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.

First test game

This marks a milestone; at last I've played a full game through. This has been a long time coming; work commitments have meant that I've not had much time to work on the game this year.

The first play through is rather like an integration test in an IT project. Lots of different components have been developed in isolation, and it is only when you put them together that you discover where they don't match up. I was expecting the game to raise as many questions as it answered, and so it was.

Several things did work. The income system meant that players and companies could record their cash on a simple track. The map and tiles worked, and I think they just need minor tweaking as further plays reveal any lingering problems. Players had plenty of opportunity and incentive to cross-invest. The stock market was reasonably dynamic. Converting companies from 5 shares to 10 shares seemed basically right, although I need to look at the details on that.

18xx designers often say that the train roster is the hardest part of the game to get right. I certainly need to change mine about a bit. I think this is par for the course.

The biggest concern I have now is to get the company funding right. In the middle of the game, players seemed to have too much money for the shares available, while companies didn't have enough money to move the train buying along. The income from the shares was all quite similar, so it wasn't obvious which player would benefit most by making companies withhold income. This will need more experimentation. I might even try partial capitalisation, despite having argued against this in the past.

In the meantime, I have lots of small changes to make, to the rules, to the map, to the tiles, and to the stock market, and possibly to other components as well.

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.

Share tokens

In an attempt to reduce the amount of printing, laminating and cutting that I have to do, I've decided to buy coloured wooden cubes to represent shares. An octogan will represent the director's "certificate" while eight cubes will represent the ordinary shares. This is a more expensive solution but should save me time. The pieces match the discs that I have already bought to be station markers.

I reckon it will also give the game more of a "euro" feel, which fits with my overall aims. Although the rules are too complex really to be a true eurogame.

My source has 11 colours available. This has limited the maximum number of companies in the game, forcing me to abandon the option of 2n+1 companies (where n is the number of players). Instead of a formula, I'm currently using 7 companies for 3 players and n+5 for 4 to 6 players. I think this will work OK. As always, playtesting will give more guidance. When these tokens arrive, I will be another step closer towards a playable game.

Certificate limits

I did a quick bit of analysis yesterday and found that most 18xx games set the per-player certificate limit so that approximately 85% of all shares in the game could be held by players, if each player was at their maximum. The percentage is usually a bit lower than this for 2-player games and a bit higher for 5 or 6 player games. This seems a reasonable rule of thumb.

However, it is based on the assumption that all companies have ten shares. In games where companies start with five shares and only some might convert to ten shares, its not immediately clear how to set the certificate limit. 18Ardennes addresses this by increasing the limit as more companies convert to 10 shares. This works, but adds one more number to keep track of during play.

I'm wondering whether it would be simpler just to treat each ten-share certificate as half the "weight" of a five-share certificate. It might be simpler still to change the limit to the number of shares, rather than the number of certificates, with 10% shares counting as 1 and 20% shares as 2.

In my game, I want to always have shares available for purchase, either from new companies on from the open market. So I don't want to set the limit so high that all or most shares can be bought. This means that even in 6-player games I'll keep the limit to around 85% rather than letting it rise over 90%.

This is enough analysis to be going on with. We can always tweak the limits during playtesting if need be.

How to Encourage Balanced Portfolios?

A basic aim of Britain Under Steam is to encourage players to invest in each others' companies without restricting which companies are available to start. This will combine what I see as the best of two different strands of 18xx games. 1825 and its descendants force cross-investment by making the companies available in a set order, so that players have to buy shares in those that are currently available. 1830 and its descendants let players start any company, with the result that they tend to focus on buying shares in the one(s) they have started themselves. The question is, how do I design the start of the game to encourage cross-investment?

One promising approach is to be fairly conventional, by requiring 60% of a company's shares to be sold before it floats, limiting each player's holdings to 60% of a given company, and giving players enough starting cash to buy shares equal to 100% of a cheap company. This means that a player can start her own company and have enough cash left over to buy shares in other players' companies.

I was wondering whether I could encourage more cross-investment if I companies floated when 40% of their shares were floated. This would leave more player cash available to invest in other companies. This idea does immediately run into a flaw: if a player has enough cash to buy 80% of a company, she could start two companies instead of investing in other players' companies. I have worked out rules to balance the options of starting one company or two (including the potential for asset stripping), but these don't address the basic aim I am considering here.

In 1830-style games, of course, directors are forbidden from selling the directors certificate, and companies without a train must buy one. This combination ensures there is a risk involved in starting a second company. Britain under Steam doesn't have these restrictions, which removes much of the risk. This is intentional, as it also removes the risk of cross-investment, but perversely it also discourages cross-investment if players have the option of floating a second or third company instead.

I could add an administrative fee for starting a company, which would perhaps encourage players to buy existing shares instead. However, this might have the unintended consequence of making it too unprofitable to start a company at all, which would hardly be the desired behaviour!

A variant on that idea would be charge no administrative fee for a player's first company, introduce a fee for their second, and a higher fee still for their third. The cost could be based on the number of directorships that the player currently holds, or the number of companies they have floated since the start of the game.

Another take on this variant would be to deal the companies in order at the start of the game, then make the one at the head of the queue free to start and ones further along cost a small fee. This second version would restrict players more than I would like.

A different approach would be to limit players to holding a single directorship in the first phase of the game. As soon as phase three begins, this restriction would be lifted.

It's worth noting that in the advanced game, I'm thinking of adding auctions for the right to start a new company. A player can nominate a company and a par price; whoever then bids the most wins the right to buy the directors' certificate at that par price. I'd have to work out how this would sit with any additional fee for starting a company.

At one point I thought about charging a administrative fee every new company, but giving the owners of some private railways a fee waiver. I haven't revisited this idea until now; perhaps it is worth some reconsideration?