A three-player game

Today we tried the 3-player game for the first time. It generally worked quite well. My testers enjoyed it and said they'd be happy to play it again.

Some recent changes worked well. The "Lawson-style" plain track tiles simplified the route building, and my changes to make the city tiles more uniform also worked. I'm even considering replacing the two-station city tiles with more conventional 18xx tiles, to simplify that aspect of the game still further, although that would change the style of the game somewhat.

As always, the test revealed some things that need tweaking. I was taken by surprise when one player started running a train that visited Glasgow three times on the same route. In an earlier version of the rules, a given city could only count once towards each train. That was a rule that I removed for the sake of simplicity, but I may have to reinstate it. (Alternatively, I could turn Glasgow into a 2-station city, which would bely its historical population; or perhaps players just need to put markers in Glasgow to stop this behaviour).

I had tweaked the Insolvency rules before this game and we agreed that they are now too generous. I either need to return to the 1860 rule whereby companies become insolvent at the end of their turn, or reduce the earnings that companies receive from leasing a train. (1860 actually does both of these, but that would probably be too harsh for my game).

We had to adjust the number of trains in the mix, but I pretty much expected that for the first game. (There is a different train mix depending on the number of players). And there are some minor tweaks to consider elsewhere as well.

Finally, the players said they would prefer traditional certificates rather than wooden cubes to represent shares. So 18GB is definitely becoming more and more of an 18xx game and less of a eurogame. I don't mind that; I now know how I would create a eurogame, learning from the experience of 18GB, and in the meantime I'm happy to create a new member of the 18xx family.

Now that was close!

Yesterday I tried another 4-player game, with me playing all positions. The final scores were: 505, 504, 503 and 501. That was close - what does it imply? I can see the following options:

1. I've developed a finely-balanced game
2. I unconsciously played all the positions similarly, with similar results
3. It was a fluke result
4. The game is designed so that the actions of the players make no appreciable difference

Obviously I'm hoping that one of the first three apply, rather than the fourth.

One of the "players" did have a good lead, both financially and operationally. Her NBR commanded the East Coast London-Aberdeen route, which is the highest scoring route in the game. She score was dragged back when another player sold 5 shares in her other main company (the Caledonian). Also, she could possibly have optimised her shares better in the end game. So perhaps I shouldn't be too worried by the final score.

I am more concerned about the stock market rules. Halfway through the game, I dropped the rule that make the director's token of each company sell for half value. With that in place, I could see no incentive for people to dump companies. I'll have to re-examine the effect of this at the beginning of the game: if necessary I'll only allow companies to buy trains from each other from Phase Three (as in 1830).

I also need some rule to limit stock trashing. It would have been perfectly possible to trash all the stock prices mindlessly. Possibly I just need a two-dimensional stock market after all, although these do have some drawbacks. An alternative would be to forbid players from selling shares in companies that they bought earlier in the round, although directors would have to be careful to protect their own holdings first. Maybe I just need ledges as in Steam Over Holland, or to make only sales by the Director affect the Share Price.

A two-player game

This week, I tried the first ever two-player game of 18GB. It went pretty well, given the current state of the design. My opponent said that it felt like a real game, which made me very happy. We faced plenty of decisions and the game generally flowed well.

As I expected, the game revealed a lot of things that need tweaking. We even found a tile that lacked a valid upgrade! I also got a lot of ideas for how to improve the design of the various components.

My opponent found the range of tiles quite hard to cope with. It made me realise that although I have designed each set of tiles carefully, there is little commonality between sets. So 2-station cities have one upgrade path, 3-station cities another, and double-town tiles a third, with little consistency across the three. So today I'm working through some options for replacing some tiles with others that match those used elsewhere in the game. I haven't gone so far as to make them all exactly the same, but there are fewer "unique" tiles. I hope this will make the tile play easier to manage, without being any less challenging in terms of tactics.

I also have concerns about my current rule for multiple jumps in the share price. Usually, a company will convert from five shares to ten, use the extra capital to buy an express train and use the extra markers to claim a route. This gives it a higher income but a lower dividend per share. The income moves the share price several spaces - one for every 10 between the income and the current share price. The total result is that these shares are worth far more than shares in an unconverted company, so the choice of which to buy is pretty straightforward.

In most 18xx games that allow multiple jumps, the share price is moved two steps if the income is double the current price, rather than a fixed amount more. I might switch to using this rule, so that share prices are somewhat slower to increase.

