Diplomatic Immunity
Design log

How the game got here

Every version, every critique pass, and the reasons. Newest sections are at the bottom.

v0.1 → v0.2: from notes to a playable game

The original notes are preserved in the original design notes. Here is what v0.2 decided and why.

Question from the notes Decision Why
Choose your goal, or goal per character? Goals are a deck. Deal 2, keep 1, hidden. Characters own exits, not goals. Keeps balance to two independent problems (goals vs goals, characters vs characters) instead of one multiplied problem. Hidden goals plus public characters gives the table something to read.
Does lobbying retroactively cover crimes? No. Laws only affect crimes committed after they pass. Amnesty (a Law) and the Fixer's Redline are the deliberate exceptions. Retroactivity as a scarce card is a decision; as a rule it's bookkeeping.
Where's the push-your-luck? Heat vs hidden hands. Bust is deterministic (Heat ≥ Limit) but rivals hold Leaks, Frames and Blackmail. Safe heat is 3 against one hostile card; 4 is the gamble. A visible line you can't cross is a puzzle. A visible line that other people can push you over is a gamble.
Two heat models in the notes (per-crime cover vs total heat vs coverage) One track. Covered or legal crimes add 0 Heat; everything else adds its printed Heat; bust at your Limit. One number to watch. Coverage lives on the cards, not on a second track.
Last one standing Fallback win, not a goal card. Attrition goals can't coexist with race goals; a race winner ends the game before attrition pays off.
How do you strip immunity? Persona Non Grata is a Law. Needs a vote the target participates in. The cost of stripping the leader is table consensus, which is exactly the politics the game wants.
Does bust eliminate? Two-strike. Scandal costs money, Rap Sheet and heat; second Scandal recalls you but you keep voting. Elimination at minute 30 of a 40-minute game is fine only if the eliminated player still has a lever. Voting is that lever.
Turn order Morning / Afternoon / Evening: upkeep, crimes, politics. Politics comes after crimes. Exits are played in the Evening, so "one last spree, then bail" happens in a single turn. Laws proposed after your crimes help everyone else first, which makes them table deals rather than private buffs.
Game length Headline pile is the clock. 12 / 10 / 8 rounds by player count. Most money wins if nobody exits. Guarantees an ending, gives a final-round frenzy, and scales down for 8 players.
Two decks, Munchkin-style Street (crimes, covers, tricks) and Politics (laws, favors, exits). You choose which to draw from. The draw choice is the simplest strategic decision in the game: are you in a crime phase or an exit phase?
Player count 3–8, best at 3–5. 12 characters as 6 archetype pairs (woman/man). Pairs share Bend and Cost so there are 6 kits to balance, but 12 faces on the table. At 7–8 a kit can appear twice.

Critique pass 1 (design on paper)

What I attacked, the verdict, and what changed.

  1. Frame moving 2 Heat was a kill card. Anyone at 3 died to it with no response. Reduced Frame and Blackmail to 1 Heat so the maximum single-card burst is +1 (+2 under Free Press). Two rivals still combine to kill a player at 3, which is the intended risk.
  2. Scandal stripping Immunity made stripped players unrecoverable. With Limit 3 and one Leak, they'd be hunted to death. Moved immunity loss to Persona Non Grata only and gave Scandal a different bite: half your money and your whole Rap Sheet.
  3. Defect needing Heat ≥ 3 was impossible without Immunity (Limit 3 busts at 3). Lowered to Heat ≥ 2.
  4. Notorious needed Heat 4 in the Evening after cooling in the Morning, which meant ending the previous turn at 5. Impossible. Moving politics after crimes fixed this and made every exit turn a "spree then bail" turn, which was the feel we wanted.
  5. Voting every Evening at 6+ players would drag. Most Evenings are a Favor or a pass; Laws are only 20 of 46 Politics cards. Quiet Diplomacy headline gives a politics-free round. Watch this at 7–8.
  6. Cooling 1 vs 2. Cooling 1 gives a spree/cool rhythm: a 1+2 turn then a light turn. Cooling 2 lets you spree every turn. Chose 1; the Spouse gets 2 as their bend, which is a live test of what cooling 2 feels like. See knob K1.

Critique pass 2 (the built cards)

  1. Ambassador's cost (max 2 crimes) barely bit. Most turns are 2 crimes anyway. A double vote in a 4-player game is 2 of 5 votes. Changed the cost to 1 crime per turn. Untouchable still works for them.
  2. Legalise Muscle + Muscle's heat-removal effects makes Bury the Story a free "remove 3". Everyone with Immunity benefits equally, so it's symmetric, but it turns Kingpin into a walk. Left as is; it's a 1-of Law the table can vote down or Repeal. Knob K6.
  3. Debauched Gala at 8 players is a mass Leak. Symmetric take-that; it's fine at this weight. Knob K7 if it proves miserable.
  4. Puppet Master is achieved by proposing Laws people want. Legalise laws are popular, so the Puppet Master player is incentivised to be generous. That's a nice emergent property. Kept.
  5. Spouse may be the strongest kit (cool 2 with Limit 5 sustains 3 Heat of crime per turn, roughly $6M). Their cost of no Laws matters less at high player counts. Top of the playtest watch list.
  6. Gag Order removes the core danger for as long as it stands. Deliberate: a leader will fight to pass it and the table will fight to Repeal it. 1-of.
  7. Missing rulings. Added: Recalled players can't be targeted; "one player" includes yourself (self-Leak for Notorious/Defect).
  8. Spook at 3 players effectively needs both other players to pass any Law. Harsh, but that's the cost, and the Spook has other tools. Watch it.
  9. Exit scarcity is the real race. 12 Exits in 46 Politics cards. Goals are reached around rounds 5–7 by rough maths; the bottleneck is finding an Exit. Diplomatic Cable and Graft's "draw Politics" effects matter more than they look. Knob K4.

Critique pass 3 (simulation)

A crude 4-player Monte Carlo of the Heat economy (cool 1, Limit 5, two cautious players who stop at Heat 3, two greedy players who push to 4, rivals Leak anyone at 3+).

