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Thanks Seth (and Jeremy)! The game I most recently worked on was Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest (I’m not the designer, but I was heavily involved in the development. One of the elements we wanted to “fix” from the original Libertalia was the tiebreaker system, which was originally built into the cards. In-game tiebreakers are a bit tricky, though, as they need to be instantly identifiable. I proposed a concept for a long reputation track where players could never share the same space (always leapfrogging over each other), and Paolo pointed out that we really only needed a 6-space track (for 6 players). It worked right away, and we later added to it by associating each round’s starting wealth per player based on their reputation level. Based on playtester feedback, we also added a reason not to go lower than the lowest reputation (and a reason to gain even more reputation when you have the most). We also debated whether reputation should give players a choice as to who breaks ties, but we decided to keep it entirely clear cut: Just as a higher-ranked character goes to the right of a lower-ranked character, a tied character from a player with higher reputation would go to the right. Last, with all those mechanisms in hand, we incorporated the concept of reputation as something to gain/lose into several of the character cards themselves.
