Trust in Games Needs Mechanical Support
Temporary alliances add a lot to a game. Working together feels great because it creates a shared sense of purpose. But being stabbed in the back by a teammate hurts a lot. To make alliances work in competitive games, players need to believe that their partners will follow through. The easier it is to back out of a deal, the weaker agreements become. To address this, you can:
- Make deals binding
- Make betrayal difficult
- Make retaliation easy
If you want players to ally with each other, you should make sure at least one of these conditions holds for your game.
Binding Deals
The most direct approach is to make betrayal mechanically impossible. This is common in trade but less common in other types of agreements. In Dune, all agreements are binding, including deals about future actions. This guarantees that players cannot go back on their word. The difficulty with this approach is that it creates fuzzy edge cases when promises become mechanically impossible to fulfill. What should happen if you promised to send troops to a location, but they die before they can make it? While some players don't mind fuzziness, others want an "official" answer to any rule situation that may arise, and this lack of clarity can frustrate them.
Difficult Betrayal
Making betrayal difficult may be less strict than banning it, but it is often easier to express in rules. In Carcassonne, all tied players on a feature score the full point value, which encourages players to build features together. Joining a follower into a feature always takes at least two turns: one turn to place it on a separate feature and another to connect the two features. It is difficult for one player to swoop in and steal all the points without their intentions being obvious well in advance. On small and medium features, it is often not worth the effort.
Easy Retaliation
Giving allies leverage against you is the most indirect way to discourage betrayal. Rather than using mechanical barriers, it relies on the threat of retaliation. In Twilight Imperium, as part of a trade, players can exchange Promissory notes. Many of these notes give the recipient a way to harm or hinder the giver, for example, by preventing them from moving ships into a system. This makes players less likely to betray opponents who hold one or more of their promissory notes, since they will have plenty of warning.
Conclusion
Alliances are a fun way to create temporary teams in multiplayer games and help balance games in favor of players who are behind. To make them work, you need to make betrayal difficult or costly. Otherwise, players may not trust each other enough to cooperate. Worse, in some cases, betrayal can create social tension that lasts beyond the game. Unless your game is specifically about betrayal, it is usually best to prevent it from intruding on gameplay altogether.
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