Setting Scandals per player (cautious / greedy) Extravagance reached Kingpin reached
v0.2 as written ($20M / 7 crimes) 0.00 / 1.10 round 4 round 6
$30M / 9 crimes 0.00 / 1.08 round 7, 9% never round 7, 15% never
$30M / 9, cooling 2 0.00 / 0.69 round 7, 4% never round 7, 6% never
$35M / 10 0.00 / 1.08 round 8, 20% never round 8, 20% never

Findings and changes:

  1. Goals were far too fast. With the original numbers the goal phase was over by round 4 of 12 and the rest of the game was an Exit hunt. Raised Extravagance to $30M, Kingpin to 9, Specialist to 5, Untouchable to 6 crimes, Notorious to 5 crimes, and Jack of All Trades to 6 crimes including all four types. Goals now land around round 7 with a real chance of missing for players who never push.
  2. The gamble is real. Cautious players never bust; players who push to 4 eat about one Scandal per game. That is the intended shape: pushing is faster and punished roughly a third of the time.
  3. Cooling 2 halves the greedy bust rate. Keep cooling 1 as default (knob K1) and let the Spouse be the live test.
  4. The sim ignores Laws, Covers of the right type, Muscle heat removal, and character kits. Treat it as a smell test, not a balance pass.

Critique pass 4 (writing the explainer)

Scripting a full example game is a good consistency test: every scene has to be legal. Things it surfaced and what changed:

  1. Character Heat Limits were stated as absolutes (Heir 6, Attaché 4) which left the no-Immunity case ambiguous. Rewritten as modifiers (+1 / −1 on the base 5 / 3), so the Heir is 6 / 4 and the Attaché 4 / 2, and they stack with Laws and Headlines.
  2. The Spouse could be dealt Puppet Master, which they can never meet, and can't use Elected. Added a Goal replacement rule in setup and a note on the Elected card.
  3. No vanilla diplomat exists to teach with. Every character modifies something, so the tutorial chapters use four plain "Diplomat" seats and introduce kits in chapter 7. Worth considering a printed "Attaché-in-training" card with no kit for first games.
  4. Self-Leak is legal and useful (Notorious, Defect). Kept, and it's now in the rules.
  5. The example game (Heir, Spook, Spouse, Attaché) plays out legally under the rules as written, including a Phone Call Home, a double Leak Scandal, a Persona Non Grata vote the Spook can't join, a Reinstatement, and a Vendetta win via Private Jet in round 7.

The explainer site

site/ is a static page: index.html, styles.css, data.js (all cards and characters, mirrors CARDS.md and CHARACTERS.md), scenes.json (the 35-scene script with narration text and timed actions), app.js (the table renderer and scene player), and narration/*.mp3 (ElevenLabs, voice "George"). gen_narration.py regenerates audio. The player replays every earlier scene instantly when you jump, so any scene can be opened directly and the table state is always consistent.

v0.3: Departures replace Exit cards

The principle. Nobody at the table wants to let anyone else win. Any rule that needs a rival's yes vote, consent, or generosity is a dead rule. v0.2 had two: the Pardon vote and the 12 Exit cards you had to draw. A player could meet their Goal and lose to the deck.

What changed.

  1. Exits are gone as cards. The six Departures are printed on the back of every quick-reference card and are always available. Each Goal card names the two doors its holder may use, so Goals feel different in the endgame and the door list is short enough to remember.
  2. No Departure needs a vote. Pardon now means "Heat 0". Elected needs a Law of yours in effect plus $4M, which you earned earlier through votes people had their own reasons to cast.
  3. Booking is public and resolves at once. Reveal Goal, name door, pay, then the table goes round once with Anytime and React cards. Only a Tip-Off or a Scandal stops you. Laws, crimes and Afternoon tricks can't be used; there's no waiting round for a coordinated table to unload. The Goal is checked at booking and not again.
  4. Tip-Off is now the most important card in the box. It cancels a crime or a Departure and there are only three. Spending one early on a big crime is a real cost. Shred answers it. That two-card exchange is the endgame's Coup moment.
  5. The six old Exit cards became dual-use Favors. An ordinary Use for anyone, and a Departure bonus that waives a door's cost. Never required, always welcome.
  6. Goal and door pairings are thematic and asymmetric. Untouchable leaves by Pardon at Heat 0, where five Leaks are needed to bust them. Notorious leaves by Defect at Heat 2+ with no Immunity, where one Leak busts them. The risky Goal has the risky door.
  7. Marriage stays because both players win. It's the one cooperative door and the table responds to each spouse separately.

Rejected alternative: a one-round wait. Booking, then surviving a full round before leaving, was considered. Against a table that all want you stopped it lets everyone unload their Afternoon tricks and pass a Persona Non Grata, which makes leaving close to impossible at 5+ players. The immediate response window keeps the pile-on but caps it at cards already in hand.

Teaching note. Playtesters were confused by Morning / Afternoon / Evening. They are the three steps of one player's turn, not three turns. The rulebook now opens the turn section with a one-line diagram and a "sample turn in one breath".

New knobs.

# Knob Default Turn it if...
K11 Tip-Off count 3 Departures never fail: 4. First booking always wins: keep, add Shred
K12 Shred count 2 Tip-Offs feel unbeatable: 3
K13 Doors per Goal 2 a Goal's doors both feel dead: 3 for that Goal
K14 Response window once round the table 7-8 players too brutal: "three players to your left only"

v0.4: Favors, Maneuvers, and an Anytime Repeal

Favor chips. Three per player in seat colour. A chip is your word: give it in any deal, cashable by the holder for "Vote with me" (any vote) or "Take it back" (a Dirty Trick or Tip-Off just played against them). Cashed chips return to the owner. The promiser may break their word for 2 Heat, in which case the holder keeps the chip.

