Starting the game

After a long hiatus away from Britain Under Steam, I spent some time at the weekend working on the financial side of the game. This is in many ways more important than the track building aspects. I've also found it harder to get a handle on, which partly explains why I've been slow to start on it. Eventually I decided that I'd done as much preparatory work as I could, and now just had to dive in, try some figures, and see how well they worked.

I focused on the start of the game: what prices companies can be floated at, how much cash players should start with, and how much private railways should cost. The result wasn't too bad. I only had to tweak a few figures here and there to get something that should be a reasonably playable game. I was able to lay at least one issue to bed, and to formulate some of the remaining questions I need to answer.

One issue I looked at was the "rungs" on the stock market around the start price. Many 18xx games have less than £10 between spaces - e.g. £67 & £72, or £60, £65 & £70. I want to divide all prices by 10, so I wanted to check that spaces valued £60, £70, £80 ... worked fine. And they did.

I will revisit the issue of how many shares are required to start a company. So far, I've been assuming two (i.e. 40% of a five-share company). A result of this, if the minimum start price is £60, is that someone could start two companies with just £240. This would not encourage players to invest in each other's companies from the start, which is my goal, so I may change this to a more traditional 60% of a company. This would make the minimum cost to float a company be £180, so I could add an additional £170 to the starting cash which players could only spend on each other's companies.

An alternative idea, which I had right at the start of this project, would be to charge a £50 fee for starting a company. So although the shares might only cost £120, the total cost might be £170. I'll experiment with this. There is an attraction to keeping the two shares to float rule, which is that there are more shares available for other players to invest in; they just need an incentive to actually do so.

Some other questions popped up, which I will leave for future posts.