Playing the game for the first time, we've run into an issue with the conspiracy tokens. From what we understand a conspiracy piece only has to connect via one link. Example: a piece only has to connect to one other piece(blue line connecting). The other lines don't have to connect and can run into other pieces, the side of the board, ect. That's what we understand. The problem we've run into is a friend has spammed the conspiracy tokens. Thus he has gained 16+ points via just the tokens alone. Is this how it was meant to be? It seems rather cheap for somebody to do this while also placing evidence and connect conspiracy pieces to gain well over what you would gain from finding a suspect guilty or innocent.

Has anybody else run into this problem? Are there any limitations on how conspiracy pieces are placed(other than connecting one blue line), or gaining conspiracy tokens? Or is it up to the other players to try and limit that themselves?

The player can place as many conspiracy tokens as they like. All they need to do is make sure that the piece they play continues the line of another piece already on the board.

That being said, why did you let them get 16vp that way? If they focus solely on advancing the conspiracy, the other players should focus either on undermining their abilities, or finishing the rows or columns before him/her.

The key to this game is not only in trying to prove guilt or innocence, but to advance your own personal plot, as well as respond to your opponents' strategies. If they are focusing so much on the conspiracy, they're likely not paying close attention to their plots or hunches. Even if you can't prevent their finishing rows or columns on the conspiracy track, you can still load them up with baggage and trauma.

Even if they get 16 or 20vp from the conspiracy track, that won't win if they neglect their plots, or if you manage to get your guilty verdict while preventing theirs.

When you're playing, just be sure to keep a close eye on your opponents, and do your best to thwart their plans, or hit them where they've left themselves vulnerable.

I believe that you have the rule right. There is no other restriction on how to place a conspiracy token, and it is mostly up to the players to stop anyone from dominating any area of the game. However, as a point of clarification, you made it sound like this guy was using conspiracy tokens and placing evidence at the same time. That's not ok. When you follow up a lead you have to do either/or, not both.

This is the same person as who made the thread(was on a friend's account at his house).

I apologize for not being too clear, I was in a rush. No we were not doing both at the same time. Definitely had that right. Anyway, we found the puzzle board filled up fairly quickly so players were able to rack up conspiracy tokens one after the other. We were also concerned because the examples shown in the instructions were rather clean. Ours ended up all cluttered and nearly full thus leading to almost all of the tokens being taken.

The other problem was people pretty much ignored the plots. We had to cut the game midway thru the second week but everybody had gotten the good ending for their first plot.

Admitted, it was all of ours first time with the game so we are still getting the hang of everything. I'm thinking that more careful consideration on where leads are placed and which lines you're trying to connect in the puzzle should help us out with this. Just wanted to make sure we didn't misunderstand anything.

Thanks for the quick replies.

I'm now 4 games in, and I'm starting to question the balance between placing evidence and placing a conspiracy piece. From my 4 games, I am convinced to just ignore the murder initially and just place conspiracy tiles. I may be wrong, and need subsequent plays to test this out but...

If only one player really goes for the conspiracy puzzle and the others let him do it, they will own it completely. They will rack up lots of +4 tokens, but also they will be choosing what is going to score extra near the end. And not only this, but they will be amassing favours, baggage tokens, drop ships, moving leads around from underneath other people, and placing hits. I think puzzle pieces are way more powerful than placing 1 piece of random evidence which may or may not do anything.

So, lets say the other players also hit the conspiracy hard early on. This happened in our last game. I was Louis, who is apparently good at uncovering the murderer. Ray was also in the game, and the last time we played, Ray won easily by double the VP of anyone else thanks to the conspiracy. So, I decided to get in on the conspiracy early to try and link up some favour bonuses before Ray blocked them off. About a third of the way through the game, the conspiracy was half done, with Ray and Louis having 4 conspiracy tokens each. Caprice was feeling a bit left out, having none, and instead had been placing evidence.

However, at the start of week 2, Caprice followed up 3 leads on her turn, placing puzzle tokens each time. This was an awesome move because placing the remaining pieces of the puzzle got her 20VP (5 x +4 conspiracy tokens) just for completing 5 lines of 5. They were all baggage pieces, so she placed 3 good baggage on her plot, giving her 1 extra sanity. She also gained 2 more hits and managed to kill off Noise (who I happened to be obsessed about).

