Hollandazed: Thoughts, Ideas, and Miscellany — Practical Problems

I had a problem: the players in my highly-interactive game weren't interacting. The Vote tasks one player (Equality) with agitating for a more democratic American society, while their opponent (Supremacy) has to fight them tooth and nail. Equality tries to build popular support, Supremacy tries to confuse the issue with the usual bad faith arguments and calls for unreciprocated civility. Equality tries to garner enough votes for change, Supremacy suppresses them. Equality gets laws passed, Supremacy gets them overturned. And of course while Supremacy is trying to prevent Equality from pursuing their victory, they're trying to rack up points by...

 This is a new series of blog-things where instead of delving into highfalutin experimental game design theory, I look more practically at a specific game design problem and talk about how I solved it. This is the first of a handful about our end-of-year release The Vote, a game about voting rights in America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I had a problem: I didn't want to do the thing that scores me points, because if I did it wouldn't give me enough time to score enough points to win the game. So, let me back up...