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.