In Oath, there is a mechanic in which at the end of rounds five through seven out of eight, the Chancellor player rolls a die to see if they win, provided they have fulfilled their victory condition. The probability of victory starts at 1/6 and doubles each round up to 2/3.
When I first encountered this rule, it felt out of place – clunky, even. After playing a game as a Citizen and another game observing the behavior of a Citizen, I think I understand why it is there; it is key to the entire dynamic between Citizen and Chancellor.
Citizens, in Oath, are players that are ostensibly allies of the Chancellor. However, unlike other games such as Dune or Eclipse with official alliances, they do not win together. Instead, the Citizens have an additional victory condition. If they have achieved their goal when the Chancellor wins, the Citizen wins instead; otherwise, they lose.
In practice, this can lead to strange conflicts between allies. If it looks like the Citizen will meet their condition, the Chancellor might attack them or even self-sabotage to prevent the game from ending. If the Citizen has not achieved their personal goal, they might attack the Chancellor to do the same, as I did in the game where I was a Citizen.
Enter the victory die. Both the Citizen and Chancellor need the Chancellor’s goal to be met for either to have a chance of winning, but if they know for sure that they will lose should it be achieved that round, they would have no choice but to self-sabotage. But because the Chancellor or Citizen is not guaranteed to win at the end of rounds five, six, or seven, there is enough doubt that they can work together even though they know who would win if the game did end early. Their alliance works because the losing member thinks the game might not end until they can achieve their goal.
The illusion of hope is crucial to designing games because knowing they will lose effectively eliminates a player. Traditionally, official alliances require shared victory because who would cooperate with somebody they know will win when the game ends? Oath demonstrates a different approach by adding enough uncertainty to enable teamwork between technical enemies. I still think the mechanic is clunky, but I also think it is needed.
I can already think of mechanics to support a similar dynamic for other designs. Instead of randomizing the end of the game, what if we randomized the winner of the alliance instead? For example, suppose you have a system where official allies put tokens into a bag according to their contributions. Then, at the end of the game, the winning alliance draws to indicate which one wins.
Or another option: allies could gain hidden victory points, and if their team wins, then the player with the most points is the sole winner. Rex: Final Days of an Empire does something a little like this with its betrayal cards, where each player has a secret condition which, if fulfilled, steals the win from their team. The problem with its system is that the default is shared victory, so stealing it feels petty and spiteful. If only one player can ever win, this goes away.
I don’t think shared victory is a bad thing, though some people do. It can introduce problems like freeloaders or power imbalances, but there are solutions to these. However, as Oath shows, there is a viable alternative for games with official alliances; you need to make the sole winner uncertain enough that allies keep hoping that it will be them.