Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Whenever a game has a double-digit player count, there’s a 99.97% chance it involves social deduction. Now, I love social deduction games. They give you an excuse to break the social contract and lie to your friends and family, all in the name of fun. They’re also one of the few genres that let you discover just how good the people around you are at scheming and lying. Eventually, you start wondering if their name is even real. That said, I’m also kind of sick of every single large group game being dropped in the social deduction box.
Coalition: Council of the Republic sings a different tune here, focusing on negotiation rather than inevitable betrayal. Better yet, it’s team-based, with four teams competing for influence and potentially a few independents thrown in to make things even messier. Instead of simply figuring out who’s lying, you have to convince people to work with you, negotiate deals, cross your fingers while making promises, and figure out how long those lofty alliances will actually last. All of this in one hour.
Draft Laws, Not Friends
The story behind this is a little more complex than most. The country is suffering through political turmoil and demanding reform, so four teams are tasked with drafting new laws. Naturally, each team wants to push laws that serve its own interests.
Those interests are abstracted into four virtues, each represented by a different color. Every team has two colors it cares about, and each team shares at least one color with another. For example, the Rebels want Red and Green. Red also happens to be important to the Merchants, while Green is important to the Clergy. So right from the start, you have some natural allies.
Passing these laws requires influence, represented by influence cards. The easiest way to think of them is as currency, since you use them to bid on the colors you want to pass through a hidden auction. The catch is that players are split between different councils, and each council has its own separate vote and a sole player who is the Council Chair, a powerful role. So having a fistful of influence doesn’t necessarily mean you’re powerful. It might just mean you’ve got a very expensive way of losing an argument.
Trust Me, I Have a Plan
To add insult to injury, each team has a set of individual powers they can use during the game, such as blocking another player’s influence or evicting the Council Chair. This can completely throw off someone’s plans, meaning that you can spend five minutes negotiating the perfect deal only for another player to pull a card and make your whole plan look pretty silly.
So far, this probably sounds like a lot of moving parts, but once you see how a round actually plays out, it starts to make more sense. Thankfully, the game gives each council a chunky player aid that lays out the process, which is especially helpful because the councils are literally separate tables. Players gather around their assigned table to handle their bids and abuse their powers.
The first part of the round is a simple negotiation. You get five minutes, in real time, to stand up and mingle with members of the other councils. Five minutes doesn’t sound like much, but it’s long enough to cut a deal or three and short enough that nobody can overthink it. Cards can be exchanged, deals can be made, and you can even reveal your hand to prove you’re telling the truth, but it isn’t mandatory.
Promises are also part of the negotiation, although they aren’t technically binding. One small exception exists: the Sigil. Every player starts with one, and handing your Sigil to another player turns a promise into a binding agreement. The catch is that you probably don’t want to hand them out too freely, since there are bonus points at the end of the game for every Sigil your team has collected that belongs to another team.
Public Pain
After five minutes and plenty of yelling, everyone goes back to their seats and starts bidding. It’s a hidden auction, with players secretly choosing how many cards of each color they want to throw in to determine which color gets passed by the council. Win or lose, those cards are gone. Before the winning color is determined, though, everyone gets one chance to activate their power with everyone’s bids revealed.
Every council also has everyone’s nameplate arranged in ascending order, with the player at the top serving as the Council Chair. This position can break ties and, under certain conditions, cause a little trouble for everyone else.
I really like how much weight this gives the position, because suddenly where you sit at the table actually matters. Being at the top is a powerful position that everyone wants to strive for, and it gives each council table a unique feel despite operating under the same set of rules.
Once everyone has had their chance to use their powers, each council officially determines which color gets passed. The colors are marked on the scoreboard, and whichever colors have the majority are the current Edicts in play.
It Isn’t Fair
Edicts can completely upend a team’s situation. Each color is a virtue with its own effect. Red (Freedom) can shove the Council Chair to the bottom of the list. Green (Justice) hands out free influence cards or, in extreme cases, redistributes everyone’s hand. Blue (Order) and Yellow (Wealth) put the Council Chair’s power front and center, letting them force card swaps or funnel extra influence to themselves and a friend. Every color also has a stronger version once it hits a threshold. So while everyone fights over which color passes, they also have to think about what it will do once it gets there.