As such, the conspiracy was finished on turn 7, which meant Ray's plot which got him good baggage when he placed a puzzle piece was doomed to failure.

I thought I was pretty screwed by being obsessed with Noise who was dead, so I just ignored the murder and instead just wandered around the board collecting favours which were going to be worth 3VP in the end. As such, I won fairly easily I think on VP.

Next game I think I might try the same, ignore the murder and just hit the conspiracy early on. If it does turn out to be "this easy", it is unfortunate, since major changes would be needed to rebalance things.

That's kind of what I was getting at, but Paul has explained it better than I, and given much better examples from actual play-thrus. It honestly doesn't make much sense to me. Consider this: You get a +4vp token for each row, column, or diagonal you create. So you're spending 1 time to move to the location(provided you're within range of course), 1 time to follow the lead, then you place your puzzle piece. For the sake of arguement we'll say you complete a row. That's +4vp for you. You could even be lucky enough to complete a row and a column. A little unlikely till a bit later, but you see what I mean. So at the very least you'll be getting +4vp in addition to the basic benefits AND a bonus if there's one on the piece. All of that for a measly 2 time. Sure it'll take you a few turns to get to that point, but once you do you're golden.

To put that into perspective you have the Jinteki and Haas tokens. Which are only +3vp. To get those you must spend 3 time to even get into the location. You could have a warrant, but then you would have either had to buy it, be one of the characters that starts with one, or be lucky enough to get it some other way. Either way you have to spend at the very least, 1 time to get there. Then you spend 2 time(I think I remember that correctly), 2 different types of favors, AND discard two twilight cards. You almost have to spend a whole turn in time, and get rid of a bunch of stuff just to get +3vp. I hardly see the point when I could very easily follow a lead, get my conspiracy puzzle piece, and gain the benefits. On top of that I get a chance of getting an easy +4vp as well as the chance to connect a link to gain more vp off the favors I would have spent to get the Jinteki or Haas tokens.

Not only that, but say somebody gets rather screwed and gains quite a few trauma tokens. Those are easily negated by gaining a single conspiracy token. Sure you've just lost out on 4vp(assuming you had 4 trauma), but that would be much easier than getting rid of trauma another way.

It's true that some of this could be counter-measured by careful play by the other players, but if somebody is determined to spam the conspiracy pieces, the others will be forced to completely sabotage the board just so they don't get any. Of course this is where house-ruling comes in. I'm thinking the easiest solution to the problem is make the conspiracy tokens worth less. +1vp or +2vp. At first I thought +1 would be best, but then at most a person could get 12vp, and that's if they got all of them. So if we make it +2vp that should still give incentive to go for them, but would greatly decrease the usefulness. Thus force players to think more about their plot and placing evidence. If you went with the +2vp, you would then probably have to increase the Jinteki and Haas tokens to +4vp or +5vp. If only to give more incentive to spend their valuable time, favors, and twilight cards on them.

Other ways we thought of that would be more difficult to balance out would be to limit each player to placing one conspiracy puzzle piece per turn. Or make it so a person could only score one token on a row, column, and diagonal for the game. So you couldn't get a token for completing a row, then complete another row(another turn or not) and get another token. So a max of three tokens for each player. Any way we choose to do it, I definitely think the Jinteki and Haas tokens need to increase to probably +4vp.

Gigan22 said:

Not a single person in any of the 4 games I have played have even bothered with these spaces. It just isnt worth the time and effort. Even in one game where Jinteki tokens were worth 5VP, the player would have had to give up a favour worth 2 to do so, and it just wasnt worth the hassle. Maybe later in the game when the conspiracy puzzle has been completed, but only maybe, as then just getting favours is probably better. It all depends how the puzzle is connected.

Gigan22 said:

I very much like that idea, and will stop our problem of the puzzle being completed half way through the game. I might try that next time we play. I'm assuming that 'digging deeper' does NOT count as placing a puzzle piece, and therefore someone could still do this AND place a piece in the same turn. And of course, peoples cards which allow them to place one more should still be ok.

Gigan22 said:

I wouldnt say per game, but I would say "per placement", because otherwise, you could potentially get 12VP just for placing the last piece of the puzzle in the corner of the board (assuming the rest was completed)

AND - You havent mentioned Broadcast Square. Way too powerful for what it does. Allows you to spend a bit of time and any 1 favour to place a puzzle piece of your choice (and get all the benefits associated with that piece). Kinda negates the point of digging deeper mostly. In my next game, I think I'm just going to grab an early favour, head over to broadcast square and then every turn use it to place a favour puzzle piece, getting another favour and then doing the same thing the turn after.

