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Commentary and processes of J C Lawrence: systems architect, contrarian, theorist, sailor, hacker, virtual world designer, linux-user, aquarist, disquisitor, cat breeder, raconteur, game designer, ludophile, bibliophile, numismatist, speculator and theologiser

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Muck & Brass — Revision #69 released

Changelog:

There are no other rules changes. The download file is in the same place as usual with 69 in the filename instead of the previous number.

map-12.png

Again, please append commentary, questions, reactions, thoughts etc1 as comments below so we may all easily track exactly what is being talked about.

Footnotes
  1. Please upload images and other media to the FTP server and then mention the upload in your comment. ↩

Twitter Week: 2009-05-02

Declaring a mysterious type

I’ve posted a first draft of the rules for the un-named game to give an idea where I’m headed. Please note that I’ve not checked or otherwise verified any of the game’s basic arithmetic (eg component counts, scoring values, map sizes, etc), so they are likely to be way off. However the rules should show the intended basic structure and character of the game and to hopefully help get the game name suggestions flowing!

Of uncertain name

I need a name, a name for a game, preferably a punish double entendre. Here’s the premise:

It is 1958 and pop culture is transforming London, life and society. It is the age of the young and the young want to party and to hook up and to disappear into the night. But first they have to get involved, find their ways to the parties and avoid the police who don’t quite approve of the new social order along the way.

Yep, that’s mostly ripped off from the truly wonderful Absolute Beginners, and yes, this is a game all about getting your’s and the other player’s pieces laid1. Structurally the game features network-building, pick-up-and-deliver, a very relaxed definition of player ownership2 and a Velano-inspired scoring system3. Intended playtime is in the 75-90 minute range, which feels about right but it is early days yet.

The other inspirations include the usual suspects:

The core premise is that of shared public actions, player actions which affect and move not only that player’s own pieces, but those of other players. The hope is to create a diffuse yet strong temporary emergent alliance/mutual incentive system that is based on spatial relationships and not partial-ownership via company shares (ie not like Wabash Cannonball, Pampas Railroads etc and more like Bridges of Shangri-La and Clans).

FWLIW previous themes and titles included Infection and Necrosis, but #bgdf_chat successfully persuaded me those titles and themes were non-starters4.

Footnotes
  1. Complete with boy bits and girl bits and disappearing into the night. ↩
  2. Players are colours but they may play any colour piece at almost any time. ↩
  3. I’d dearly love to own a copy of Veleno! ↩
  4. In changing the theme to teenage sexual exploration in the newly liberated London of the late 1950′s, only the names were changed. ↩

Trimming corners

New rules for Corner Lot. The only substantive change is to the starting capital for different player counts.

Change Log:

Sticker shock remembrance

A possible clean-ish address for the problem of remembering the value assigned to a wild card: 20 small chits, 4 in each suit’s colour, double sided with each side bearing a revenue value (3/4/5/6/7/8/9/12). When a player buys a wild card they place the matching chit on the card with the appropriate side up so as to record the revenue they assigned to the card.

Unfortunately it means not only an extra component, but an extra component-type. Oh well. I guess I can’t hope for an Adlung-Spiele small-box presentation.

Need help with that?

A few playtesters have requested player aids or cheat-sheets for Corner Lot. I may be too close to the game to see the wood for the trees: If there were to be a player aid, what would you like to see on it and how would that help you? Would a player aid have been useful to you? If you have played the game already, would it still be useful to you> Would it make teaching the game easier?

Only one of the 40+ players I’ve taught the game to locally requested a player aid, but didn’t have a clear statement of why they wanted one, how it would be useful or what data they thought should be on it (more likely a product of my bad questioning than their fault). My perhaps unflattering impression was that the player aid would provide comfort by re-assuring the player that they hadn’t forgotten any of the core game structures rather than providing data they’d forgotten. Does that about right? What do you think of the need and value for a player aid for Corner Lot?

Twitter Week: 2009-04-25

Teaching Corner Lot

Reading between the lines, it seems that some of your players have had difficulty grokking some aspects of Corner Lot, especially the value and size of the bonuses, or how the stack will unroll etc. Below is a rough transcript (from memory) of the spiel I use when teaching the game. It has worked well for me. I wrote this originally in reaction to a session report. In case I forgot anything, I’ll update this version as needed.

