an extremely difficult time getting the Emperor to solve their crisis—much less embezzle anything on top of that. We playtested several different potential solutions to this problem, and we ultimately decided to add more extreme bonus rewards to higher tier cards in order to encourage the Emperor to solve them, and we changed how Advisors draw crisis cards so that they draw to three in between every round and discard one. These two additions allowed Advisors to be much more strategic with which crisis cards they attempted to solve, and it prevented Advisors from feeling “stuck” or “unlucky” with the crisis cards they happened to draw.
The final major change that came about while playtesting this prototype was how the Emperor was deposed of. In this prototype, the Emperor had 10 resource cards every round, and they would be deposed if they failed to meet one of their two objectives for that round or if an Advisor completed a card that immediately transferred the Emperorship to that Advisor. We found through playtesting that the vast majority of Advisors were unable to band together, oust the Emperor, and overcome the Collective Action Problem. To solve this, we made five major changes. First, we changed the crisis card bonus “You become Emperor” so that the Advisor to the Emperor’s left will become Emperor in the following round. Second, we made it so that the Advisor to the Emperor’s left will always be the next Emperor whenever the current Emperor is deposed. Third, we changed the number of resource cards that the Emperor had access to. Every new Emperorship now starts with 12 cards, and they draw 3 fewer cards for every round in a row that they have been Emperor (12 -> 9 -> 6 ->3). Fourth, an Emperor that would start a round with 3 resource cards is immediately deposed. Fifth, we completely overhauled the monarch cards to encourage the Emperorship to rotate more often. Specifically, we did this by adding in parachute and golden parachute cards that gave the current Emperor a bonus if they completed an optional objective and abdicated the throne. These changes resulted in much more consistent and fun depositions, and it also solved our Collective Action Problem.
This prototype was by far our most impactful. We playtested, iterated, modded, and re-playtested this prototype over and over again, and one of our external playtests lasted for over six hours! It was during our six hour playtest in particular that we finally realized just how fun our game was becoming and how well our systems were working together!
Playtest 3
For our final prototype, we expanded the use of unique crisis names from just 2 crises to every crisis. We substantially upgraded the fidelity of our resource, crisis, and emperor card designs (front and back), created our own tokens (quarters used as stand in for coins for this playtest), role cards, and a rules sheet. See higher-resolution images of components in sections titled “Final Game Components” and “Guidance for New Players”. We also printed on cardstock in order to allow for easy shuffling.
We made the decision to allow advisors to trade resources with the emperor both to give advisors another method through which to make points, as well as to soften the emperor’s dependence on a purely random selection of resources. We also decided to make private every advisor-centric bonus on the crisis cards, and to make public every emperor-centric bonus on the cards. We further chose to give every player 2 coins at game start for use in bargaining, and fine-tuned the advisor role slightly: to give each advisor more options they now draw 3 cards, rather than 2, before choosing 1 to discard. We also adjusted the crisis cards themselves in some key ways: crisis costs were given more overlap between levels to make it more difficult to discern what a crisis was by its cost; average crisis costs were centered on a 1/2/4 scale; any crisis effect that caused a player to be skipped over for the emperorship was removed in favor of an “emperor shifting” focus. The latter change was made to ensure that players don’t have to wait too long before donning the imperial robes.
Due to a printing error, the values of the resources were all 1 higher than they were supposed to be – since we had already printed them out on cardstock, we “fixed” the issue by increasing the value of the emperor’s legacy tokens from 5 to 7 rather than waste more cardstock. During the in-class playtest on April 23rd we received feedback that the game was largely balanced, leading us to believe that the printing error problem was successfully mitigated. We further saw much success during the playtest with the usage of crisis names in helping players get immersed in the imperial Chinese setting – in negotiations, players would routinely use the crisis names as a means of drawing the emperor’s attention – “There is RAMPANT cheating going on in the civil exams!” – which was very exciting to watch!
During our final playtest, we noticed that our playtesters were confused as to how negotiations worked. In Mandate of Heaven, all Advisors can negotiate with the Emperor at the exact same time, and this was counterintuitive to the one-at-a-time negotiations that our playtesters were used to from other games. Additionally, our playtesters were confused as to which resources were kept and which were discarded by both the Advisors and the Emperor. In response, we decided to add in additional clarifications and emphasis to our rulebook regarding round setup, round end, and Emperor deposition. See section titled “Guidance for New Players” with our updated rules, role cards, and a How To video.
Video of our final class playtest of Mandate of Heaven
Additional Documentation
Our notes from all 10 of the playtests in which we actively took notes can be found via the following link.
A spreadsheet containing all of the mechanical changes we have made to the cards from prototype to prototype with additional documentation can be found via the following link.
A complete Google Drive containing additional documentation can be found via the following link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZZM2gPITZZ61IZ_tMB0qu45e57BQYIzU
Final Game Components
- Resources – 18 weapon cards (worth 5 points each), 24 bricks (worth 4 points each), 27 food cards (worth 3 points each)
- Crises – 9 level three crises, 12 level two crises, 10 level one crises
- Emperor cards – 16 total. See spreadsheet here for breakdown of card types.
- Points – 8 legacy tokens, 20 coins
Based on TA design feedback after our final play test, we updated the resource cards to include a smaller sized resource icon in the top left and right corners for easier visibility when fanned in one hand. No other changes were made from the final play test.
A preview of the various card types are shown below. The top left row shows the three resource types. The bottom left cards show the 6 Emperor card variants. In the middle are sample cards from level 3, level 2, and level 1 crises (respectively, from top to bottom). The various back and front designs distinguish between types of hidden and public bonuses. Rightmost are a sample of legacy tokens (left column) and coins (right column). See bottom most section of this post titled “Print & Play + Design Files” to see component design files and printable PDFs ready for gameplay.
Note: weapon, brick, and food icons were generated with DALL-E. The back designs for the cards, legacy tokens, and coins were also DALL-E generated.
Guidance for New Players
As part of the game, players are also provided with a rules sheet and reversible role cards describing game play mechanics for the Emperor and the Advisors. A “How to Play” video was also created to provide a more visual demonstration.
Rules Sheet
A written copy of the rules can be downloaded as a PDF here.
Role Cards
See “Final Print & Play + Design Files” for printable files.
How to Play Video
A video demonstration of Mandate of Heaven in which we go over the rules and demonstrate game set up, round set up, game progression, round end, and game end can be found on YouTube via the following link:
Box Design
Left: front of box; Right: bottom of box. The front box design includes basic information like age range (13+), estimated play time (45-60 min), and number of players (4). Included on the back are a preview of the various card types and relevant themed quotes. Download the pdf here for printing. Note: image backgrounds were generated using DALL-E.
Final Print & Play + Design Files
Printing Instructions: our print files are pre-formatted for double-sided printing (orientation and mirroring taken care of). PDF links are provided for both 8.5″ x 11″ printing and for 11″ x 17″ (which was used when printing our components on card stock). Choose your desired dimensions and ensure that double-sided printing is enabled.
Printables
8.5″ x 11″ (contain all components including cards, tokens, and role cards)
11″ x 17″ (contain all components including cards, tokens, and role cards)
Figma Design Files
For custom printing preparation or viewing of original design files check out the Figma links below:
