Bouncing to a win

I was happy enough with my tuning of the game to organise another playtest last weekend.  I was very pleased with the outcome: the players enjoyed it, one saying he preferred it to some published games that we've played before.  My reorganisation of the train mix and game end conditions seem to have cracked the problem of the end game, and the removal of the double-town tiles has simplified route building while keeping the challenge posed by the more important hexes.

We did encounter one interested feature towards the end of the game.  As in several 18xx games, if a company's share price is in one of the lowest areas on the stock market, shares in that company don't count against a player's certificate limit.  In the penultimate stock round of Sunday's game, the GWSR was valued this low and my two opponents had spare cash to buy up all the shares.  So far, so good (for me as a designer, if not me as a player).

By the next stock round, the share price had risen out of this zone and hence the players had to sell some shares.  They chose to sell the GSWR, which knocked its share price back down so much that they no longer counted against certificate limits.  As my opponents had sold shares in the GSWR, I was the only player able to buy them and I quickly bought all ten of them.  This was enough to win me the game.

This seemed a little unsatisfactory, because all the manouevring, stock trading and blocking until then counted for little in the final outcome.  In retrospect, we worked out that my opponents could have prevented the share price from falling so far back if they had sold some other shares instead, which would have kept me from the win. Still, it seems a large swing at the end of the game from a single decision. I'm musing about maybe changing the rules so that shares in the low-value zone only count half for the certificate limit, rather than not counting at all.  This would still give an incentive to buy them, while retaining a trade-off against other stock.

(I think the reason that this doesn't occur in other 18xx games arises from other differences in the design.  In 1825, for example, shares don't fall in price when they're sold; while in 1830 the stock market is two-dimensional and structured in such a way that if shares move out of the zone, subsequent sales are less likely to drop them back into it).