Why this shape:

Renamed the no-vote cards to Maneuvers. "Favor" is the word players will use for the chips ("you owe me a favor"), so the cards had to move. Laws, Maneuvers, Favors: vote on Laws, play Maneuvers, trade Favors.

Repeal is Anytime. Laws are checked when Heat is taken, so a Repeal during a crime's reaction step strips a Legalise law out from under the criminal. It also reopens a Gag Order mid-Departure. Two copies, unchanged count.

Ninth Goal: Everyone Owes Me. Hold Favor chips from three different players. Doors: Elected, Marriage. The negotiator's win; also the Goal most exposed to Recall (a Recalled player's chips are void).

Character texture that falls out for free. The Ambassador's chip buys two votes. The Spook's chip is worthless at the vote and valuable at the airport, since they hold the most tricks. The Heir, who starts broke, will be the first to pay in chips.

Watch list.

# Knob Default Turn it if...
K15 Chips per player 3 votes feel bought: 2. Chips never move: 4
K16 "Take it back" during Departures allowed first booking always succeeds: disallow
K17 Breaking cost 2 Heat nobody ever breaks: 1. Everyone breaks: 3

v0.5: player count capped at 6

The 7–8 player range is gone. With six archetypes, a full table is one of each, which is cleaner to teach, and the two scaling problems (three Tip-Offs and five Leaks being too few at eight seats; every crime pausing for seven reactions) stop being problems. Immunity and Quick Reference drop to 6 copies, chips to 18, box total 175 cards.

v0.5: money has to leave

The problem. Money entered on every crime and only left through a Departure, the Heir's upkeep, one Headline and Scandals. Bribes just moved it around. Over twelve rounds the table inflated, Extravagance got easier the longer you waited, and the fallback ending (most money) rewarded sitting still.

The fix: costs on the cards that reduce risk. Crimes, Leaks and Tip-Offs stay free because they are the risk. Safety and information cost money.

Fixed in the same pass (v0.5):

Still open: Notorious can't use Defect (Limit drops to 3 on booking, instant Scandal); Everyone Owes Me is impossible at 3 players; Limit changes mid-turn need a written ruling; crime reaction order needs the same clockwise rule as Departures; the Diplomatic Marriage card bonus lets a player hand a win to a friend; Tip-Off and Leak counts don't scale to 7-8 players; every crime pausing for reactions will drag at 6+ (consider reactions only on Heat 2+ crimes).

# Knob Default Turn it if...
K18 Filing fee $1M laws never get proposed: $0. Politics still free-feeling: $2M
K19 Hush Money price $3M per Heat rich players never bust: $4M. Nobody uses it: $2M
K20 Extravagance $25M never reached with sinks: $20M

v0.5: rounding the box to 180 cards

175 cards left five empty slots on the tenth 18-card sheet. Filled with: a Trainee character (no Bend, no Cost, once-per-game draw 3) as the teaching card and a stand-in seventh seat; two Headlines (Bank Holiday: no Maneuvers this round; Rate Cut: Hush Money costs $1M this round); a Bribes and Favors reference card; one blank. No rules changed.

v0.5: the door's price comes out first

Goals are now checked after the Departure cost is paid. Extravagance means $25M over and above the Jet's $8M or the Marriage dowry, which is what the card now says. Before this, a player at exactly $25M could book the Jet and leave with $17M, which made the money Goal cheaper than it read.

Proposed, not yet adopted: character Departure clauses

Idea: escape difficulty should track kit power. Stars measure complexity, not power (the one-star Spouse may be the strongest kit), so values must come from playtesting. Mechanism: a one-line Departure clause per character, layered on the Goal's doors, using money and conditions rather than extra table responses. First guesses: Spouse +$3M and Pardon needs Heat 0 this turn and last; Fixer +$2M; Spook may not book under Gag Order; Ambassador and Attaché none; Heir -$3M; Trainee -$2M. Play as a house rule first; print on the next run.

v0.6: a Departure takes a round

Before: book, pay, the table responds once with cards in hand, resolve immediately. Only a Tip-Off or a Scandal could stop you, and a money Goal was checked before anyone could touch the money.

Now: book in your Evening (reveal Goal, name door, pay it, marker). Every other player takes a full normal turn with you as the target. At the start of your next turn you resolve instead of playing: no Scandal since booking, no Tip-Off on you, and the Goal still met with the door already paid. Success: win. Failure: skip that turn, marker off, Goal stays face up, price not refunded.

Why the change. Raymond's rule: a money Goal has to be over and above the door, and if someone takes money off you during the escape, the escape should fail. That needs a window in which the money can be taken, so the whole card pool becomes relevant to stopping a leaver: Shakedown, Kidnap the Chef, Blackmail, Repeal on an Elected player's Law, Amnesty on a Notorious player. The earlier one-pass response was a Tip-Off duel; this is the whole table's turn.

Consequences and levers.

# Knob Default Turn it if...
K21 Wait length one full round first bookings never succeed at 5-6: "until the third player after you has taken a turn"
K22 Departure card bonus waives the door's cost leavers need more help: "resolve immediately, no wait"

v0.7: two protections for the leaver, from the playtest engine

tools/playtest.py (300-game aggregates, hostile rivals) showed v0.6 working at 3-4 players (three quarters of games end by Departure, half of bookings succeed) and failing at 6 (46% of games end by Departure, 24% of bookings succeed, half the failures from five rivals' stacked Leaks). Two changes bring 6 players to the 4-player feel, 74% and 53%:

Playtest report: PLAYTEST.md. Narrated games: PLAYTEST-LOG-3p.md, PLAYTEST-LOG-6p.md.

v0.8: hitting 80-90% escapes at six players

Target set by Raymond: at 6 players, 80-90% of games should end with someone meeting their Goal and escaping. v0.7 measured 69% at 6 players (79% at 3, 81% at 4). Half the clock endings at 6 were games where nobody reached a Goal in 10 rounds; the other half were failed bookings with no time to rebook. Sweep in tools/playtest.py (300 games, seed 100, 6 players, each lever alone on top of v0.7):

