Couldn’t you simply make some lines around the outside of the card, sort of like a scoring track? Just place a cube on or next to the appropriate line?

Couldn’t you simply make some lines around the outside of the card, sort of like a scoring track? Just place a cube on or next to the appropriate line?

Given that money moves about fairly frequently, I thought the solution shouldn’t be something that was easily accidentally knocked or moved to have a different value.

Ideally perhaps, but given the increase in production costs, it’s probably not worth it to use chits. One cube for each wild card would be a lot cheaper than a tile sheet.

I think a simpler, cleaner solution came up in BGDF chat… just use the 12 revenue cards in each suit like you’re using the wilds now. So no wilds, and the ‘high value’ cards (which are often what wilds become anyway) are the ones set aside and whose purchase makes the revenue of that suit go to full value. This saves you the component, the confusion, streamlines a little, and I wager doesn’t significantly change the game. Sure it’d change things a little bit, but I bet in many cases the change would be so minor you wouldn’t notice.

• Seth

I like how you presented it in your post.

Ideally perhaps, but given the increase in production costs, it’s probably not worth it to use chits. One cube for each wild card would be a lot cheaper than a tile sheet.

True, but that’s a publisher/production decision and thus not my baliwick. For now I see my job as to just come up with something that facilely represents the game.

I think a simpler, cleaner solution came up in BGDF chat… just use the 12 revenue cards in each suit like you’re using the wilds now. So no wilds, and the ‘high value’ cards (which are often what wilds become anyway) are the ones set aside and whose purchase makes the revenue of that suit go to full value. This saves you the component, the confusion, streamlines a little, and I wager doesn’t significantly change the game. Sure it’d change things a little bit, but I bet in many cases the change would be so minor you wouldn’t notice.

Please feel free to make yourself a copy of Corner Lot and play the game, with and without your suggested change and report back on how it does. I expect that removing the 40/12 cards as you suggest will significantly change the game and not for the better.

For a variety of arithmetic reasons, the suits need to contain exactly 8 non-wild cards each. More exactly, the markets need to contain no less than 7 cards and mo more than 9 cards (9 is really pushing it), and there needs to be no less than 5 rounds and no more than 6 rounds. Change that and much of the game starts to fail. These particular aspects of the game are actually rather delicate. You can verify this easily enough: jJust discard 15 cards at the start of the round and put only 5 cards in each market. Similarly you can discard just 4 cards and go for 6 rounds of 6-card markets. Been there, done that: not good.

Outside of those arithmetic aspects, simple removal of the 40/12 cards to become pseudo-wilds (the cards for instance could be double-sided with each end of each face of the card bearing one of the 4 largest revenue values) not only changes the above arithmetic, but also does significant injury to the game’s cash-flow and changes the auction dynamic in poor ways. Key here is understanding the relative card values. The small cards are actually worth less than their cost. By themselves they are losing propositions. The lower-middle cards are actually worth somewhere close to face value, the middle cards are worth more than their face values, and the 30/8 and 35/9 are worth a lot more than their face values….but the 40/12 is actually worth considerably less than its face value. They are usually losing propositions that cost more than they are worth — and that fact is important to the auction’s evolution and the game’s cashflow problems. A good portion of each game’s markets needs to have cards hanging at the end of the market which players really don’t want but equally can’t afford to let slide. Much as the core of the game is the question of who will pull the trigger when (echoed in the passing/discount rule), the over-priced uneconomic 40/12 cards force an unwelcome commitment question onto the players where they can’t afford to commit, but equally can’t afford not to, and the question is who does, where and when and much of the rest of the game drives around that smaller trigger point.