More on Private Railways

In January, I reported my plans to combine aspects of both 1825 and 1830 in how I handled private railways. That's more or less how things stand, except it turned out that the 1830 approach gave too much cash back to the players too early in the game, disrupting the flow of capital. That works fine for 1830, which has relatively low incomes, but didn't work for 18GB. So now, 18GB players assign private railways to companies instead of buying them in.

I've also changed the selection of private railways. The GNR and GSWR, instead of being optional public companies, have become private railways - the GNR with a slightly unusual track-laying power. Historically smaller privates such at the Arbroath & Forfar and the Newcastle & Carlisle have been removed. I've also defined which privates should be used for different numbers of players. I feel happier about this new arrangement.

One thing I'm considering is using the privates to add some asymmetry to the public companies. In many 18xx games, some privates come with shares in particular public companies and I'm toying with that idea for 18GB. My current musings are that perhaps the LNWR could start as a ten-share company (but with half capital) and that the Liverpool & Manchester could come with the LNWR directorship. Some other privates could come with 10% shares of the NER & NBR, which would only come into play if and when those companies become ten-share companies. It's an interesting idea and one I hope to try out.

I blame 1830

The map and tiles for 18GB were, I thought, pretty much settled. The interesting problems lay in the cash flow and train mix. But recently I played a game of 1830 – not something I do often – and I was struck by the tight tile set and the impact that a few key hexes had on the routes available. So I thought a bit and decided to add three double-town hexes to the 18GB map.

The beauty of these hexes lies precisely in that there are only three of them and the supply of tiles is strictly limited. This means that players may be in competition for the particular tile they desire. So by adding these hexes, I have added an extra element of player interaction and competition.

By comparison, the single-town hexes, plain hexes and most city hexes are more numerous. Therefore they have more tiles available and the element of competition is not so great. The exception is the four major cities – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, which have similarly tight tile sets.

I’ve taken this opportunity to change the single-town tiles as well. Previously, the green tiles had four prongs (K, X, or peace-sign). Now they only have three (doglegs and Y), thus making tighter track development. This wouldn’t have worked before because the three hexes that are now double towns really need crossing track. It will be interesting to see whether how this change affects the game – it may make it too hard to build intersecting track, which would potentially reduce player interaction rather than enhancing it.

Converting to Ten-Share Companies

A fair amount of my recent testing has looked at the process of converting companies from five shares to ten shares. Converting gives the company more capital, more station markers and a higher train limit, but halves the income from each share. So the director has to make a trade off between owning a more effective company or keeping a higher percentage of a company’s shares. The questions are, how this should affect the share price, and how much money should it give the company.

At first, I halved the company’s share price when it converted, reflecting the fact that each share now represented 10% of the company’s value instead of the 20% it did previously. This didn’t work in practice. It made the shares too cheap to buy and their value quickly increased thanks to the multiple jumps from a high dividend. Players ended the game with too much cash that they couldn’t spend. Also, the company didn’t get much extra cash from the halved share price, which made converting less worthwhile.

So I looked at what happened if the company’s share price is unchanged by conversion. With this approach, the number and cost of shares available works out much better. However, this also gives more money to the company, to the extent that it seems too easy to buy the expensive trains and even have a little left over for tokens. I could increase the cost of trains to compensate, but this would effectively eliminate the option of withholding income instead of converting.

One option would be to make the money coming into the company be set by its original, initial, share price instead of the share price at the time of conversion. This is what 1880 does. However, this would remove a trade-off. As things stand, a director has the choice on the one hand of converting early, to gain markers and key routes, and on the other hand of converting late, to get more money into the treasury. I like to have more decisions in the game and having a fixed amount of money arising from conversion would shift the decision towards converting early.

Currently I am experimenting with dropping the share price by two spaces when a company converts. This reduces the amount of money it receives and inflicts some cost on the director’s share value. In the first run through, this seemed to work OK. I'll do a few more tests and see how it goes.

Trains and Asset Stripping

When I last discussed asset stripping on this blog, I listed several possible rules that might contribute to a balanced game. Since then, I have tried various combinations of these rules in solo games and spreadsheet simulations. It's now time for a review.

I've decided that the key problem is when a company in receivership collects enough money to buy a new large train near the end of the game. The company probably won't cost much, so the player with the priority can buy this company, strip the new train from it, and dump the company for little or no cost. This gives a huge advantage to that player. You could say that players have to assess the situation and juggle the priority accordingly, but I suspect that the effect is too large.

