With the release of version 28 to playtesters, 18GB is basically ready for the wider world. But if I were to revise it further, I'd be tempted to think again about the capitalisation rules. Specifically, I might introduce par prices.
To recap the current situation: companies start with five shares and five times their initial price as capital. Each share pays 20% of the company's income. In a subsequent stock round, the director may convert a company to have ten shares. This drops the share price by two spaces and gives the company five times the new share price as extra capital.
What concerns me is that linking the extra capital to the current price reinforces the benefit of an early lead. If a player owns a company that is paying well, they obviously get the benefit of the early income; they also benefit from owning good shares that climb the stock market (possibly including double jumps) and enable them to convert at a comparatively high price. Lesser stocks will definitely not double jump and may well have their price hit by players selling shares in those companies.
As an alternative fix, I did consider removing the double-jump advantage. I could do this either by ruling that five-share companies don't double jump, or by saying the game starts with a basic stock market in which companies only move one space and only introduce multi-jumps from a certain phase change. Either approach would limit the most egregious cases of early stock appreciation.
On reflection, it seems easier to record par prices and give converting companies five times their par price, rather than the current share price. This is a familiar mechanism from other games (and would work the same way regarding the costs of buying from the IPO vs the open market). It would remove the capitalisation advantage of well-paying early companies.
My intention is that someone who does well early on will still gain the benefit of the income (and the share price if they choose to sell shares), but the company itself gains no advantage and so the player has to look for other options to maintain their early lead.
Looking at other 18xx games, the "convert at current price" mechanism usually seems to be found in games with incremental capitalisation, where the cost of shares increases with the price anyway. I haven't seen it in a game with partial/full capitalisation and multi-jumps. It may be a combination of mechanisms that introduces an unwanted positive feedback loop. So, if I were to tweak 18GB further, I'd experiment with dropping this mechanism.
An even more radical approach to reduce early advantage would be to drop the notion of 20% shares entirely. Instead, I could adopt the rules from 1880 China: companies would start with five shares worth of capital but shares would only pay 10%; "conversion" would just give a company its final tranche of capital. The impact of this mechanism is that when someone gets enough money for another share, the extra income is only 10% instead of 20%, so the additional advantage of buying the share is lessened. But this change would remove a choice point from the game as to whether and when to convert, and I'd rather not make that change.
Sunday 21 February 2016
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