This is a set collecting game. We’re going to be buying cards in a weird auction and collecting revenues for the cards we get. At the end of the game we’ll get bonuses for having certain patterns of cards. The player with the largest net worth wins.

There are 5 suits of cards with 8 cards per suit. (Lay out 8 cards, one of each value) Property cards have a cost and a revenue. The cost is the baseline of how much they cost to acquire and the revenue is roughly what they’ll pay you every round for owning them. With one exception the cost is always the revenue minus two times five. And the exception is…? (Wait for someone to point at the 40/12) Correct!

The deck will be shuffled and five cards will be laid face up to the side. (Lay 5 cards off to the side) These are out of the game and yes, you get to see them. Then 7 cards are laid in a sorted row as so. (Does this) This is the current market: the cards up for auction first. Then another 7 cards are set out, and make the future market: the cards auctioned in the second round. Later they’ll move down to become the current market, a new set of 7 will be dealt to be the new future market and so forth. As there are 40 cards in the deck, 5 are out, leaving 35, the game has 5 rounds of 7-card lots.

Okay, we’ll also pick a start player. They’ll get the first turn, then the player to their left and so on. Always purely rotational. That never changes.

On your turn you may bid, buy or pass. That’s it, just bid, buy or pass. Bidding! You may bid on any card in the current market that isn’t the cheapest/bottom card and that you haven’t bid on already. Just to keep the bids straight, make your bids by putting your chips on the corner of the card nearest you. So you get this corner, you get this corner you get this corner etc. (points) The minimum bid is the cost of the card plus $2, or $2 more than the highest bid on the card, whichever is more. Instead of bidding you can just buy the cheapest/bottom card for face value: this number on the card. Pay your money, take the card. And of course, you can pass. If you pass you’re not out: you can come back in later.

So why bid ahead and pay that $2 premium? Because the high cards are worth a lot more than their face value and the low cards, are well, not so good. (Quickly throws some chips on the various cards, some cards with a single bid, some two, some three, usually the penultimate card with none) Just pretend these chips are the bids by various players. When someone buys the bottom card we then look at the next card up. If it has just a single bid on it, then that player gets the card instantly for his bid. (Shows this) Then we do it again. Ahh, the next card has two bids! Those two players then go clockwise bidding for the card until only one person is left and they win the card for their bid and the losers get their money back. The minimum raise is $2. This next card has 3 bids on it: same thing happens, round robin etc, And this keeps on going, the stack keeps unrolling until there are either no cards left or you get to a card with no bids on it. Then it stops. Often all 7 cards in the market will go all at once! The key thing is that by bidding ahead you are securing the right to bid later. If you didn’t bid ahead on a card, you’ll have no chance to bid on it when the stack unrolls if someone else has bid on it. You are bidding for the right to bid!

Now all this unrolling and bidding and cards going places etc happens during the turn of the player who bought the bottom card. Once it is all done, the next player gets his turn.

Now of course with this card here (points to the penultimate card with no bids), say you (points) have the next turn, you can just buy that card for face value, you can bid on this last card if you haven’t already, or you can pass. It might be a good deal. Or not.

Okay, once all the cards in the current market are gone we get revenues! You get paid for every card you have. But you don’t get the full revenue! If the wild card for that suit hasn’t been bought, then every card in that suit pays $2 less. (I’ll talk about the wild cards and how to get them later) So this 5/3 card only pays $1 and this 25/7 only pays $5 and so forth. The key thing here is that cards pay back at roughly 22%. So you don’t get your money back quickly!

So we all get our money, a new future market is dealt and we do it all again. We do that 5 times and the game is over and we figure out how much I won by. Or not. Again. Bahh!

