Note: This article was also posted to Boardgamegeek at Wabash Cannonball set piece: #1

I’d promised a while ago to post a move-by-move analysis of one of our Wabash Cannonball games but for various reasons that hasn’t happened and is unlikely to happen. But there is hope. I had an interesting discussion with Adam Kao last night regarding Wabash Cannonball tactics (the game has been popular at Eudemonia). During the discussion we worked through a few set pieces in order to illuminate some of the points I was making. The first set piece is below. If this proves popular/effective I’ll see about posting other set pieces.

Assume a 4 player game of Wabash Cannonball and that the initial share auction resulted in the following share distribution:

• Player #1: PRR $15, B&O $15, Cash $0
• Player #2: Cash $30
• Player #3: C&O $15, Cash $15
• Player #4: NYC $16, Cash $14

Questions:

1. Why did Player #4 spend $16 on the NYC? Is this a good or weak position?
2. Is Player #2 in a strong or weak position? Does Player #2? control initiative?
3. What is each of the four player’s posture as regards game length?
4. What is the first action of each of the four players in the first round of the game? Why?
5. Do they have any other reasonable choices? Why?
6. Might any of the players use a Develop action during the first round? If so, why?

Enjoy.

I wrote previously on Duck Dealer and got it all so embarrassingly wrong. Here’s the corrected version I promised.

Duck Dealer is a far simpler game and is a much closer derivative of Merchant of Venus than it first appears. Like Merchant of Venus there are only a few things in the game which are important. The rest is incidental.

There are only two things in the game which are really important: 50 point factories and 50 point consumer tiles. The 50 point consumer tiles are consolation prizes for the people who didn’t get there in time to build the 50 point factory. The 30 point consumer products are consolation prizes for the people who were dawdled and didn’t get either. With rare exception nothing else in the game matters; only the 50 point factories and 50 point consumer tiles are important. Everything else is either an incidental, a consolation prize or a stocking stuffer because there’s nothing else better left to do.

Examine the consumer tile table board carefully before the game starts. One of the bottom two tiles is not going to be placed. Which one won’t make it? Look at the mine placements. Look for synergies in the patterns of mines that lead toward specific 50 point consumer tiles as contrasted to the order of availability of those consume tiles. There should be 2-3 obvious opportunities. Those are what you and the other players will be heading for. Your goal is to get ownership markers on all the buildings in one or more production chains that have a 50 point consumer tile at their end. With good players you won’t get everything in the chain so compromises will need to be made. Look to the efficiency points along the way. Where in that process chain will you be spending the most discs? Forgo ownership markers on buildings which are used less frequently in your chain than those used more often. The goal is to be able to cycle from mines all the way up to 50 point consumer tile products as quickly as possible (least number of energy-taking turns required).

Your teleport link has two main purposes:

• To add efficiency to your production loop

or:

• To get you to or from your production loop when re-jiggering your ship configuration before another player can interfere with your efficiency

Offensive use of teleport links is almost irrelevant. Using other’s teleport placements to increase your own efficiency is delightful.

The ideal situation is a loop of four mines in a row, needing only one red disc for each move between them, each mine paired with the proper adjacent factory, no back-and-forthing required for ideal production, and a telport from the end back to the start where the 50 point factory and consumer are placed (or one of the trivial variants of that pattern).

Once you have secured a 50 point factory tile and its matching consumer tile and built/flipped them both as applicable, there is a simple choice. Which is more efficient: to cycle on your loop for 30 VPs per product or to run off and cherry pick other 50 point factory or consumer tiles? If your ownership markers are well placed it will usually be to run your own cycle. However there’s a potentially interesting tactical decision, especially if it also provides the opportunity to bork other player’s hopes and plans.

Opportunism is everything. The other players will also see the same opportunities you do. They will be pursuing the same goals and possibilities you re looking toward. Getting there first and sewing up the key points along the way is critical. In doing this the key question is opportunity cost. By acting early you can get the jump on them, but by waiting you’ll have more energy and will be able to do/secure more. Attempting to correctly time the relative advantages of that decision forms a large portion of the game. This is the race portion of the game. It is entirely a question of who gets there first. Who gets the 50 point factory first? Remember: consumer tiles are a consolation prizes for the player(s) who didn’t get the factory. Careful timing and watching of the energy potentials of the other players is key. Count carefully and often.