Lever 6-player games ending by Departure
v0.7 69%
12 Headlines instead of 10 75%
No Heat of any kind on a Departing player 75%
Deny at $4M 74%
Only 2 Tip-Offs in the deck 77%
Only the next 3 rivals get a turn at the leaver 74%
Failed Departure doesn't cost the turn 73%
Draw 3 a Morning 71% (more Leaks and Tip-Offs in hands)
Scandal discards half the Rap Sheet 77%
Easier Goal numbers 79%

No single lever gets there. Adopted for v0.8, the set that lands inside the band at every count without touching Goal numbers or Deny:

Players v0.7 v0.8 Booking success v0.8
3 79% 85% 76%
4 81% 86% 67%
5 89% 61%
6 69% 84% (85% on a second seed) 56%

Held in reserve (K23-K25): removing one Tip-Off at 5-6 players (+2 points at 6), Deny at $4M (+4), easier Goal numbers (Extravagance $20M, Kingpin 7: 88% at 6 but 88% at 4 too).

v0.9: Goal balance

With v0.8 the escape rate was right but the Goals weren't. Vendetta, Untouchable and Notorious won three to five times as often as Extravagance, Kingpin, Specialist and Everyone Owes Me, and the Heir won a quarter of games at every count.

Two of those were the model, not the game, and were fixed in tools/playtest.py first: players never traded Favors (now chips are promised for votes, an Everyone Owes Me player asks for one as the price of a vote and buys them for $2M), and an Extravagance player played like everyone else (now chases payouts, draws Street, skips filing fees). Even so, Extravagance players peaked at $17-20M on average: $25M plus a door was out of reach.

Adopted (300 games per cell, seed 100; fair share is about 33 wins per Goal at 3 players, 28 at 6; 50 per kit at 6):

Goal v0.8 v0.9 Wins at 3 / 4 / 6 players
Extravagance $25M after the door $15M after the door 28 / 19 / 20
Kingpin 9 crimes 8 44 / 33 / 29
Specialist 5 of a type 4 30 / 25 / 20
Untouchable Heat 0, 6 crimes Heat 0, 7 30 / 37 / 39
Vendetta left player has a token left player has a token and you have 4 crimes 32 / 37 / 45
Everyone Owes Me 3 players (all, if fewer) 3 players, 2 at 3-4 players 23 / 35 / 37
Notorious, Jack, Puppet Master unchanged 43 / 44 / 46, 27 / 20 / 29, 43 / 50 / 35

The Heir: money costs did nothing (the model's Heir doesn't need money), removing the Limit bonus made it the weakest kit, removing Phone Call Home altogether breaks the explainer's example game. Adopted: Phone Call Home now discards half the Rap Sheet as well as zeroing Heat. Heir wins 65 / 60 / 64 (was 66 / 64 / 75); Spook and Spouse sit at about 60 at 6 players, the rest 36-47.

Escape endings after v0.9: 92% / 96% / 92% at 3 / 4 / 6 players. That is the top of the band or a little over; the reserve knobs to pull it back are Deny price and clock length.

v0.10: the Heir and the Spook

Raymond asked for wins against games actually played, so the engine now plays every possible line-up: all 15 four-kit combinations, 50 games each, 750 games, each kit at the table in 500 of them (scratchpad/combos.py logic, kits passed to Game(kits=...)). Fair share at 4 players is 25%. v0.9 as written:

Kit Win rate
Heir 33%
Spook 31%
Spouse 25%
Fixer 21%
Ambassador 20%
Attaché 20%

Levers tried on the Heir: removing Phone Call Home (29%), Limit +0 (30%), crimes pay $1M less (30%), doubling the upkeep (no change: the engine's Heir doesn't need money), no Covers (25% with the money cost kept, 27% without it). On the Spook: no Law proposals (28%), hand limit 5 (29%), start broke (30%), no Morning cool (23% with no votes, 26% with votes restored).

Adopted:

Together, 750 games at 4 players: Heir 28%, Spook 25%, Ambassador 25%, Fixer 23%, Attaché 21%, Spouse 22%.

The same grid at 6 players (one line-up, 150 games) showed the Attaché at 8% against a fair 17%: Heat Limit 4 doesn't survive five rivals' Leaks. Tried: Limit 5 with no cost (17%), Limit 5 and no Morning cool (12%), Limit 5 and a hand limit of 5 (16%). Adopted: Attaché Cost is now Cards, a hand limit of 5 instead of 7, Heat Limit back to 5.

Final v0.10 grid, every line-up, wins against games played (fair share 33 / 25 / 17):

Kit 3 players (800 games) 4 players (750) 6 players (300)
Fixer 28% 20% 15%
Heir 39% 27% 20%
Attaché 32% 25% 16%
Ambassador 30% 21% 14%
Spook 30% 27% 17%
Spouse 40% 29% 18%

Still open (K26): the Heir and the Spouse at 3 players, where the Limit-6 engine and the two-Heat cool face only two rivals' Leaks. Watch at the table before touching them.

v0.11: Goals belong to characters

Raymond's call during the first online playtest: when you pick a character you should see its Goals and confirm the two together. Each archetype now has three Goals, drawn from its "plays like" line; you choose one at setup and it stays secret, though the table knows which three it could be. Replaces "deal 2, keep 1". Print consequence: Goal cards need small archetype icons (K27), and the count per Goal card may change once the spread is seen at the table. The online table enforces it; the physical setup step in RULES.md says it.

