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Inflation, Endgames and The Devil’s Plan

(This article has some “broad stroke” spoilers for S2, and then a section at bottom with full spoilers. I will likely update this article in a few days after I finish the season).

I am currently watching The Devil’s Plan Season 2 (see my comments on Season 1) (I finished ep 11 10). I recently wrote up Mind’s Eye Theatre as an entry for the 20th Century Project, so I’ve been thinking about live action games recently, which is kinda related to this reality show if you squint hard. I remembered an article I read in Inter*Act (a -zine related to LARPing) that discussed how to build a good in-game economy.

(Some board games also struggle with this).

In a game, if “Money == victory” then that’s not a problem. But often in games you have “money” and you have “points;” money is a tool to buy points. Consider a game where points are bought via auction. The last point will cost as much money as the most player has,1 but before that you could probably buy points much cheaper. That’s because the money is valueless in the final auction, but before you could carry it over to the next auction, if the point was too expensive.

(The game Q.E. takes this to the extreme in that players are free to print as much money as they want to buy production for their economies, but if you print the most money your economy crashes).

If players keep building up their revenue, but the points are limited to auctioning one a turn (or whatever), the game will have a marked inflationary flavor. So to make the money feel stable, you’ll probably need to grow the opportunities to spend money for points in relative sync.

Or consider an engine builder game. In many engine builder games the best advice is to “Get Money Early, Buy Points Later” and the primary tension is “When do I start the conversion?”2

Anyway, in the Inter*Act article the authors were very aware that “in game currency” tends to suffer rampant inflation in the endgame as the various McGuffins become important to players individual victory conditions, which rarely related to currency at all. Player X would spend all his money to buy his McGuffin from Y, who would use that new stack of cash to by his desired McGuffin from Z, etc.

The article suggested a few things to keep currency stable: Some of the items should have NPC producers/consumers. (For example, in a game set in Casablanca there was a great demand for Exit Visas, which some PCs had, but an NPC crime boss could also sell you one at a steep price3. Or a store might have standard items and buy them, or sell them back at a markup), and games should have characters that view money as a victory condition. (Such as two millionaires competing for most wealth).

Like a good electrical engineer, I mentally converted this to “Currency should have sources and sinks to keep a good flow going.”

Good games (mostly) get this right. Some O.G. Euros have meh economics that fail at the end; but generally if the economy doesn’t work its a bad game, and if the economy works its a good game.

And then there’s The Devil’s Plan. In Season 2 I’ve been much happier with the games, but feel like I should forward that Inter*Act article to the producers. I couldn’t put my finger on it before, but now I know that the design of their economy feels …. wrong.

For those who haven’t watched: Players start the game with a “piece” and can earn and lose pieces through the games (They can also trade amongst one another, but only during down time between games).

The big rule is that If/When you lose your last piece, you are eliminated.

For the daily (“main”) games, the winner(s) will often gain piece(s) and the loser(s) will lose some piece; you can sometimes spend pieces to buy an in-game bonus. As the week goes on there are more and more “drains” so players get eliminated. Also in Season 2, each day the poorest half of the players are sent to prison4 and one prisoner is eliminated (and in that game, having the most pieces of the prisoners doesn’t help).

Why do I feel like The Devil’s Plan economy is wack? Well, without going into spoilers, I think the first thing is that they need to have more sources and sinks and generally more pieces. There is often a massive tie at some point, so the rule is just “whoever has the most pieces decides,” which does mean that having the most pieces is a big deal, and having a marginal piece to get out of the tie for being sent to prison is a big deal, but the number of pieces is too small.

They need to devalue the pieces to help the granularity. It’s not really devaluing, each player starts with 1/nth of the pot, so it doesn’t matter whether the pot is 14 pieces or 28.

Poker — of course — has developed many theories about how much chips are worth when you have N chips out of a total of M chips in players hands. This is massively relevant to games like The Devil’s Plan. But the short form is that “each chip you have has diminishing returns.” Losing your last chip is game over, but getting one more chip when you have half of them (in a 10 player game) isn’t a big deal. Of course Poker and the Devil’s Plan have a different betting structure, but the producers need to be aware of this. (The pro-poker players they have on certainly know this).

Starting each player with 3 pieces and increasing the awards (and penalties) would help. But when increasing the awards, instead of just doubling/tripling the big awards, add a large number of smaller (one piece) awards. The first game often sees only 2-3 people win pieces, which makes a giant tie. Make the first game have 2-3 people win big numbers, but a scattering of people who gain a piece. And, if you start with multiple pieces, you can start with a small penalty.

(You can’t make the game too complicated: the players and audience must be able to follow the games).

The game quickly split into “Prisoners vs Upstairs,” because there was not enough economic mobility between the two. Having pieces also be able to be spent in game meant that upstairs was in a position to spend more to lock in a victory.

How could the economy be fixed while being made more interesting?

Well, one thing that is missing is the ability to contract! If players could make binding deals (enforceable by the moderators) then that would open up a whole new aspect of the game. In the game everything short of violence and theft is explicitly allowed5, but what if people could formalize their alliances (at least for short term).

Also, where are the banks? Imagine if a player could take out a loan! Say 3 pieces, which must be paid back (with 1 piece interest) over the next four days. Everyone could simply take out a loan, but that would put some liquidity into the system, which needs it. Prisoners could take out a loans and then bundle it up, which the upstairs might be loathe to counter.

