The Extortionist: an idea for a Tower variation

[mjharper]

Quick idea for a variant, based on a question someone at BGG (piim) just asked me. Like all my attempts at variants, it's just a sketch which will probably prove impractical.

You'll need The Tower. The main idea is that at the end of the game, you have to buy back any followers which have been captured by other players—similar to the way that you lose points for any letters left in your hand at the end of a game of Scrabble.

The current rules make it completely optional whether you buy back followers or not; you're only obliged to exchange followers if two players have captured each other's followers. But if you had a ruling that you were obliged to ransom followers at the end of the game, it might open up an entire strategy: a player could decide to become a serial kidnapper, building towers, capturing followers, and extracting ransoms, rather than building cities and so on.

How to score the ransoms? A couple of ideas.

• 1. One way would be that end-game ransoms are for the same points as during the game. Fairly dull, this wouldn't affect the game much.
• 2. You could also double ransom costs during the game to 6 points—discouraging people from ransoming followers unless they really need them.
• 3. You could abandon in-game ransoms altogether; the only way to get back a follower in game is via exchange. This would be a tough game.
• 4. And you could even have a variable-score ransom, perhaps just like the tower block distribution (two players=10 point ransoms, three players=9 point ransoms, and so on).

Actually, #4 could be used without the 'end-game ransom' idea at all. But the others could be combined in a variety of ways. A game with #2, and #4 would be very expensive; a game with #3 and #4 could be extremely difficult. Both would take Carcassonne confrontation to an unprecedented level…

Over to you.

[Novelty]

Good idea.  How about ransoming with trade goods as well at the end of the game?  That way, someone who has only 1 wheat may be able to trade back their meeple for the trade good?  How about ransoming with the robber baron and the king?  I'm sure there are other ways to ransom a meeple back at the end of the game.

[Tobias]

Or you could have a point system depending on the hight of the tower. The higher the tower - the higher the price. And if someone don't want to get their meeple back, you get to score for it at game end!

Hm, what I'd really want though, is a way to execute prisoners. That would make a game of Evil C even more evil 

[mjharper]

Or you could have a point system depending on the hight of the tower. The higher the tower - the higher the price. And if someone don't want to get their meeple back, you get to score for it at game end!

Could be tricky to remember…

Hm, what I'd really want though, is a way to execute prisoners. That would make a game of Evil C even more evil 

So, what we need here is a way for a player to capture the dragon; and once they have the dragon, any meeples captured are fed to the dragon and never come back. Bwah ha ha!
 

[Scott]

I'm not feeling particularly enthusiastic about fiddling with ransoms. It doesn't add much to the game.

Here's an idea related to the Tower. What if prisoners could be trapped in them and you somehow had to go rescue them? This would have to involve a whole new bunch of game mechanics for a movable type of meeple that would move a fixed or random number of tiles each turn.

[Scott]

Had another thought about towers, prisoners, and dragons. We know that meeples on towers can be eaten by the dragon. For the sake of example, let's say that red has capped a tower with his meeple. He has previously taken one of blue's meeples prisoner during the construction of the tower. The dragon moves and at some point lands at the base of red's tower. How about if red could feed his blue prisoner to the dragon to save himself? This would cause the blue meeple to be returned to blue for redeployment in the future without having to pay any ransom or exchange of prisoners.

[mjharper]

That's a really nice idea. I guess that 'saving himself' would mean that he would get to stay on top of the tower?

You could even extend it to cover any follower that the dragon comes across, actually—you can sacrifice a prisoner to keep a follower where it is…

Either way, though, you'd have to have a plan for what to do with the dragon, since it can't inhabit a tile with a meeple. Maybe the sacrifice is made when the dragon is on the next tile, and sacrificing a prisoner ends the dragon's movement phase? Of course, that wouldn't stop it coming back next time it moved; after all, it will surely figure that you've got an inexhaustible supply of prisoners to feed it with

I was wondering about your earlier suggestion too. That might be tricky to implement; did you have any other thoughts on that?

[Scott]

Yeah, the meeple would get to stay on the tower.