Watch at the table (from the first online playtest, 2026-09-05)

Online playtests, 2026-09-05 (three games driven through the browser)

Game Table Me Result
1 4 players Yumiko, Specialist Ashby (Silas, Vendetta) by Pardon, round 5, 5:52
2 5 players Teodor, Vendetta Rook (Ottoline, Notorious) by Private Jet, round 4
3 3 players Constance, Everyone Owes Me Vesper (Ottoline, Notorious) by Defect, round 12

Fixed on the way: unplayable Maneuvers were offered (Reinstatement with Immunity, Pardon without a token, Elected/Repeal with no Laws); a second click before the server answered sent a stale action; Laws stayed proposable after proposing; Frame was offered at Heat 0; a target dialog could outlive the decision it belonged to. Bots never handed out Favor chips, so Everyone Owes Me was unreachable against a bot table; a proposing bot now buys a vote with a chip about a third of the time. Rule note added: a Defector's Limit drop is not by itself a Scandal. Observations: the Heir's Notorious line won two of three; Ottoline sat at Heat 5 with Limit 4 while Departing, which the table shows as "5/4".

v0.12: simultaneous reactions, Dawn Raids, Intimidate a Witness

From the second online session:

v0.13: Recall on the third Scandal

Raymond's call: two Scandals felt too quick a death for a game where rivals can push you over. Recall now comes with the third token (18 tokens in the box). Effect in the engine, 300 games each: 4 players 98% escapes (was 96%), 6 players 88% (was 92%), Scandals per game 2.2 / 3.5, average game 6.3 / 6.2 rounds. Games barely change length; a Scandal is now a setback you can survive twice.

v0.14: State of Emergency, Extravagance $20M

v0.15: Persona Non Grata is a standing Law

While it stands, the named player has no Immunity; when it leaves the table (Repeal, Term Limits, pushed out by a fourth Law, Redlined) the Immunity returns. Reinstatement also discards the Persona Non Grata naming you; Diplomatic Reconciliation discards them all. Gives the Law a $2M counter (Repeal), makes the slot matter, and reads as a declaration that can be withdrawn. The Scandal check when it passes is unchanged. Defectors keep their lost Immunity regardless.

v0.22: three more doors

Asylum (Heat 4 or more, discard your hand), Witness Protection (hand in Immunity and 3 crimes, a rival takes 2 Heat), Slow Boat ($5M, resolves a round later). Every Goal now names three doors instead of two, so the leaver's route is not an open book, and each new door carries its own counter: cool an Asylum seeker under 4, Leak a witness at Limit 3, outlast a Slow Boat through two rounds. Each also exists as a one-copy Departure Maneuver in the Politics deck (43 cards).

v0.21: five new archetypes

Raymond wanted more kinds of character than seats. Five archetypes join the six, two faces each, so the character deck is 22 plus the Trainee. Each bends a system nobody else bent:

Archetype Bends Pays in Goals
Interpreter votes last, seeing every other vote no Persona Non Grata Puppet Master, Everyone Owes Me, Specialist
Chaplain Hush Money $1M for 2 Heat $0 start, payouts capped at $4M Untouchable, Puppet Master, Everyone Owes Me
Envoy doors half price, Deny $4M never votes, Laws need one more yes Notorious, Jack of All Trades, Vendetta
Security Chief Limit never below 5, PNG on them needs every vote no Dirty Tricks Untouchable, Kingpin, Notorious
Pilot Smuggling −1 Heat, +$1M cannot Lay Low Kingpin, Specialist, Notorious

Signatures: Lost in Translation, Off the Record, Absolution, Confession, Safe Passage, Recall Order, Lockdown, Sweep the Room, Cargo Manifest, Lost in Transit. Recall Order and Lockdown are two more counters to a leaver; Absolution is the first thing that removes a Scandal token. Every Goal is now held by three to five archetypes.

v0.20: fewer exits in the Politics deck; Puppet Master needs three

v0.19: Favors bite harder

v0.18: Expunge the Record

New Dirty Trick, two copies in the Street deck: "Your Afternoon. A player of your choice discards 2 crimes from their Rap Sheet. They pick which." Nothing in the game touched a Rap Sheet before this except a Scandal, and six of the nine Goals are counted there. It is the direct counter to a Kingpin, Specialist, Jack, Untouchable, Notorious or Vendetta leaver, and a self-target lets you duck under a count you no longer want. The target may Shred it or cash the trickster's Favor, like any Dirty Trick. Bots play it on a Departing rival or a leader with five or more crimes.

v0.17.3: three fixes from live play

v0.17.2: cooling cards name a player

Lean on a Journalist, Intimidate a Witness, Bury the Story, Disappear a Witness and Character Reference now read "A player of your choice removes N Heat." Raymond's ask: any card that moves Heat should be aimable. It adds a cooperative move (cool an ally before their Departure) and one more counter: cooling a Notorious leaver under Heat 3 breaks their Goal. Bots cool themselves unless a revealed Notorious rival is Departing.

v0.17.1: Leaks land before the Cover decision

Leak Heat now lands as each Leak resolves in the reaction step, Scandal check included. The Cover decision comes after, with the full picture: "you are at 4/5, this crime adds 2, a Scandal". Before, Leaks were tallied into the crime's Heat at resolution, so a player chose a Cover without knowing whether the Leaks alone had already sunk them. Nothing about the numbers changed; only when they land and what the criminal knows when they decide.

v0.17: a Scandal stops a Departure

The v0.8 shield ("a Departing player takes no Heat") is gone. Heat lands on a leaver like anyone else, and reaching the Limit while Departing is a Scandal that collapses the Departure. Raymond's call from online play: a Defector you could not Leak felt wrong, and the chase had only two tools (Tip-Off, break the Goal). Now there are three.

Bots were taught to chase: on their own turn they Tip-Off a leaver if they can, or Leak one who is a point from the Limit. Both worlds, same bots, headless engine:

4p, old 4p, new 6p, old 6p, new
games ending by escape 100% 99% 100% 96%
avg rounds 5.3 6.1 5.0 6.1
departures booked (per 100 games) 154 201 192 252
stopped by Scandal 6 33 5 46
stopped by Tip-Off 10 6 29 29
stopped by broken Goal 5 29 7 22
Defect wins 36% 14% 24% 10%

Escapes still end nearly every game, so the v0.8 target holds; games run about a round longer because more Departures get knocked back and re-booked. Untouchable is now a Leak away from breaking (Heat 0 required), which is where the "broken Goal" column comes from. Watch item: Defect. At Limit 3 and Heat 2+, one Leak is a Scandal, and its win share halved. If it stays cold in live play, the fix is to keep the Limit at 5 until the Departure resolves (the Immunity is handed in at the gate, not the door).

v0.16: Burn Bag

Once per turn, in any phase of your own turn, discard any three cards and draw one from either deck. Free action. Added after online play: the Spouse sat on Laws it can never propose, the Heir on Covers it can never play, and wrong-type Covers clogged hands. Three for one is steep enough that nobody churns for value; it only clears dead weight. Bots use it when they hold three cards their Cost forbids.

