I've usually found when cobbling games together that discussing what I had in mind and how I got there tends to let others get a good hold on the concept and making good suggestions, but, I didn't want to make the initial post any longer than necessary. So, here we go

I started mucking around with CRISIS!!! as a joke with a friend while sipping coffee after a political event, I thought it might make a decent easy one-time game parodying a generic legislature during election season, with maybe room for a sequel, but it was very simple and not complex nor IMO really able to capture the dealmaking aspect of things. So I shelved it in favor of another far simpler game, the Coin Game. Ironically the solution was right there.

The game rounds have a crisis to start them off, and a setup for a vote with voting blocks for sale and other that can act in pre-determined or random fashion outside of player influence, it removes total calculation in favor of strategy subject to the whims of luck. The Crisis Cards, still to be written, basically can be envisioned as a deck (or in reality a spreadsheet) on which the Crisis is printed in fairly generic form, along with the number of NPCs showing up to vote and the number and type of Elector and Auction Cards to draw.

The Crisis cards essentially represent the strongest random factor of the game, but are not completely random, basically each has a general value - light, medium, heavy, and severe and one basically adds the round to a random roll to determine which level of severity to select the 'card' from. This is actually necessary because the game is otherwise somewhat open-ended, more severe crisis later in the game can smash players in weaker positions and be the fatal hammer blow or step up for those in stronger ones, so luck plays a strong role in the game but not an overwhelming one. Essentially though the crisis are designed to be the backdrop to the bidding and manuevering

Loosely speaking the CHOAM auctions fall into mulitple categories
Stock offer
Asset offer
Opportunity
Open Bid
Player offer
Elector offer

You can have more than one of a category and many will overlap. Stock offers are bundles of the generic revenue source, Assets specific ones with specific abilities - an "Ice Mine" might provide a decent income in of itself, but it might give a bonus to an agricultural asset and so forth, they can also be sabotaged, improved, etc. Opportunities, like the smuggler investment, are usually short term effects not income sources, or provide an ability, for Dune you might be able to buy a "Snooper" able to detect poisons or the equivalent of a gift certificate to assassins'r'us. Open Bid would be where an auction is an actual auction, the item is placed up with a deadline and players post specific bids openly for it, presumably directly replying to a message for the bid in replies with their bid in the title, and the Elector offers are specifically for the Crisis vote. Players can offer stuff for bid and to increase their anonymity some auction materials will be placed mid way through a round, so people don't automatically assume anything added to the auction list after the initial offers for the round are from a treacherous or desperate player. Loosely speaking the number of items for auction each round will be less than the number of players but more than half, and selected semi-randomly via a method not fully flushed out yet to produce a random but diverse set of offers. Open player offerings will essentially be handled by the player, the post a new header for an auction, describe what they got and want - be it assets, stock, votes etc - and run the auction on a deadline not to exceed the last CHOAM offers, so we don't drag things out and to ensure people can cast final votes with no auctions on the table. However, from a mod perspective, those auctions are all inter-player - I transfer things strictly by NB request. So if Bob offer his Ice Mines and Ted buys them for 1200 MS, If Bob sends me a NB saying transfer Ice mines to Ted, I do it, and if Ted never sends me a NB to transfer funds to Bob, well, nothing happens, except Bob presumably screams at Ted the next day, of course I'll allow a player to NB me that such a transfer will occur since they might be away, but I won't confirm or deny such a request was made if asked. That's where the anonymity bid with 10% fee comes in, that person transfers the object to CHOAM who oversees the auction and collection of payment.

For NPC and Electors, I'm still a little torn on this, I'm about a 9-10 on the Dune Geekdom scale, so the temptation is to load up characters from the books, the original and the various sequels, but I'm not sure I want to overlap the time frame with the game - you'll be able to tell when the game starts because I'll use the game years, but I'm sure even if I just make up names any other Dune fanatics will catch parallels. If Count Masmir Henring, famed assassin, shows up as an elector, yeah, he's a Hasmir Fenring rip off. I may not even use Atreides as a playable affiliation for the same reason, but I do anticipate taking strictly 'real' Dune Houses, worlds, groups and so on.

I did screw around with trying to build an RPG aspect into things, since the game process will favor 'in-character' commentary anyway, and this may appear for the final draft, say each 'character' had 3 attributes - intrigue, combat, diplomacy rated at 1-5 dots plus 1-3 special abilities. I am undecided if this would add an excessive layer of complexity or a valuable and fun aspect to the game. But the players, while essentially unkillable, can be harmed and those attributes might make a good way to arbitrate such things. You can't kill Player Bob, but you can wound him, spy on his house, 'assassinate a key ally' and take away one of his votes permanently or cost him a lot of money to buy a replacement cloned set of lungs after you nerve gas his household or a new set of eyes when you drop a stone burner on his doorstep like in Dune Messiah or cost him a billion solaris in bribes and good works after a smear campaign. This does not require a RPG aspect but that may be the optimal route. Also still undecided is if the player's character will be the actual head of their house/group or simply an unnamed 'rep', if I try to fuse in a RPG aspect then likely the former.

But before I consider it I'll need to see how comfortable with the current game mechanics people are. The basic core rules seem simple enough but rarely are to someone who is trying to read your own text summary of them, on the other hand I worried the coin game rules would be hard but they haven't been.

Voting - One thing I should have included in the initial post was the result of abstaining. Obviously if the votes for that round are 150, and 76 are needed, any abstention would act as a no vote, which isn't desired, so abstainers will be removed from the total. So if 150 votes, then 76 are needed, and if 10 votes are to abstain then its not 76/150 but 71/140.

So, that's it for the moment, some clarifications I hope. Some of the rules are accidentally vague, some are vague because they are still vague and need ironing out over the next week or so, but I'll try to answer any questions regardless of which type of vagueness is involved.