First Impression: Bill of Rights / The Ten Commandments

By W. Eric Martin
June 4, 2009

Designers: Mike Selinker, Dan Tibbles & Teeuwynn Woodruff
Publisher: Bucephalus Games
Players: 3-8
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 20-40 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $30
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Bill of Rights, once with 5 players / The Ten Commandments, none

When you finish a game and ask the other players whether they’d play again to help you get a different perspective on it, to assist you in writing reviews like these, and all four other players say “No” – well, that says a lot about the game.

I’ve already panned a couple of titles from Bucephalus Games – Roman Taxi ( ) and Rorschach ( ) – and Bill of Rights is the latest release to see the flat side of my hammer, which is a shame as the concept of the game is a winner. Players have been charged with rewriting the Bill of Rights, that is, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution which entail some of the country’s most cherished (if poorly worded) rights. Each player takes on a different randomly chosen role such as economic conservative, warmonger or revolutionary and will champion bills that support that point of view. That’s the idea anyway, but the reality didn’t rise to meet that concept.

Peaceably Assembling to Play

Proposed amendments are divided into four decks, with the most expected and traditional amendments (due process, search and seizure) being part of the first deck and the more outré amendments (right to be happy, freedom to fear) belonging to the fourth deck. Each amendment shows icons for the one or two roles that benefit from it being passed; due process shows economic and social liberals, for example, while the right to bear arms shows warmongers and totalitarians, unlimited speech shows two revolutionaries, and the right to worship TV has icons for peaceniks and economic conservatives. Feel free to argue about the appropriateness of these icons among yourselves.

Players start with one card from each deck. In a round, each player draws a card from the deck of her choice, then lays an amendment face-down on the table. These amendments are revealed simultaneously, then players vote on them by placing n-1 markers – valued from 1 to n-1 with n being the number of players – face-down on the cards, with each player placing at most one marker on each card. After revealing the votes, the amendment with the most support becomes law. The proposer of this amendment scores 2-8 points (with outré amendments being worth more points) and everyone who supported it scores points equal to the value of her marker. Each amendment has a special power on it, and when an amendment passes, its power takes effect; all other proposed amendments are discarded, then players reclaim their markers to prepare for the next round.

After ten rounds, players reveal their specific identities: “You knew that I was an economic conservative, but what you didn’t know is that I’m actually a naïve free-marketer. Ha ha!” How do these identities work? Each role has six different identity cards, and players randomly take one of these cards at the start of the game; the identity cards show how many points you’ll earn or lose for each symbol showing on the ten amendments that players adopt over the course of the game. The economic conservative, for example, earns three points for each of its own icons and loses three points for each icon of its opposite, the economic liberal, but the value of the other icons (warmonger, peacenik, etc.) depends on whether you’re an overpaid CEO, a covert arms dealer or one of the other four identities.

…Nor Cruel and Unusual Punishments Inflicted

The concept of Bill of Rights, as well as The Ten Commandments – a game with identical rules, a different theme, uglier art, and different special powers on its commandment cards – is solid and interesting. After our game (and our complaints about the game) ended, players sat around discussing some of the amendments included, which led to broader and equally interesting topics. More broadly, I can see the game’s appeal for teachers who want to cover this section of history in an entertaining way.

Unfortunately, so much goes wrong with the game play and the game design that the post-game discussion proved to be the most enjoyable aspect of Bill of Rights. To start with, the game has a high busyness-to-decision ratio. In each round, you’re drawing and discarding cards as well as laying out and reclaiming markers. You’re shuffling material constantly, like someone trying to look busy at the office when there’s no real work to do. You might hold a number of amendments that have already passed, which reduces your possible amendment choices each round. On top of that, you might have amendments that hurt your final score if they do pass, thereby nullifying most of the points you would gain.

Furthermore, if two or more players put down identical amendments, then markers placed on those cards will be added together, thereby all but guaranteeing that this amendment will pass; knowing this, you’d be a fool to vote on any other amendment, and in our game identical amendments were on the table in four of eleven rounds, so those rounds didn’t even allow us the minimally interesting problem of where to place our many markers.

The special powers on the amendments are a mixture of irrelevant, albeit theme-specific ones like search and seizure’s prohibition on stealing cards from other players and nasty, beat-on-the-loser ones. Capital punishment dings the player with the lowest score for two points, for example, while the right to bear arms allows players to steal cards from those with fewer points. Strength through firepower, and all that. Theoretically you would have to choose between amendments that deliver lots of points, amendments that score well for you in the endgame, and amendments with beneficial powers, but that never proved to be the case for the reasons mentioned above. (While I appreciated the mixture of frivilous amendments such as the right to polyamory and right to arm bears with the historical importance of issues like trial by jury and states’ rights, not everyone felt the same as me.)

The “busy hands” syndrome and unspecial powers are matched by a graphic design that impedes your ability to play the game: The gameboard uses a winding scoretrack that’s hard to read and too short for the points that players score; the cards and vote markers each use a font – a different font, mind you – that’s hard to read across the table; most bizarre of all, the amendment cards can be sorted only by referring to the rulebook because they contain no markings to distinguish one deck from another, instead differing only in the thickness of the card stock used in each deck! No joke. Rather than marking the face of a card – you know, taking the boring obvious approach – the designers apparently want you to intuit which deck a card is from by rubbing it. That’s hardly the type of challenge I look for in a game.

Bill of Rights would make a decent ten-minute-long online game, assuming all the graphical unpleasantness were rejiggered. The tedious handling of cards and tokens would take place automatically, leaving you to focus on the few decisions available to you. As is, however, I’d send the published game back to committee for another round of revisions. Call Madison – I hear good things about him.

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Comments:

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That’s disappointing, these two titles had sounded interesting.  A lot of games out there simulate an economy, but too few a political system, and those that are about politics tend to focus on elections rather than beliefs.  I’d love to find a Eurogame that features the roleplaying of values standpoints. Posted by John Mitchell on Jun 5, 2009 at 03:36 AM | #

Sounds like someone(s) played a bit of Credo, then decided to streamline it… Perhaps they’d have done better to license Credo in the first place. (Though Credo could certainly do with a round of re-development...) Posted by Chris Johnson on Jun 5, 2009 at 05:27 AM | #

John, I have a 2-player prototype, Election Night, that’s been in playtesting for about a year.  The Democrat and Republican each customize positions on five key issues at the beginning of the game and may then ‘massage’ their stands slightly as the game unfolds.  These issues are: * the economy (let it be >> government action) * social policy (strict >> hands off) * military (more >> less) * taxes (fewer >> progressive) * environment (cash in >> conserve it) The positions taken are either ‘1’, ‘2’, or ‘3’, moving from left to right, with ‘2’ being a neutral stance between the two standpoints. My brother and I have managed to tie the five issues in with six regions, the West, the Frontier, the Mid-west, the South, the Swing states, and the East, to create a fair approximation of a present-day election that is also quite fun to play.  It’s a card-driven system that has been scaled back to a euro. You, or anyone reading this who wants to give it a play is welcome to write me.  The next census isn’t until ‘10, so there’s still plenty of time for playtesting before it’s shopped around. Posted by Jared Scarborough on Jun 6, 2009 at 11:13 PM | #

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