Tuning knobs

Move these first when playtesting says something is off. Defaults in bold.

# Knob Default Turn it if...
K1 Cooling per Morning 1 game feels timid or nobody busts → 2
K2 Heat Limit with / without Immunity 5 / 3 busts are too rare → 4 / 2; too common → 6 / 3
K3 Leak count 5 of 72 pushing to 4 never punished → 6; Leaks feel oppressive → 4
K4 Exit count 12 of 46 games run to the clock too often → 14; games end by round 6 → 10
K5 Extravagance threshold $30M it's always first or never reached → ±$5M
K6 Muscle heat removal as printed Kingpin trivial with Legalise Muscle → Muscle effects remove 1 less
K7 Debauched Gala 2 copies too swingy at 7–8 → 1 copy, or "up to 3 players"
K8 Headline pile size 12 / 10 / 8 games long → −2; goals rarely met → +2
K9 Starting money $5M (Heir $0) early game too slow → $8M
K10 Hand limit 7 Leak hoarding → 6

Hard decisions for you

These are the choices I made that you may want to overturn. Each one changes the game's shape, not just its numbers.

  1. Hidden goals vs open goals. Hidden gives Coup-style reading and makes Informant, Burn Notice and Full Briefing worth having. Open makes blocking sharper and the game more Munchkin. I went hidden.
  2. Two-strike Scandal vs one-strike elimination. Two-strike keeps people in the game and lets Vendetta and Phone Call Home exist. One-strike is tenser and shorter. I went two-strike.
  3. Politics after crimes. This is what makes exit turns dramatic, but it means you can't legalise something and then do it the same turn. If you'd rather have that, swap Afternoon and Evening and change Notorious to "Heat 2 or more".
  4. 6 archetype pairs vs 8 unique characters. Pairs are easier to balance and to teach ("there are six kinds of diplomat"). Eight uniques give more variety at big tables. The Envoy and Consul are benched in the diplomats page if you want to go to 8 (which would be 16 cards at 8 pairs, or 8 uniques with 4/4).
  5. Money as the fallback win. Simple, but it rewards hoarding in the last two rounds. Alternative: most crimes in Rap Sheet, which rewards pushing instead. Worth trying both.
  6. Diplomatic Marriage as a double win. Great table moment; also a kingmaker lever. Cut it if the group hates shared wins.
  7. The Spook can't vote. It's the sharpest cost in the roster and the most thematic. It might feel bad. The softer version is "your vote only counts to break a tie".
  8. Names and gender presentation. Names are placeholders. The pair structure assumes one woman and one man per archetype; if you'd rather have 12 fully distinct people with 12 kits, that's a bigger balance job and I'd want a full playtest cycle on the 6 first.

Playtest plan

Session 1 (4 players, beginner kits: Heir, Spouse, Attaché, Ambassador). Question: does the Heat 3/4 decision feel like a gamble every turn? Count busts. If zero busts in 12 rounds, turn K1 or K3.

Session 2 (5 players, all six archetypes minus one). Question: is any kit obviously best? Track final money, Rap Sheet size and who exited. Watch the Spouse and the Fixer specifically.

Session 3 (8 players, every kit, two duplicated). Question: is the round too long and is Debauched Gala miserable? Time each round. Target under 5 minutes per round.

Record every game: player count, who won and how (which Goal, which Exit), round number at the end, busts per player, Laws passed, and any card nobody ever played. Cards nobody plays get cut or rewritten.

Things deliberately not in v0.2

2026-09-06: explainer rewritten for v0.22

The narrated explainer (site/, served live at /learn/) was rescripted from scratch: 48 scenes, new ElevenLabs narration, real card art on the stage, character avatars, and every rule as it stands in v0.22 (Leak before Cover, Heat on leavers, Deny $8M, Burn Bag, Expunge, three doors per Goal, nine doors, Favor break at 3 Heat, third Scandal recalls, Spook never votes, Envoy needs one more yes). The example game now stars the Heir, the Pilot, the Envoy and the Chaplain, and the Chaplain wins through Pardon. RULES.md lost its last v0.10 leftovers at the same time (two-Scandal Recall, six doors, two doors per Goal, six Departure cards).

v0.23: Ground All Flights, and the table deck

A new Headline, Ground All Flights: every Departure in progress fails the moment it is flipped (price kept, Goal face up, no skipped turn since no resolution happens), and nothing can be booked that round. It is the eighteenth Headline, which makes the Headline deck a full print sheet, and it answers the "ground all flights" idea as a Headline rather than a card someone has to draw. The Immunity cards and the reference cards now print as one 18-card deck, Table Cards: 7 Immunity, 7 Quick Reference, 2 Bribes and Favors, 2 Blank, each card with its own back. That fills a sheet instead of leaving two half-empty ones and gives every seat at six players a spare. Total 194 cards. The quick-reference front also caught up with the v0.20 Favor break (3 Heat).

v0.23: Deny is $10M

Deny goes from $8M to $10M (the Envoy from $4M to $5M), and the Tip-Off card now says so on its face: "Cancel it. A Departing target may pay $10M to Deny it." At $8M Deny was exactly the Jet, so a rich leaver could treat a Tip-Off as a second ticket. At $10M it costs more than any door, which keeps Shred and Favors as the real answers and makes Deny the emergency exit it was meant to be.