I didn't think of any meeple being able to sacrifice a prisoner. I figured since they are captured by towers, only tower meeples would be able to do it. A thief on the road or a farmer in his field doesn't hold the prisoner captive. Also, by only allowing tower meeples to do this, it partially avoids the problem of the dragon occupying the same tile. There is a chance of the dragon returning on a subsequent movement, but there is also the chance that a volcano will lure the dragon to a different area.

Regarding my earlier idea, my initial thought was that each player would have only one moveable meeple, and the number of tiles it could move per turn would be determined by rolling a normal six-sided die. But part of me wonders if each player should have more than one moveable meeple, and there's probably other things that moveable meeples could be allowed to do, like attacking cities. It might be more of a total conversion than an expansion.

I just had an idea that would be less conflicting with the existing rules. The magic portal would allow a player to deploy their meeple to the base of a tower and rescue a prisoner. Both meeples would then immediately be returned to the player.

[dwhitworth]

I like this prisoner rescue idea. It is simple, needs no extra pieces or tiles and makes for an interesting variation. I like Scott's limitation to rescue from the tower only, but if the rescuer is magic portalled to the base of the tower what happens if the tower tile is not a legal placement for the rescuer? For example the tower could be in a completed city. Perhaps the rescuer should be able to rescue only if the result is a legal placement of the rescuing meeple, or perhaps the rescuer can escape to the nearest legal tile(s).  Or does the rescuer escape back to the players hand along with the prisoner rescued?

[Scott]

The rescuer returns back to the player along with the now-released prisoner, so it would not need to be a legal placement.

[EcoGuy]

I kind of like Matts original idea on ransoming ... easy to implement and uses the existing rules and expands them a little.

Scotts idea of rescuing also is interesting. I wonder if instead of a moving meeple if you could use a mechanic similar to Cathars by completing say a Cloister adjacent to an opponents tower and thus rescuing the prisoner.

Something along these lines would not change many of the mechanics and would theoretically avoid the need for new mechanics and conflicts with other rules. Just a thought.

[Novelty]

Hmm... moving meeples reminds me of wagons.  How about incorporating the wagon rules with... the mayor pieces maybe?

So how about this:

1. Each time a tower captures a meeple, place the meeple lying down at the base of the tower.
2. Whenever a city with a major is completed/scored, the mayor is not returned to hand.  You may move the mayor x tiles away to a road, cloister or another completed city (or a cult place) that is connected by roads to the completed/scored city.  x = or < the size (number of tiles) of the scored city.  A mayor cannot move into an incomplete city or a farm or river.
3. If the mayor is on a tile with a tower and there is a meeple lying down at the base of the tower, you may return the mayor and one of your meeple lying down at the base of the tower to your hand (your choice of meeple if there is more than one, but you can only "ransom" one this way, and you can only "ransom" one of your own meeple.)
4. If you have a mayor that is outside the city, it counts as nothing when that feature is subsequenty completed and scored.
5. During your turn, instead of placing a meeple (or its equivalent), you may remove the mayor from play to your hand provided that it is not in an uncompleted city.
6. When you complete a city (doesn't matter if you don't earn scores for it), and you have a mayor that is outside of a city, you may move the mayor to a road, cloister or another completed city (or a cult place) on an adjacent tile that is connected by road to the initial tile that the mayor is on.

[Scott]

It might be too difficult to complete a cloister next to a tower. Somebody would capture your monk, and then you'd need a magic portal to get back. The only way to complete without using up all the portals would be to cap the tower yourself, in which case you don't really want the cloister there.

The mayor is a good choice for a moveable meeple. I thinking that placing prisoners at the tower base could be a problem though, because tower ownership can change hands because of the dragon. Under the official rules, prisoners are not released when a tower meeple is eaten by the dragon, so it's sort of important for the prisoners to be kept with the player holding them prisoner, UNLESS you're using the feed-the-prisoners-to-the-dragon rule.

[Novelty]

Well, I don't have the Dragon, so I'm not sure how that goes.  Feel free to modify my idea!