This is what sets Coalition apart from a simple negotiation game. Not only are you negotiating what benefits your team, but also what Edicts you are willing to unleash on the table. Sometimes, the best play for your team can be to endorse something that will make the biggest threat’s life difficult at the cost of your comfort.
After the Edicts are executed, the player who spent the most cards in their council is declared the “highest bidder” and moves to the next council, forcing a shuffle every round. The game ultimately ends when two of the four colors reach a certain point criteria, where the inevitable tallying of points occurs.
Scoring is relatively straightforward, with points coming from the colors your team helped pass, Sigils collected from other teams, team-specific objectives, and the influence cards you have left in your hand. I like that the game rewards more than simply pushing your team’s preferred colors. The deals you make, the Sigils you collect, and even how well you manage your hand all matter when the dust settles. The giant board tracking the colors even doubles as the scorepad, because apparently Coalition wasn’t interested in giving us another component to keep track of.
Nobody Asked Them
I also have to mention the independents. Four characters with their own objectives that operate completely outside the team system. They don’t care about points and instead win alongside whichever team comes out on top, which means they’re free to cause problems without worrying about the same things as everyone else. Problems like having more cards than everyone else, being in a Council Chair, or keeping everyone close or as far away as possible. To be frank, they make the game way more interesting than without them.
The downside is that all of this can be a lot to process. teams, individual powers, council positions, Edicts, influence, Sigils, and independent objectives all pull at the game at once. The first game or two can feel like everyone else is playing off a script that you don’t know the lines to. The friction is real, and it’s also the cost of the good stuff.
However, just because a game has friction doesn’t mean the game is bad. I have reviewed and played quite a few negotiation games before, such as Waterfall Parks and Wolf Street. I have to say that Coalition, despite its focus on higher player counts and complexity, is perhaps one of the better negotiation games out there. This game feels like those giant mega games at conventions without the crazy commitment or timeframe, and that rarity deserves praise.
Art of Making Enemies
The big reason is the depth underneath the deals and the conflicting goals. Most negotiation games lack layers in their deal-making because information is fully transparent, leaving little to no room for backstabbing. Even Diplomacy, famous for betrayal, only works because orders are written in secret and revealed together.
Because Coalition adds extra bits like sigils, player powers, objectives, and the like, it adds layers upon layers of deal-making, with a toolbox that lets you handle it all. Many powers in this game require another player’s cooperation, so players can use these abilities as leverage to get what they want.
Edicts can upset the balance of power among the players. Unlike most negotiation games, this isn’t a zero-sum game. If you try to play hardball with everyone here, you will often find you and your team out of the running because no one wants to talk to you. Reputation matters here.
It’s also where I’ve seen some players get turned off by the experience. There is no comeback mechanic, and I’ve witnessed teams get decimated on the scoreboard either because they were too aggressive or too passive with their deals. You win here by interacting with others, and sometimes you have to make compromises to get what you want. Or maybe a powerful alliance is pulled off that upsets your plan. If the idea of round outcomes going sideways does not appeal to you, Coalition is going to make you feel pain.
Price of Doing Business
I need to mention that the component quality here has cut more than one corner. Cards are thin, which is a big no-no for a game that expects to pass cards around like a six-pack at a high school party. The player aids are flimsy, practically begging me to get them laminated so they don’t get destroyed on the table. Even the scoreboard could be better; the few times I’ve played it, it’s already had a tiny rip from simply folding the damn thing.
Coalition: Council of the Republic isn’t an easy game to recommend to everyone, but that’s also what makes it so interesting. The game’s flow structure is quite simple, but to negotiate properly, you need to understand the numerous interactions between several systems such as the player powers and Edicts. Once everything clicks, it becomes the kind of negotiation game I rarely see in the hobby.
Trading cards sit in the back seat to managing relationships and leveraging player powers. It can be messy, occasionally brutal, and absolutely unforgiving. Still, when the table gets into it, Coalition becomes one of the few games where you stop thinking about the rules and start worrying about the people sitting across from you. For a negotiation game, that’s exactly where you want to be.
