The Yellow Zone

I hadn't planned to have a yellow zone in the 18GB stock market. I wanted to keep things simple, and several recent games don't have one - including 1861, 1812, 18Neb, 18EU and Steam Over Holland.

I have changed my mind. One stimulus for this was a discussion of strategies for 1830 on BoardGameGeek, especially this comment. Another arises from my design aim of dividing all share values by 10 compared to traditional 18xx games. I wanted to have some spaces with value 3.5 towards the low end of the table, as well as whole numbers. The yellow zone fits nicely with this: by allowing players to buy multiple shares of companies in the yellow zone, they can choose to buy two shares for 7 (instead of two single purchases each rounding up to 4).

I also noticed that the games without the yellow zone all use incremental capitalisation and are fairly cash rich. 18GB currently uses full capitalisation (well, half capitalisation). which puts in more in line with the games that do have a yellow zone.

As with all my other design decisions, we shall have to see how this works in practice. I won't mind if the yellow zone doesn't get used much. I will worry if the tactic of having one company always in the yellow zone becomes a dominant play over other approaches, but I don't expect that to happen because players will be losing income.