I am reminded of Air Baron (I’ve been playing with the TaoLing recently) where each airline can take out a single loan, but you can’t increase the value … you have to pay it off and then take out a new loan. This is weird, but an interesting game mechanism. Do you take out a $50 loan right away, even though you probably only need $30, just to lock in the liquidity? Are you willing to eat the extra interest? If each player only got one loan per game *and* the maximum loan was explicitly tied to “how much market share does the leader have” then you get this dynamic where “X takes out a loan for $3,” “Y takes out a loan for $6!”

(Perhaps only allowing people to take out loans during the game, but also allowing it during the post-game pre-prison time is good. It’s now an auction! And the dramatic tension of looming interest payments!)

And of course, what if you could deposit a piece in a CD and earn interest? You run this risk that not having that piece means you get eliminated (particularly if the rule is that you must always have an available piece)! But (particularly if the prison has more opportunities to earn points than upstairs) perhaps you might want to deposit a piece to get sent down to form alliances and chat it up!

(Perhaps the wealthiest person should get their own area and also be isolated from the rest of upstairs! That would wreck havoc with alliances).

I’ve argued that Devil’s Plan has too much meta-gaming, but I like these ideas because it formalizes what was meta-gaming and makes it less free form. I want the game to be more like Titan in that it creates interesting limitations on how players can collude and attack each other. (See my geeklist for board games that would work well in the Devil’s Plan).

Random minor tweaks that would be fun, but i haven’t thought through

  • Perhaps the prisoner who is eliminated can give their pieces to other prisoners prior to leaving, or “leave a will”, which would also make being a prisoner have some potential upside. Call it “rehabilitiation money.”
  • Alternately, charge the people upstairs for their quarters. (A single piece for all players! Paid for by the player in the lead, as a tax!)
  • Arguably prison should only count the pieces earned/lost on the current day and not “inherited wealth!” (or have a “prisoner” penalty that sends you down no matter how many pieces you have).

Anyway, that’s my spoiler-free thoughts. I’d love to see Bryan Caplan (an economist who runs his own game convention!) thinks. (I would absolutely go to Capla-Con ’25 if I were closer).

Thoughts involving spoilers are below

Things that I’d like to see that are spoilers

So, spoilers:

  • The meta puzzles are great; I want more with less impact. They are too swingy. There were two puzzles worth ten pieces; but since everyone involved had watched Season 1 they were both discovered and solved quickly. This is a show for gamers, you have to assume they’ve studied the game.
  • So … more micro puzzles (ideally, in game and tied in with the set design). Keep the puzzles worth 20 pieces, but make four or eight puzzles instead of two (or have layers to them). Make puzzles mutually exclusive — each game has a puzzle but you are time constrained “win the game” or “focus on the puzzle?”
  • The upstairs puzzle was worth way more than the downstairs puzzle (the same piece count, but it let the player hide the pieces). This was an obvious flaw. In general, to promote mobility the prison should have more rewards. But clearly “10 pieces you can claim at any time” is dominant (from a game theoretic point of view) over “10 pieces you get now.” The upstairs puzzle would have been balanced at maybe 5 (hidden) pieces.
  • The revelation of the upstairs puzzle reward and “everyone looses a piece each five rounds during Bet and Doubt” triggered my thoughts (“Someone needs to consider the economic design of the game, it’s weak”) and led me to this post. The player named 7-High6 (a poker player, and short stacked) let out an audible gasp/curse when that rule was revealed, because he knew how much it screwed him over. I haven’t (as of this writing) watched the game yet, but the fact that the two leaders can just shove chips back and forth to time out the other players instantly occurred to me (and to the leaders) and I’m sure to 7High. The player order draw will be massively important.
  • There were points that were done OK, such as penalties like “Lose half your pieces” which helps to tighten the game up.
  • The design of Bet and Doubt (basically, “Liar’s Dice“) does help in that it gives each player four more pieces (the extra dice) but makes losing them painful (or you can lose a piece instead of a die) but the draining
  1. Well, $1 more than the second most player has, at least. ↩︎
  2. One of the reason Tom Lehmann’s games are so interesting and popular: he’s very aware of this pattern and tries to subvert it and put in “low income” paths to victory and paths where “make the best short term move each turn” isn’t optimal. ↩︎
  3. Escaping a bad regime is one case where “your money is literally worthless unless spent” makes sense. ↩︎
  4. The set design is wonderful and the prisoners only get bread and milk for dinner, where as the non-prisoners get a lovely spread. ↩︎
  5. Which is fine in a game shown, obviously, but even the “betraying someone on a reality show” does cause many of the participants discomfort and stress. One of the nice things about The Devil’s Plan is that the cast is great. Even the ‘jerks’ are appropriately calibrated. “I’m betraying you in a game, which we all came here to win” and not being jerky outside of the game. ↩︎
  6. And for the love of all that is Holy, producers, please cast more people with memorable names and looks. Maybe if I were watching the show in English it wouldn’t be a problem, but for whatever reason Korean names (and often — faces) do not stick in my head and I lose track of who is who. Anime makes all the characters have a different weird hairstyle for a reason ↩︎
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