Liege Lords: Lords and Vassals

Kevin and I had a great work session this weekend. We want the fun of Liege Lords to revolve around the changing relationships between players more than simply around who controls which territories. Territory and armies are a means to an end, but not the end in itself. Since the main focus of Liege Lords is, in fact, to have players lord over each other in-game, we spent most of our time discussing how to establish and encourage players to enter into liege-and-vassal type relationships, and what that would mean for gameplay.

We established earlier that the two main resources in Liege Lords will be Nobility and something more material and generic, for the time being called Gold. Nobility is a representation of social importance and influence, while Gold is a representation (obviously) of material wealth and buying power. The game will be won or lost based on Nobility, which will also be more difficult to obtain. Nobility determines who can lord over whom, while Gold is a commodity that can be used to buy upgrades to military strength, buy out of vassalship, or to throw a gala ball to earn extra Nobility points.

A player with fewer Nobility points than another can voluntarily become that player's Vassal. This makes the player with more Nobility a Liege, or lord. One advantage of this relationship is that a Vassal's Nobility and wealth increase with the Liege's--like riding the Liege's coattails. The Liege of course then gets the benefits of being lord: requiring tributes of Gold, using the Vassal's armies, or forbidding the Vassal from taking a particular action. It will also be possible for a Liege to force other players to become Vassals by crushing them on the field of battle.

The next step in the process is to get out the gameboard and start balancing the powers of the Liege versus the benefits to the Vassal. And, of course, to identify the numerous ways in which a treacherous Vassal might scheme to turn the tables on the Liege in order to win the game!