At the end of the game you get bonuses for the cards you have. There are four bonuses. For 3 or more cards in the same suit you get the number of cards you have of that suit times the highest revenue card you have in that suit, Then, 3 or more cards in the same suit in adjacent numerical order (and 12 comes after 9 as there is no 10 or 11) pays the number of cards in the run times the highest revenue card (so 4/5/6 or 7/8/9/12 for instance), 3 or more cards of the same value pays the number of cards time the revenue, and 3 or more cards of adjacent values but with each card of a different suit and each suit only occurring once pays the number of cards times the highest revenue. Sort of a “rainbow” run. It is always 3 or more cards and always times the highest revenue card in the set.

Each card can pay all four bonuses, but it can’t pay any bonus more than once. So 5/6/7 in suit will pay two bonuses, one for the suit and one for the run! But you you can’t take four 7s and say you have lots of sets of triple 7s as you mix and match them, and you can’t take two 5s, a single 6 and two 7s and say you have two rainbow runs.

So these bonuses are where the real money is in the game. And what you really want is for all of your cards to pay out multiple bonuses in different directions. Something like a 5/6/7 in 3 suits will pay every which way, for the suits, the suited run, the triples, and the three rainbows, see? See why the big cards are so much more valuable? (Get an answer) There’s lots of money there.

So we do all that and the player with the most money wins! It takes about 45 minutes.

Oh, the wilds! Okay, remember the bid, buy or pass business? You can just buy a wild card. It costs $20. It is just like buying the bottom card but it doesn’t start the stack unrolling. When you buy a wildcard you have to instantly say what it is. It is a 7! This is a 12! Whatever, just one of the card values: 3/4/5/6/7/8/9/12. But! But! When it comes to revenue time, the revenue for the wild card goes straight to the card and just piles up there. You don’t get it until the end of the game. Also, you have to pay the bank $5 for each wild card you own. You do get your revenue income first, so you can pay from that, but if you still can’t pay the $5, you have to put the wild card back and you lose all the money that piled up on it!

Now for the bonuses the wilds are just like any other card. They have a suit and they have a value. You can have the wild be a duplicate of another card you have, so you could have a blue 40/12 and have a wild blue 40/12 too. That’s fine.

And of course, once someone buys a wild, all the cards in that suit will now pay their full revenue.

There’s also a trick in passing. If everyone passes in a round, $5 is put on the bottom card. It is now $5 cheaper! However the first person to pass doesn’t get first dibs at the card at the new price. The turn marker moves forward and the next player does. Of course if everyone one passes again, it gets $5 cheaper again and the turn marker moves forward etc. If it ever gets to $free the next player has to take the card. Such a problem!

So we do all this: bidding, buying cards, moving cards about, vast amounts of money leap out of the bank and go to me, little small bits go to you guys, all that stuff. We do 5 rounds, then we pay out the bonuses, count up the money, and see that I won yet again. Hey gee, I’m the banker too!

Any questions?

Beating ploughshares into velocipedes

I’ve posted new rules for Corner Lot. The only substantive change is the requirement that all bid raises by by at least $2. There’s also an explicit statement that players may not increase their bid on a card prior to tis resolution, as there were as questions on that (this limit prevents the game from deadlocking as players dollar-up their prior bids in order to manipulate turn order).

I’m also working on new card art in order to resolve the colour problem some of you are having. With luck it will be ready in a few days. Meanwhile, please review and play by the new rules and post any thoughts, reactions and playtest reports as a comment to this post.

Twitter Week: 2009-04-18

Twitter Week: 2009-04-11

Twitter Week: 2009-04-04

So ya wanna sniff?

This morning’s surprise was a playtesting request for Corner Lot. Colour me surprised (Oh, so that’s what colour surprise is! Ewwww.). I’ll get a playtest kit (ie a PDF of the required cards) put together later today for requesters1.

Producing the game is pretty trivial as it is just 45 cards. The only other component’s you’ll actually need are poker chips. We don’t bother with the player markers here as I have players place their bids on the corner of the property card closest to them, thus self-identifying the bids as their’s.

Please comment on this post to request playtest kits. Playtesters, please also append your comments questions, thoughts etc to this post as comments.

Footnotes
  1. Already done. Later is now. ↩

Straight shootin’ complexity cowboy

The rules for Corner Lot have been updated to reflect wildcards and the current concept of rainbow straights. Sadly that also also means that the rules now occupy 3 pages instead of the prior 2. Ahh, rampant runaway complexity threatens!