v0.23: the clock ending, and overtime

When the Headline pile runs out, the winner must hold Immunity first, then have the most crimes on record, then the most money (then the lowest Heat). A diplomat who lost their Immunity does not win by default, however fat the Rap Sheet. And a Departure booked in the final round is no longer a free win or a dead card: the table gets an overtime round, Headline discarded, no Morning draw, to stop the leaver, and the Departure resolves at their next turn as always. The engine caps overtime at four rounds as a safeguard; a Slow Boat booked in the final round needs two.

v0.23: one Favor chip each, with your face on it

Favor chips drop from three per player to one, and the chip carries the character's portrait (a 25 mm punch-out, one per character card). One chip means every promise is the only promise you can make until it comes home, which makes Favors scarcer and the break-your-word decision sharper. It also lets quarter-size portrait chips, the tokens and the coin money share one ten-slug punch-out sheet, which is exactly what the Small Stout Box holds beside 194 cards and the booklet. Everyone Owes Me still needs chips from three different players (two at 3-4 players).

v0.23: the print set

The physical game is now a Medium Stout Box (6 x 9 x 2.25 in, full-print lid and base, one piece of art each: four diplomats across the lid, four more under the blurb on the base), 194 poker cards in six decks, a 16-page Medium Booklet rulebook generated straight from RULES.md, and two punch-out sheets: quarter-size chips for the 23 Favor portraits, six Departing markers and the coin money ($1M x45, $5M x25, $10M x14), and penny-size chips for Heat, Law (three per seat) and Scandal tokens. A stock two-well box insert is the open bank tray in play. The Small Stout Box was the first choice and is still supported by the wrap generator, but quarter-size coins put the punch-outs at 19 slugs, which that box cannot close on at shipping; TGC ships punch-outs unpunched. Box flap text follows the fold: lid flaps fold down (up points to the fold), base flaps fold up.

v0.23: Heat Track mats

The Heat track printed on the character card is a quarter-inch wide, too small for any chip, so every player now gets a Heat Track mat (a 2 x 8 in TGC Sliver Mat): eight boxes 0 to 7 at 0.83 in wide, the Limit boxed in gold, the no-Immunity and Heir limits marked, and the turn summary on the back. The penny-size Heat marker rides the mat; the track on the character card stays as a reminder. Quarter-size Heat markers were tried and rejected because eight one-inch boxes do not fit an 8 in mat, and the 10 in Strip Mat does not fit the Medium Stout Box.

v0.23: character boards

The character cards become 8 x 4 in double-sided boards, one per archetype, the woman on one face and the man on the other (the Trainee's back is the quick reference). A board carries the portrait, the kit, the three Goals, a slot for the Favor chip, a slot for the new Signature chip (discard it when the once-per-game ability is used; there is no card to turn sideways any more), three Scandal token slots and a proper Heat track with the character's own Limits boxed. That retires the Heat Track mats added an hour earlier and takes the character cards out of the poker decks: 171 cards. The rule that no archetype sits at a table twice is now physical, since the two diplomats share a board. The character card renders remain for the online table and the site.

v0.24: Immunity is a chip

The Immunity card leaves the Table deck (now 11 cards, 164 in all). Immunity is a quarter-size chip, one per seat, that sits in the first slot of the character board, so a glance at the board shows the Heat Limit in force: chip in the slot, the gold box; slot empty, the red box. Persona Non Grata moves the chip onto the Law card until the Law leaves, which makes the standing-Law timing physical; Defect and Witness Protection send it to the bank; Reinstatement and Diplomatic Reconciliation bring it home. The Large chit set takes the six chips without a new slug (119 of 120). The portrait on each board narrows to the card's own ratio, so the boards now show the full character art.

v0.26: two more Goals (12)

Tell-All (2 Scandal tokens, 5 or more crimes, Heat 2 or less; Private Jet, Asylum, Medical Evacuation) rewards the player who has been through the wringer twice and rebuilt: a memoir written from disgrace. Quid Pro Quo (Elected, Pardon, Slow Boat; also 4 crimes) is the negotiator's Goal with a timed door: propose a Law, cash a Favor you hold as “Vote with me” during its vote, and if it passes you may book that same Evening, the one time the one-Evening-action rule bends. Miss the window (pass, or the Departure fails) and the deal must be struck again. The bot buys the vote with a held chip and proposes something harmless when its crimes are nearly there.

v0.25: any character, any Goal, and the roll

Setup opens up. Everyone rolls a die; the winner chooses a character first, takes a Goal last and plays first. Characters are a free pick from every board on the table (the boards were already double-sided, woman and man). Goals lose their archetype lists: the deck is one of each, ten now, and goes round the table the other way from the character picks, each player taking one in secret from what is left, so no two players share a Goal and the roll winner's early character pick is paid for with the last Goal pick. The tenth Goal, Pillar of Society, is a mixed condition: a Law with your marker in effect, $12M after the door, five crimes, at most one Scandal. The online table implements the roll, the clockwise character picks and the counter-clockwise secret Goal picks; the bot leans to the easier Goals still in the deck. Cards: 156.

Notorious's doors were Defect, Private Jet and Asylum. Defect needs Heat exactly 2 (2 or more, under the no-Immunity Limit of 3) and Notorious needs 3 or more, so that door never opened; Asylum needs Heat 4, one Leak from a Scandal for the whole waiting round. Now Private Jet, Medical Evacuation and Asylum, with Asylum's condition lowered from Heat 4 to Heat 3: at Heat 3 under a Limit of 5 a leaver survives one Leak, and Notorious (Heat 3 or more) can actually use it. The same pass over every Goal: Jack of All Trades loses Witness Protection, whose price (three crimes gone) meant nine crimes to still hold six with all four types, more than Kingpin asks; it gets Slow Boat. Nothing else contradicted itself; Defect and Witness Protection stay the deliberate gambles.

v0.27: the departure window (online)

A report from a table: a player on the Slow Boat held a Tip-Off, a rival booked a Private Jet, and the round of turns went past before the Tip-Off was ever offered. Nothing was wrong in the rules: a Tip-Off on a Departure is an anytime play, and the card was lit in the hand the whole time. But with computer players taking their turns in seconds, "anytime" was a few seconds, and nothing on screen said now.