To counter this, I have adopted the rule that works well in 1860. A company may not buy another company's last train, unless it has no trains itself. So if a company in receivership buys a train, another company can't asset strip it. A player can buy a company that has accumulated money in its treasury and buy a train from one of his existing companies, in order to get an injection of cash, so there is still some judgement required about how long to leave a company in receivership, but you also need trains to sell.

When I first tried this rule, I found that it limited train shuffling in the early and middle game more than I wanted. Since then, I have reduced the cost of individual trains (to nearer the norm of other 18xx games) and made a few other changes that seem to have resolved this problem.

Other rules that work well are that shares of a company with no trains are sold for half price (another rule from 1860) and that the director's certificate is also sold for the value of one share rather than two. (It is not permitted to "make change" for selling the director's certificate).

One rule that didn't work was to require new companies to buy their first train from the bank. This restricted players' options too much.

In the blog post referenced above, I suggested dropping a company's share price if it bought a company for more than full price, or if it sold it for less than half price. In practice I kept forgetting to do this and it made the calculation of train value too fiddly. Then I tried restricting the sale price to between half and double price. The half price restriction was too restrictive but I might keep the upper limit. I have also experimented with simply dropping a company's share price every time it sells a train, which is easier to remember, but I'm not convinced this is worthwhile.

I think I've reached a workable set of rules in this regard. Much more playtesting will be required.

Manorcon XXIX

I played four 18xx games at Manorcon this year. 1848 (Australia) , 1865 (Sardinia) and 1817 were all new to me, while 18Ardennes I had played in a prototype version two years ago and not since. I had read the rules to 1817, as I was interested in the short-selling mechanism, and those of 1865, as it has a new mechanic for abstracting train operations.

Of these, the game I enjoyed most was 1848. This is a straightforward 18xx: you buy shares and run trains. It took us three hours on the Friday evening (playing more rapidly than my usual group).

The other three titles all had some form of mergers (18Ardennes), acquisitions (1865) or both (1817). I find these mechanisms harder to play. I can handle the simple minor companies and mergers in 18EU. When minors have share prices as well, as in 1861 and 18Ardennes, I don't have a handle on the best way to play. Acquisitions are entirely new to me and I'm not at all sure how to play them. I need more practice: fortunately I have another PBM game of 1861 due to start.

These games were more involved and took longer than 1848. 1817 took much longer - I think we played for 10 hours. I'm glad that I've seen these new mechanisms in actual play and I'll have a think about whether I want to adopt them, but the key lesson I take from this the weekend is to remember that simplicity is a virtue.

Spreadsheets everywhere

Recently, I've run a couple of test games using only a spreadsheet, without the map and tiles. This has meant that I've had to guess the income of each company based on its trains and the stage of the game. Although I may have made some mistakes along the way as a result, the spreadsheet approach has several advantages.

For one thing, I have a record of each game. I can look back over the game and see how many trains were bought in each OR, or how many shares were available in each SR. Then I can experiment with a rule change, starting from a particular point in the game.

This approach allows me to concentrate on the financial flow of the game. I'm looking at when money becomes available for players to start companies and for companies to buy trains. It's an important way of thinking about the game. I'd even guess that experienced 18xx designers use this view of the game from the outset, whereas I've come to it after much work on other parts of the game.

From a practical point of view, the spreadsheet is much more convenient. Instead of needing a table to set up the map, I can carry the spreadsheet on a memory stick and play a couple of moves when I have a spare moment.

I don't claim any originality for the idea. Like many good ideas, I picked it up from the 18xx mailing list. It took a while to get the spreadsheet working the way I want it, but the effort has definitely been worthwhile.

18GB vs. Britain Under Steam

Way back when I started this project, I stated that my aim was to produce a game in the mould of 1829, 1830 et al that will be popular with euro-gamers. What I currently have is more of a traditional 18xx game. I did get rid of paper money (or poker chips) by simplifying the system for distributed income, which is a step along the right path, and the game isn't too complicated by 18xx standards, but I doubt that it will appeal to Eurogamers.

I should say at this point that I'm happy with this situation. I think the game has the potential to be a good 18xx game, if I can find more time to refine it through playtesting. The point of this post is to speculate on how I could create a new game, based on the same ideas, that really did appeal to Eurogamers.