Regimental thuggery

We’ve played a slew more games of Corner Lot in the last days, all remarkably well received. The big concern is that the game is clearly a 3 or 4 player game and does not scale well to larger players. As such I’ve been pursuing avenues to increase player count flexibility. Most recently we’ve been trying the following changes:

This has worked well and has improved the game for all the players. I’ve found it a surprisingly strong improvement.

However, all is not rosy. Players tend to specialise in suits as the game rewards them heavily for that, leading to low contention rates for property cards once into the mid-game. In general each player will pursue bonuses in two suits, making competition for cards generally tepid outside of bid ordering details. The tendency is for there to be a round to a round and half of bidding for each lot before the trigger is pulled. If there were more contention for cards the trigger-pulling decision would be more difficult and interesting.

Two proposals have been made by the players:

  1. Add support for scoring bonuses for straights (not just straight flushes). This would need to be explicitly limited in some way else a player with the 5/6/7 of three suits could construct an ungodly large number of possible three-card bonus straights!
  2. All players, once per game to insert one of their purchased cards into the currently auctioned lot in return for the card’s revenue
    • A possibly slightly more interesting form of this instead adds a 6th round to the game in which players may (must?) put one card up for auction (in return for its revenue).

I’m tempted by the straights and in particular for allowing players to score bonuses for rainbow straights (3 or more cards in revenue sequence with each suit occuring not more than once). The notion of putting cards back up for auction is interesting but a little less compelling at the moment as almost every case would involve another player scoring more for the card than the contributor Hurm. Unless the winning bids on the property cards in that last round were paid back to the contributing player? I have numbers to crunch.

I’ll get updated rules including the wildcards posted Real Soon Now.

Old Age of Steam playtest photologs (Sun, London, SE Australia, Wales, Nitrogen)

I recently acquired Okay to post the photologs from some of the outside playtests of my Age of Steam maps:

Age of Steam: Sun

Age of Steam: London

Age of Steam: South East Australia

Game #1

Game #2

Game #3

Age of Steam: Wales

Game #1

Game #2

Game #3

Age of Steam: Korea (using Nitrogen rules)

Site upgrade

I’m about to start a site-upgrade for WordPress and a few other key packages, moving from WordPress 2.5 (plus a long list of security patches) to WordPress 2.7 (plus a shorter list of security patches). As I hand-wrote the WordPress theme this site uses, and several of the plugins were extensively edited away from their defaults, things may look odd or broken for a while. Please bear with me…

Muck & Brass — Revision #67 released

Thanks for all the great responses on the playtests so far!

There are no big changes in this new release, just clarifications, grammar and typo fixes to the rules. There have been no substantive rules changes. Playtesters can download the full distribution by changing the 65 in the super-sekrit filename to 67, or you can just download and print off the new rules as they’re the only thing that has changed in this release.

Again, please append commentary, questions, reactions, thoughts etc1 as comments below so we may all easily track exactly what is being talked about.

Footnotes
  1. Please upload images and other media to the FTP server and then mention the upload in your comment. ↩

18xx night: 2009-03-27

Got together with Daniel, Jacob and Todd las night to play 18xx. We played 1846, 18Mex and 1832 — and with small exception I played terribly, embarrassingly badly; rank amateurs could easily have done better. I don’t know where my head was last night, but it wasn’t in that room. The one gleaming light was that I was able to consistently manage the private auctions to my own best advantage. Actually making good use of what I got from there…not so much. Bah. Thankfully I also forgot to take any pictures. A small blessing.

My head finally hit the pillow at around 08:00 this morning, so I’m a bit groggy as I type this. However my brief sleep and the time afterward has been filled with the most delightful many flavoured forms of Oh I should have done XXX! realisations. The 18xx are so wonderfully expressive in their almost symbiotic layers of counter-reactions in that regard.

