3/2/2026

🎲 Randomness in Crisis Council

Rolling dice to decide a winner isn't fun.

Crisis Council is a political-negotiation game. If players ever believe the dice - not the table - decided the winner, the game has failed. But almost every board game incorporates some level of randomness; shuffle the deck before dealing, roll the dice to see how far you can move, etc. There are countless ways that a game’s outcome will be affected by elements outside of the players’ control. Sometimes, these random elements feel unfair / unbalanced / un-fun. In other games, the randomness makes it more interesting across multiple playthroughs.

In Crisis Council, it’s implied that a player should have a lot of influence over the state of the game - if they have a knack for politicking. That is the expectation we want to adhere to. At the end of the game, players should feel like their actions are what led to their defeat / victory. But, if we strip away all random elements from our game, it becomes too deterministic. It would be boring on subsequent playthroughs. New players would not have fun playing against returning players. It might even cease to be a “game” and be more of a “debate on who should win.”

When designing Crisis Council, we were very intentional with how we incorporated randomness. It came down to two principles - voluntary risk & shared uncertainty.

Voluntary Risk

Knowing What You Signed Up For

I believe that a core principal in making randomness fun is letting players know what they are getting into - aka setting expectations. Players rarely hate randomness, they hate surprise consequences they couldn’t evaluate. This concept was drilled into me after being a dungeon-master for many years. It is imperative to imply how dangerous an area is and to give players the option of continuing or retreating. If they choose to continue and then die due to some bad dice rolls, they can at least feel like it was their choice. If I imply that an area is very safe and then they die due to some bad dice rolls, they will feel cheated. In both cases the dice odds didn’t necessarily change - it was expectations.

In Crisis Council, there is only one action you can take that isn’t deterministic or political. It involves rolling dice to determine your options. Tables that collectively understand this risk can use it to their benefit. By the time the final roll happens, they will have already decided whether that outcome will matter.

Shared Uncertainty

Equal Chaos for All

The other random factors in Crisis Council are all applied “universally.” Board set up, shuffled deck, resource dice - All of these factors affect the entire table. This evens out the distribution of consequences. I compare this to a game like Settlers of Catan - every dice roll will affect players asymmetrically. On a 6, only some people will get resources while others won’t. In Catan, the dice decide who prosper. In Crisis Council, the dice decide what problems the table must negotiate about.

Using “shared uncertainty,” we wanted to generate different types of scenarios that players have to adapt to as a table. Each playthrough of the game will be able to tell different stories and those stories shouldn’t be driven by who was the luckiest. Crisis Council doesn’t use randomness to decide winners. It uses randomness to force negotiations that players wouldn’t voluntarily create - and then lets them decide what to do about it.

-Coleton