How can we best keep players’ resources/influence secret?
This is a critical issue, as a key component we wanted to include in our game is deception, and it’s very difficult to deceive someone when all of the resources at one’s disposal are public knowledge. Recently, my team and I discussed two paths we’d like to playtest: the first involves giving every player a privacy stand akin to what a dungeon master uses in DnD (the emperor will have the coolest one!), which allows players to keep all of the resources at their disposal secret, and encourages them to deceive others. We were, however, worried that players might find that everyone having a privacy stand is too isolating/disconnecting.
We further considered using tokens/cards of uniform size and with uniform backs, but with varying denominations. This would keep things simpler overall and make the gamespace feel more open, but it’d still be harder to conceal your resources as other players can see your pile of treasure even if they aren’t aware of how much it’s all worth. Compared to the approach outlined above, I feel like players will like this one less as a result of having less secrecy potential.
How can we spice up the emperor’s experience and contribute to a sense of fantasy?
We had the wonderful idea of purchasing a silver, jewel-laden crown for this purpose which may be worn by whomever happens to be emperor. We wanted to lean into the asymmetrical nature of the game, as it’s arguably how it most stands out among others in its genre, and the wearing of a crown will likely help the player get into their powerful role a bit more. We also will explore allowing only the emperor to conceal their hand (using a privacy stand), which combined with the crown will hopefully allow the emperor to become more immersed in their position, and make it more of a pressing issue that the emperor maintains this position (lest they give up their extra privacy and crown!).
How many resources should the emperor randomly draw each round?
This is a crucial issue as it determines the ease with which the emperor is able to solve crises. If they consistently don’t have enough resources, the emperor will never be able to stay in power for more than 1 turn, which is quite underwhelming. So we’ll play our game over and over with different amounts of cards drawn by the emperor each time, and see which amount leads to the best balance between difficulty and fun. I’d imagine that 4 cards times the number of advisors will be best here, but this needs to be thoroughly playtested first!