The first thing to do would be to have companies lay their track directly on the board, rather than using tiles. Coloured train markers would be good, similar to those in Ticket To Ride. I could either let companies lay them from hex to hex, or have predefined routes on the map on which the markers could be placed. This would get rid of the tiles and all the rules about tile placement. (I note that Poseidon has already embodied a similar approach, using round markers on a hex grid).

This change would produce a rail network more akin to those of crayon rail games. These are popular and easy to understand. They also take up less space, as you don't need table space for all the different tiles of an 18xx game, and the board itself can be smaller too. The network would behave differently from 18xx games, in which companies often share track, and I might need rules to govern junctions and other details, but it should still work.

On the financial side, I'd be inclined to remove the transition from 5-share to 10-share companies. Several possibilities arise, including only having 5-share companies or only having 10-share companies. Another intriguing idea would be to have 6-share companies, funded incrementally (i.e. with share purchases paid to the company), and dividing all income by the number of shares in play. So if one player has 2 shares of company and another has 1, the first will get 2/3 of the dividend and the second 1/3. If someone else buys a fourth share, the amount paid out will drop to 1/2 and 1/4.

In other parts of the game, I'd be tempted to simplify the rules for receivership. Companies without a train or a director would receive a fixed amount into their treasury each turn (increasing by phase), rather than having to lease a train. This is an optional rule for insolvency in 1860 and is simple to use. I'd probably also simplify the rules for private railways.

All in all, this is something to think about. From now on, I will use the name 18GB for my 18xx game, and reserve Britain Under Steam for this putative new game. Unfortunately, I barely have enough time to work on one game, let alone two!

Changing Trains

My first test game, back in November, revealed that my choice of express trains did not work. I had taken the 4+4E trains from 1825, which can run any number of stations, take income from any four of those, and double it. On the 18GB map, these were more useful on relatively short routes rather than the long routes I had in mind (such as London to Aberdeen). It turned out that the ordinary 6 trains were running longer routes than the expresses.

I've got a better idea for express trains and they incorporate a mechanism I've only seen in one other 18xx game. (Typically for me, the idea comes from Mike Hutton). My 6E trains will count up to 6 stations and then add the distance between the start and end points. So running from London to Edinburgh will score more than connecting 6 cities in the North of England, because the bonus for the distance will increase the income significantly. I hope.

I'd also like to replace the ordinary 6 train, again so that the longer routes are run by the expresses. I think I can introduce a 4E to fill this slot. This has the additional effect of further encouraging five-share companies to convert to ten-share companies earlier, because only ten-share companies can own express trains.

This leaves only one problem, which is that there might not be enough trains left for five-share companies. The 4 trains will disappear when the first 6e is bought, leaving just the 5-trains. So I plan to add some 3T and 4T trains (tank engines) as well. These will replace the 3+1 and 4+1 trains. In practice they will be pretty similar to the trains they replace, except that there will be fewer of them and they will be able to run through an unlimited number of towns instead of just one.

I'll be interested to see how these work. I'm quite hopeful, although a little nervous about the 3T and 4T trains.

Sensitive initial conditions

One consequence of my simplified dividends system is that the relative worth of companies is very sensitive to small changes in income, particularly at the start of the game. If one company has an income of 100 while another is bringing in 90, the former will pay out 20/share and the latter only 10/share (assuming 5-share companies). So a small change in income can have a dramatic effect if it crosses a boundary from one level of dividends to another.

Major changes of income are fine. If a company buys a second (or third) train, then it is only right that its dividends should increase. Indeed, if one company's dividends were to increase as a result of buying a second train, while another's second train didn't quite make enough to pay higher dividends, then this would be just as much a problem.

So I've been carefully checking the potential incomes of each company at the start of the game, using various different values for different sizes of city. To make them balance, I've had to reduce the initial value of the larger cities. I'm happy to try the game with these reduced values. It could be argued that the previous incomes were too high, leading to player incomes growing too quickly.

I did notice that if I also reduced the initial value of 2-station cities, then the presence of towns on a route made an important difference, as they gave an extra income using the "+1" of a "2+1" train. The consequence is that while the sums worked for companies in most parts of the board, those in the crowded North of England lost out because there is no space to put towns between the cities. Pursuing this line of exploration further, I considered making towns worth zero, so that they are just obstacles preventing the creation of certain routes early in the game. This worked, but I don't like the "feel" of making them worse than plain hexes. I also considered adding "2H" trains, which would run for only 2 hexes but would give an additional income equivalent to a town. I think this would work and I may return to this idea in the future.