1846

I’d been wanting to play 1846 for a long time and it has been near the top of my ever-almost Deep Thought Games order as a shorter and clever 18xx by Tom Lehmann. I’m less interested now, verging on active revulsion. I’m generally not a fan of partial capitalisation games as they push players to continuously invest in their own companies in order to validate their prior investment and make it viable. As such cross-investment is more of a spare-cash activity than a selective investment, presidency transfers are far less common, and the emphasis is moved heavily to run good companies rather than free money, combinations, or timing_1. In short the question is _How do I ride this vehicle to success? rather than, How do I exploit the other players in order to win? However, more simply, the game seemed intensely tactical, almost entirely non-confrontational and an effective rendering of a standard euro-style economic-snowball into 18xx form. Shudder. I have not had a more unpleasant 18xx experience. I’m willing to play again, I’d like to play again2 just to make sure I saw the game reasonably clearly, but I’m tempted to rate this one at 3.5/10 or under.

18Mex

We played up through Phase 3.5 and into the start of Phase 4. I had a clear lead with the NdM presidency, the 20 trigger private, 40% of the Chihuawa and 20% of the, err, gray/black thing down in the south (the two clearly best companies in our game, with the Chihuawua set to merge into the NdM), Jacob wasn’t far behind but was a noticeable step behind me, Todd managed admirably for not knowing the board and I don’t think Daniel had much idea of how terrible a position he was really in once the train rush really broke. Sadly Jacob had to go home (wife, kid) so we called it just as we entered Phase 4. Finally, at least once, I had some of my act together and wasn’t entirely stupid. Even better we got to see some neat track-build patterns with the minors that raked in the money (A and B were both running for ~$100 before they folded) while also driving the game development in entertaining fashions. Tres chic.

18Mex is growing on me. I like the phase 3.5 evolution3 plus the almost as large mutation in phase 5 one or two ORs later when the NdM forms. By reflection (same designer, similar system) 18TN (which I also have) is climbing rapidly on my want-to-play list. Just delightful.

1832

Perhaps I’m just not a stylisitic fan of Bill Dixon games. Perhaps the less said here is also the better as this was where my brain clearly exeunt stage left, leaving me to ungracefully and unconsciously suicide4. I admire the huge number of levers the game provides the players, the game has good arc, good development curves and an interesting track-system. That said, the game felt bloated. I suspect that’s an unfair characterisation as the interesting facets of the many many levers provided couldn’t fully express in a shorter game5, but having 2-trains run 6-8 times and 8 ranks of trains ( same as 1870: 2/3/4/5/6/8/10/12) is perhaps a bit too much for my taste.

Footnotes
  1. Blog post due RSN on the four basic types of 18xx designs. ↩
  2. Glutton for punishment? ↩
  3. Easily comparable to 1856′s CGR formation ↩
  4. Deliberate bankruptcy in the 8 trains. ↩
  5. I’d guess it averages 12-14 OR sets ↩

Twitter Week: 2009-03-28

Elbowing cove detours

We’ve been playing Corner Lot quite a bit lately. It is popular and playing more quickly than I’d expected. Our games have been averaging under 45 minutes when I’d predicted a game length of around 75-90 based on decision complexity. I am…surprised.

So far we’ve played with 3 and 4 players with both working well. I think 4 players is marginally more interesting than 3, but it is a tough call. The common consensus is that 5 players is right out due to multi-player chaos effects. I’d like to soften that 5 player edge somewhat and have been working through a number of ideas around extending the suits, adding suits and adding some form of wildcard property card to the mix. The suit extension concepts ran afoul of the game’s basic arithmetic and sank there; however the wildcard concepts are being more interesting. The current idea:

Thematically wildcards are empty lots that detract from the business and thus revenues of the other properties in the area. On purchase they empty lot is (slowly) developed and thus begins to accumulate revenues.

Knocking off the corners

We played several games of Corner Lot last night, all in comfortably less than hour. It was quite the hit. However a few small changes also resulted:

The rules have been updated.

On the stoop selling cigars

I’ve renamed Corner Property to Corner Lot as being a little more colloquial.

I’ve made a first draught of the rules. I’ve made the cards required for play (thanks go to Ariel Seoane for helping with the art) and hope to play at tomorrow’s gamenight at SB-Boardgamers.

Twitter Week: 2009-03-21

 

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