Proposal: [Building Blocks] By Our Powers Combined
Copy the rule “Declared Alliances” and its contents from the Building Blocks wiki page to a rule with the same name in the Building Blocks section.
In the rule “Isles of BoardGamia”, add a subrule named “Alliances” with the following text:
A set of Meeples who are each named in the other’s Alliance are considered to be in a Verified Alliance.
A Meeple in a Verified Alliance with the Current Meeple may perform actions described in the rule “The Turn” on behalf of the Meeple who is the Current Meeple; whenever they do so, those actions are performed as if the Meeple who is the Current Meeple is performing them.
This allows Meeples to join Alliances and effectively control each other’s Tokens and Turns, which should speed things up if some Meeples are willing to let others take Turns for them. The “Verified Alliance” option keeps Meeples from doing this maliciously to other Meeples; if you put a Meeple in your Alliance, you are consenting to let them control your Turn for the potential benefit of achieving victory with their help.
. I’m not a big fan of some people just becoming action reserves and not really playing the game at all (at that point, we may as well just kick them out). When I was thinking teams I was more thinking everyone on a team can be the Current Meeple at the same time, and the turn order contains teams rather than Meeples. That way there’d be only 3 delay periods to get through instead of 7, and rounds would go a lot faster
ais523:
While I agree that speeding up the game still further is likely a good thing, I continue to not really be a fan of pooling mechanics.
Although I’m likely to vote against this regardless, some suggestions to fix the wording:
I think the “considered to be the owner of” is likely to lead to weird rules breakages (e.g. you can temporarily change your alliance to change what your most recently moved token is by changing the definition of “your”).
The wording of mandatory actions in the current version of the proposal is broken – if you’re performing actions on behalf of someone else you can end their turn to skip mandatory actions.
I think a better approach (that avoids introducing potentially scammable new mechanics) is to let Meeples in the same Verified Alliance take actions defined in “The Turn” on behalf of each other? That way, it clearly doesn’t let you do anything you couldn’t do on your own, whilst still producing the sort of gameplay you’re likely to be looking for.