Station markers

Following on from the preceding post about Companies that start in single-station cities, another way such companies could conceivably be losing out is in the number of tokens they can deploy at the end of the game.  With one token required in their home city, they only have three to place in higher-value cities.  Does this disadvantage them in comparison with Companies that have higher-value cities as their homes?

Six of the twelve Companies in the full game start in single-station cities.  That’s half of them.  So even if there is a disadvantage, it is quite widely spread.  In the two-player game, the mix is rather different.  Only two Companies start in single-station cities, but this leaves the four others available for purchase between the two players, so neither player is necessarily disadvantaged.

Of the other six Companies in the full game, the LYR and MSLR start in the centre of the board in high-value cities. But these Companies only have three tokens in total instead of the usual four, so they don’t have a significant advantage over the single-station cities.

The LNWR and CR start in triple-station cities and have the usual number of tokens, so they might have an advantage.  They are slightly limited in that their route through their home city will never upgrade, so they have to commit early on between routes that generate immediate income and those that have longer-term potential.  Also, the CR, starting in Glasgow, is slightly removed from the action in the centre of the board.  The LNWR may be a bit stronger but I’m happy with this, given its historical significance.

This leaves the GWR and the NBR, which start in double-station cities and so have reasonably high income at the end of the game combined with flexible routes.  The GWR’s home is in Bristol, which is strategically important for the South-West of the board but not too central.  I think this is balanced (and the GWR was one of the larger companies historically, like the LNWR).  The NBR’s home is Edinburgh, which is a key station on the East Coast route to Scotland.  If any company is over-advantaged in tokens, it is the NBR, but it is also yields some of the lowest possible incomes in the early stages of the game.  So I think this is not too unbalanced.

One small change I may make is to give the MR an extra token when it converts to ten shares.  This would give in one more in total than any other company.  I’ve found that the MR tends to underachieve in 18GB compared to its historical reach and this extra token might be a small encouragement for players to expand its network.    The change would also add a little more asymmetry to the game, which I think is a good thing.  There is a risk that combining this change with the free upgrade suggested in the previous post would make the MR too strong; we shall have to keep an eye on it during test games.

Single-station city bias?

A couple of playtesters have commented that the fixed income for single-station city tiles puts the companies that start in such hexes at a disadvantage.  That is not my intention and I review this aspect of the design in this article and the following post.

Although the home cities of these companies yield lower income than larger cities, single-station tiles can be upgraded more easily and can have multiple connections, so it should be easier to build more varied networks and to run multiple trains without laying a second marker.  Some of these companies start near higher-scoring cities and are better placed to upgrade those cities than companies that actually start in the higher-scoring cities.

That is the choice I intended these companies to offer.  This design goal would be forfeit for some companies if it turned out that they were unable to build multiple routes while the game still allows companies to run three trains.  To check this, I have reviewed the possible early incomes of all the companies in the game and have investigated a couple of possible rule changes that might make building multiple routes easier.  Some of changes these would have been quite major ones to make at this stage in the development of the game, so it is fortunate that they turned out to be unnecessary. 

One such option was to ease the restriction on laying two tiles, replacing the current rule that only one may be a city, with a version that applies that limit only to double and triple station cities.  This variant would allow a company to upgrade its single-station home city in addition to another city build.  But an evaluation of all the companies shows that only three (the MR, GWR and SWR) would significantly gain from this rule and the primary advantage would arise from building longer routes rather than multiple routes, so this option didn’t help the stated goal.

Another possibility was to add an extra “prong” to the yellow one-city tiles.  This would allow companies to build three routes without having to upgrade their single-station home city.   But this change breaks the upgrade process.  Companies would have fewer reasons to upgrade their home cities to green, and other companies would have one fewer option for building new track in the hex to force an upgrade.  If the green tiles had two marker spaces instead of one, there would be less incentive to upgrade to brown and if the tile were tokened out it would be harder for another company to do so.

In the end, I have adopted a very limited change.  The Midland Railway now has the special ability of a free upgrade for its home city when laying a green tile there.  Other companies are not affected.  Most of them would not benefit from applying this rule and the GSWR would be too strong.  So a special ability for the Midland Railway is sufficient.