i’m personally inclined to redex this, since i want to experiment with genuinely hidden objectives. but — i’m open to changing my mind if everyone else feels strongly about it :0

A game with genuinely unknown objectives feels like a very difficult one to play. The idea that I could lose a game of Agenda Chess when you revealed the secret “take a pawn with a queen” and “arrange seven pieces into a smiley face” goals that I didn’t know existed (because you wrote them yourself, or because another player wrote them and kept the secret to themselves) and that I wasn’t able to anticipate or block in any way.

I have an alternative Proposal that at least solves the “write my own path to victory” problem:

https://blognomic.com/archive/not_on_my_agenda

An unguessable Agenda might still be dealt to an accomplice, with the same effect.

I’m not sure how unguessable Agendas dealt to rivals would play out - if I write a smiley face Agenda and later notice someone probably starting to build one, I guess I might tell the group exactly what the Agenda was, or at least gnomically advise on how to block it (both of which may be weighed up as a bluff).

Yes, an unguessable Agenda might still be dealt to an accomplice, but you can’t guarantee that. When writing Agendas, you’d have to weigh that possibility against the possibility of it falling into the hands of a rival and make a risk decision on whether or not to do so.

I did think about prohibiting Agendas from going to Machinists that are in an Alliance with the author of an Agenda, but since Alliances are fluid, that becomes a whole mess on its own.

I think just having that possibility of not knowing where the Agendas will land is sufficient to keep Agenda-writing interesting without making it too powerful.

I think it comes down to whether whoever wrote the Agendas you get dealt chooses to call you out when they see you progressing them. If they don’t (because you have a private agreement, or because they’ve stopped playing), nobody else will ever guess that Agenda and it will be much easier to complete. Players unlucky enough to be dealt Agendas from attentive rivals will have a much harder time of it.

Perhaps I’ve got the wrong idea of the general shape this dynasty will take. I’m reading it more as a shared arena where we’ll try to complete our goals and other players will help or hinder that, rather than a solitaire where we all get dealt middling-difficulty goals and try to achieve them quickly without interference.

i do think you’ve got some good points, Kevan — but i’d much prefer finding an in-between method of making Agendas easier to guess/learn, rather than revealing them all from the start. i think that having all of the potential Agendas on the table while we’re initially building the ruleset will make it a much more painful process, and will make it very easy for players to get hedged out completely in the earlygame.

[Lemon] It’s going to be very hard to fairly reveal and/or balance an unbalanced deck of victory cards when we, as a group, don’t know what’s written on those cards or who has which ones!

I don’t follow what you mean about hedging out, or how a public Agenda list would be worse than a secret one for that. Writing an unbalanced deck and dealing it blind - where only the “unfairest” extremes of difficulty have been removed, and one player might get dealt two easy-but-fairish Agendas, while their neighbour gets dealt two difficult-but-fairish ones - is going to hedge some people out from the start, they just won’t know it.

If the list is public, the group can recognise it as unbalanced and amend it before we deal the cards out.

I guess one of the pleasures of BlogNomic is that dynasties aren’t that long (in Nomic terms, anyway) so we can try things that are a little unbalanced or erratic just to see how they play out. This proposal seems to me too cut a little too deeply into the core of the central dynastic mechanic set out by the emperor; perhaps the Imperial author is only semi-dead.

Lemon had mentioned the Veiled Fate board game as the inspiration, and I didn’t think this was going against that. I’ve not played the game, but it appears to use, as you’d expect, a printed and public knowledge deck of cards, rather than a free-text handwritten set that players don’t get to look through until after somebody has won.

@Kevan you’re right about what’s in Veiled Fate — but i don’t want this to be just like Veiled Fate, i want it to be like Veiled Fate meets Nomic! i’m aware that it’s experimental, and that’s a good thing to me.

so i see where you’re coming from, but i want to see how genuinely hidden objectives will influence the construction of a ruleset. if you’re concerned about balance, maybe you or i could propose an alternate mode of distribution aside from random, or some sort of vetting process for Agendas?

Oh, every dynasty is something-meets-Nomic, I’m all for that.

It’s your idea of “genuinely hidden objectives” that I’m not sure about - which if I understand correctly means “genuinely surprising objectives”. There may be amendments that let us peek at or shuffle Agendas or whatever, but that ultimately you want there to be some element of a player being able to complete an Agenda that their opponents were entirely unaware of and that they would never have guessed in a million years. Being on the losing side of that feels like it’s going to be frustrating.

I’ll close this proposal, anyway.