For now, I have some values that seem to work. The next step is to do more modelling of how player incomes grow at the start of the game, taking account of the cost of shares.

Bonus routes

18GB has a notion of bonus routes, in which a train’s income is increased if it links a certain pair of destinations. Examples include London to Plymouth (for the transatlantic trade), London to Scotland, and Hull to Liverpool. These encourage the building of longer routes.

One problem with this idea is that in the later game, companies have fewer trains than the routes available. So if the London-Holyhead route is worth less than (say) London-Manchester, companies will always choose to run the more profitable route and the less profitable routes will be irrelevant. This is something I would like to change.

Historically, there was intense competition to achieve the fastest journey times on these routes. In the current draft, 18GB tries to represent this by giving a bonus to the company with the shortest route at the start of each OR, regardless of whether they actually run the route.

Recently, I’ve thought of an alternative. Perhaps each bonus should be awarded only once per OR, to the first company to connect that pair of destinations. This would give a competitive element to the game and would encourage companies to claim different bonuses. In the example above, the London-Holyhead bonus could make the route worth more than London-Manchester, so the first company to run might claim it, leaving other companies no choice but to run the competing routes. I think this is worth a try.

Multiple Trains

In my first test game, I tried out a new rule for 18xx. When a company ran two trains from the same station, I counted the income from that station only once. This encouraged companies to build longer routes rather than link the same cities multiple times. It also simplified the counting of city incomes.

It did affect the train roster, in that if a company bought a second 2-train, the income it gave was much less. This can be tweaked by having a smaller number of 2-trains in the game and more 3-trains.

However, I plan to drop this for the next test. I would rather have companies make the trade-off between earlier income and longer-term routes. If they want to build dense local networks, this should be their choice; it will make the companies less able to compete for the longer routes in the later game.

In any case, the track-building in 18GB is already fairly restrictive, in the early stages, so there is already some restraint on the building of multiple short routes. This constraint from the tile mix seems sufficient to encourage the building of longer routes.

Private Railways

The private railways are the icing on the cake of an 18xx game. They add flavour, but are not the main part of the game. Their main role is actually to give the players different starting positions, with slightly different cash holdings and initial income. They may also have significant other effects, especially if they can be bought into a company.

On the other hand, the private railways are the first things that the players have to buy. Therefore the designer has to get them right. This is a lesson I learnt from my first test game. Until then, I had only a hazy idea of how the privates would work, and I had to decide on various rules in a hurry at the start of the game. In fact, I began that game with two different models for how private railways might influence the rest of the game.

The first was a minor enhancement of the 1825 rules. In this approach, privates would be owned by players, but interact with track-building. In phase 2, companies would be forbidden to lay track in a hex occupied by a private (possibly unless the owner agrees). In later phases, whenever a company does lay track in a private railway's hex, this closes the private. So some private railways occupy valuable hexes and influence early track lays; other will stay open longer and give more income over the course of the game.

The second was an 1830-like approach. Companies may buy private railways and this may give the companies special abilities. The most obvious ability is the laying of a tile in the private's hex – although for hexes in the thick of things this might be too unbalancing.

Another might be extra income for a certain town or city. Another might be a share in a particular company. This last ability probably wouldn’t work so well in 18GB, as it would be a 20% holding in the early game.

My current plan is a combination of these approaches. As in 1830, companies may buy private railways from phase 3 onwards and most privates give an extra ability to their owning railway. No company may lay a tile in a private railway's hex until the private is owned by a company (not necessarily the one laying the tile). However, in phase 4, companies may forcibly buy a private railway from a player (at face value) if they lay a tile in the private's hex. This prevents players from continuing to block important hexes. All private railways close at the start of phase 5.

As an extra thought, I’m wondering whether it would be possible/sensible to represent one or two companies as privates that give the ability to teleport a token. E.g. the SWR might become a private with the ability to lay a token in Swansea. (Although this would affect the optional grouping rules). Currently, the optional companies are the GNR in York and the GSWR in Ayr/Glasgow. The GNR could give a bonus to York and a free tile lay in any plain hex. The GSWR could give a bonus for Ayr and perhaps a free upgrade for Glasgow.