The online table now opens a departure window the moment a Departure is booked, exactly like the reaction window on a crime: every other player is asked at once, on a twenty-second clock, to play a Tip-Off, a Leak, or let the leaver go. Answers are revealed together and land in seat order from the leaver's left, each one answerable as before (Shred, Deny, the trickster's own Favor). A second Tip-Off on an already-tipped Departure is kept, not wasted. Computer players answer in the same window with the same instinct they had for the anytime play. The round of turns still follows; the window only makes the first chance to answer a real, visible moment. The paper rules are unchanged.

v0.27 audit: Burn Bag is unlimited, doors as printed

A consistency pass (AUDIT.md) found the rules saying two things about the Burn Bag: the heading "as often as you like", the body "once each turn" (the v0.16 note above). Decision: as often as you like. Three cards for one is its own brake; nobody churns a hand away for value, and a player stuck with six dead cards should be able to clear them in one Morning instead of over two turns. Every copy of the rule now says so and the engine never limited it.

The same pass made the engine honour two things the cards already printed: the Envoy's doors really cost half, and a Departure card waives only what its bonus line says (the cost for Private Jet, Slow Boat and the dowry; the condition for the rest, so Elected and Medical Evacuation still pay and Medical Evacuation with its card keeps the hand).

v0.27 bot games: two engine fixes

Two all-bot games through the live Durable Object (3 and 6 seats, 2026-09-16) turned up what the engine tests had not. A Vendetta holder booked Witness Protection with exactly four crimes; the door's three crimes left one and the Departure failed a round later. Booking now checks the Goal against what is left after the door, for every door. And a Change of Protocol played mid-round let the players just passed take a second turn while the rest, including a leaver waiting to resolve, were skipped for a whole Headline. A round is now literally every player taking one turn: a reversal changes the order of those still to come, never the count.

v0.27 bots: an Evening worth having

Two bot games showed the computers passing two Evenings in three and proposing two Laws in thirteen rounds. The bot now values every Law in its hand for itself and for each voter (public information only: Heat, money, Immunity, Rap Sheet sizes and types, Laws in effect, who is Departing, its own hand), proposes the best one when it is worth the fee and the table would pass it, votes by the same valuation, adds a Lobbyist when a vote matters and looks close, and uses the everyday side of the Departure cards (Slow Boat, Marriage, Witness Protection, Asylum, Elected). Bots also pick Goals from their board's three suggestions three times in four, so Extravagance, Specialist and Everyone Owes Me appear at bot tables. Measured over 120 games at five seats: proposals 3.5 → 7.8 per game, Laws passed 1.8 → 5.1, Maneuvers 4.1 → 6.0, Evening passes 65% → 51%. Along the way the sweep surfaced two engine gaps (a Scandal on your own turn did not end it; Asylum's use could Recall a player mid-draw), both fixed.

v0.27 wording pass: the rulebook reads plainly

A language pass over RULES.md, checked line by line against the engine. No rule changed; the words did.

The booklet is back to 16 pages at the Large size (type scale 1.36, headings kept with what follows them, the running foot inside the safe zone, figure rows scaled so the gaps no longer push a row past the column); the stale private-jet-maneuver preview ("ART GOES HERE") that the Evening and Departure-card figures had been showing is replaced by the real Private Jet card and deleted.

v0.27: time to call in a Favor

Reported from a table with computer players: the chip button was gone before you could reach it. "Vote with me" is only legal against someone who has not voted yet, and the bots vote about 700 ms after a Law is proposed, so against a table of them the call was effectively unavailable — and with it the Quid Pro Quo Goal, which is met by cashing one.

The vote now carries the moment it opened (pending.at), and the room holds the computer players' votes until five seconds after that whenever a connected human holds a chip they could still cash in this vote: the proposer's (to withdraw the Law) or an unvoted player's (to call their vote in). It holds only when the wait buys something — no cashable chip, the owner has already voted, every computer player has voted, the human is disconnected: no hold, and the vote runs at its usual beat. The prompt shows the seconds left, so nobody has to guess whether there is time.

Nothing else needed it: a crime's reaction window and a Departure's stay open until every human has locked, so the chip call there was never on a clock.

Second pass, from the same table: a diplomat who never votes (the Spook's and the Envoy's Cost) was being left out of it. The tally already waited for such a player when they held a Signature, a Lobbyist or the proposer's chip — but not when they held a voter's chip, which is the one call that needs the vote still open: "Vote with me". The voters are now settled before the hold list is built, so any chip that can still be cashed in this vote keeps the tally waiting, and the five-second window covers the rest (the named player must not have voted yet). The tally used to label a held seat "Double Agent?"; it now says "no vote, still deciding", which is what it means.

v0.27: reading a card on a landscape phone

A landscape phone is about 390 px tall. A playing card is portrait. So the lightbox that holds a card up to the light — 82% of the height — could only ever make it 320 px tall there, smaller than the same card in the read-then-play dialog, and less than half what the same phone gives in portrait. Rotating the picture is the obvious trick and a bad one: nobody wants to read sideways.

The answer is that on a landscape phone the words matter more than the picture, and landscape has width going spare. The lightbox now puts the card on the left and its name and text on the right, at a size meant for reading — the shape the read-then-play dialog has always used. A card zoomed with no text of its own now falls back to its own card text, so a tap on any card anywhere says what the card does. Two more fixes fell out of it: the lightbox scrolls when the content is taller than the screen (justify-content: safe center, which a small portrait phone needed), and the Departures board — a nine-row table, unreadable as a 264 px picture — now comes with all nine doors as real text, built from the card data, so it reads on one landscape screen.

The menu had been calling it "the six Departures" and "All six doors" since before there were nine, and telling players their Goal names two of them instead of three. Fixed.