Oh yes, I forgot about the Broadcast Station, but I also didn't realize it gave you a piece of your choosing. That is definitely overpowered. I'm curious if making it two or three favors to use would make that less desirable. I would also say that limiting the puzzle pieces to one per turn sounds like a pretty viable option the more I think about it. Though it could lead to players not placing any pieces for fear that the next person will gain +4vp. So maybe a combination of lowering the vps awarded per token(maybe to +3?) and limiting piece play would be best. Unfortunately I won't be able to test out these scenarios until next weekend, so I'll see what my friends decide at that time.

Oh, and I meant placing a piece by following a lead only. If you've got a card that allows you to lay another piece, than by all means do so. 'Digging Deeper' wouldn't count as laying a piece either. I'd say that if you want to spend the time to do that, go right ahead. Of course you can do whatever you want, but that sounds fair to me.

Gigan22 said:

And who's the genius that left 4 in a row for you to complete? Yes, token points are easy to get if lines are almost complete, and they give benefits while you're placing them. If you are placing two of them into a row of three in the same turn, it's at the very least 4 time (unless you're lucky enough to be resting on one, or better yet, to get a two-fer piece, but to get to use a two-fer, you need to have dug deeper first). That is more or less equivalent to the Jinteki / Haas tokens (minus the favor and cards cost, granted).

Also, you may lose the chance to making the connections you want to make. The faster lines (central row and central column) don't connect to any group (and if you get one with a corner, you can't get those easily anymore). Furthermore, if the tokens are split more or less equally, the net effect isn't that big, so I'd say the problems come from letting someone do the puzzle on their own. At first, one player, say Raymond, can get a couple of pieces out... see if he's going for a line and complete it yourself! This is a game of taking short-time opportunities when they appear.

Maybe with more games I'll change my opinion, but as for now, I don't think the balance is broken.

The balance may not be broken but I get the feeling that people will tend to exploit the puzzle for the 4 VPs instead of trying to make links. An idea I had to try and discourage that is to limit how you can place pieces. The rules state basically, that you can place them nearly anywhere as long as they connect. I suggest that you can only connect to a an unbroken line, i.e. you can't make any dead ends or dangling lines. I think it would put alot more emphasis on trying to link the conspiracy while limited the chance for rampant puzzle placing. Just a thought though, have to try it out.

Check out the link in my sig. Using the variants for the conspiracy along with the one for Days/Turns/Time pretty much eliminates this problem with the conspiracy puzzle. It forces players to be a lot more careful about where and when they place puzzle pieces and makes them more concerned about the actual links and their bonuses rather than the conspiracy tokens and achieving 5-in-a-row.

I'm also thinking of modifying my board to change the bonuses granted by the conspiracy. In all the games we've played so far, a huge number of points have come from players who have racked up favours throughout the game, which seems "off" seeing as it is supposedly not a primary objective (and thematically, favours should be there to be "called in", not hoarded). I'll be changing Mayor Wells so that he grants only a +1VP bonus for each pair of Political and Street favours and changing James Levy for each pair of Society and Corp favours. I decided on these combinations as the other combinations are represented by Jinteki and Haas-Bioroid - Jinteki requires a pair of Corp/Political favours and Haas-Bioroid requires a pair of Street/Society favours.

I believe this would bring the relative desirability of those conspiracy bonuses and major locations in line with each other; you have the potential to gain many points from Mayor Wells and James Levy, but you actually have to make sure there are links to those bonuses. Jinteki and Haas-Bioroid are more reliable, but require a lot more resource expenditure.

Paul Grogan said:

You are 100% correct. The optimal way to play the game as ANY character (except maybe little miss moron, the wannabe cyborg) is to assault the consipiracy puzzle ASAP. The reward ration is higher than any other activity on the board, and if you DON'T hit it immediately and the other players DO... you wind up with the situation described by the OP.

Is this IMBA? Not sure. Maybe it was intended... but it does seem profoundly counter-intuitive that the 'grand consipiracy' is usually wrapped in my house by the end of week one, while the murder is a last-ditch scramble....