All ship sizes are viable – for different purposes. A 1 hold ship can be very effective at sewing up the early stages of a production route before the players building out their ships can get there. However you’ll need to go back and reconfigure for more holds to make your 50 point tile runs. A 5 or 7 hold ship seems about minimal for making efficient 50 point tile runs but bigger can be better. Depending on your success in securing your production chain, bigger ships of various configurations make sense. Final ship configuration is entirely a question of minimising energy-taking turns per VP earned (or VP blocked from another player).

As the end-game approaches and players start sewing up their runs the VPs should come flooding in. 200 points in a single action is not uncommon an I’ve seen as many as 300 in a single action. This is why the little 3 and 10 etc point returns for smaller factories and consumers are just noise. In a tight game they may make the difference but that can’t be planned and accounted for at the start of the game and thus should be ignored. The big 50 point and 30 point runs at the end of the game are the goal to focus on and the primary determining factor in the game. One delivery of 5 top-level consumer products earns a minimum of 150 points. The real question is: How often can you do that or better?

The primary value of the 10 and 25 point consumer tile placements is to reduce the efficiency of other player’s production loops. They’re not worth bothering with otherwise. Flipping them yourself wastes a product that could be better spent building a 50 point factory or flipping a 50 point consumer. Put low value consumer tiles where other players wanted to ideally put their 50 point consumer tiles. Low value consumer tiles are more valuable as blocks than for points. There’s a similar though much reduced value for the lower point factories (the one’s you don’t need for your loop but others do for their’s). Put their desired factories in the wrong places and force them to be inefficient. The ideal is to have the factory adjacent to one of its inputs and logistically after its first input location. It is sometimes possible to ensure that a given 50 point factory is never placed and can never be placed. Also remember that one of the 50 point consumer tiles cannot be placed in every game. There is often advantage in ensuring that the factory or consumer tile another player was building towards is the one that won’t be placed, or if it will be placed, that it is on the opposite side of the board from their production chain. Of course they’re also thinking the same thoughts about your chain, so some attention to preventive defence may be in order. Opportunistic collateral damage is a wonderful thing.

Beware of the end-game. Most of the game consists of setting up for massive point runs in the end-game. It is not unusual for a player to have almost no points before they start their big end-game runs. In this way the game is extremely end-loaded. Most games end with players acting every turn and forcing the end-game, thus forcing other players to accelerate out of efficiency or else never get to act at all. It is not uncommon for a different player to have won if only they’d had one more energy-taking round or a slightly different mix of energy in-hand before the end-game rush started. Count, calculate and plan carefully.

I’ve played Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga’s Duck Dealer twice. It is a tough game to grok.

Update: In fact the game is sufficiently difficult to grok that almost all the below is flat out wrong. It is hogwash. Beware. I’ll be writing up a correct summary of the game after it reaches broad release.

• Duck Dealer is a perfect and certain information logistics game very much in the spirit of Roads & Boats and Neuland but with its own unique take
• Don’t be deceived by the light and funny theme
• Duck Dealer is a deceptively direct re-interpretation of Merchant of Venus
  • The theme, core nouns and board-patterns are similar
  • The play decisions and game character are violently different
    • Duck Dealer is a mentally demanding forward-looking planning-festival. Merchant of Venus is a much lighter and simpler affair of delivery optimisation with occasional opportunities
• Three players is probably the sweet spot, maybe four with experienced players
• The first phase of the game is ship improvements
• The opportunity cost of ship improvement is usually prohibitive later in the game
• Each pattern of ship investments establishes a natural rhythm for that ship; the rhythm at which it takes energy and then acts
• The balance of colours on the ship likewise establishes a natural activity-type rhythm
• None of the choices of combinations for game-start ship configuration are obviously bad but each one strongly suggests a different ship development tack and thus resulting rhythm
  • I suspect that the game’s initial turn order plus the ship configurations of the player’s ahead of you in turn order is a key factor to smart initial ship configuration decisions
  • I also suspect this reflects strongly into suggested ship configurations
    • It is clear that the random distribution of initial mines and the consumer tile ordering affects this and in fact defines these choices
    • It is not at all clear to what extent this is true in practice given human’s struggle with the decision space of the game
• Coarsely (there are exceptions) the larger/more equipped a ship is the longer its rhythm
• The heart of the game is managing your ship’s natural logistical rhythms against the emergent opportunity costs as the game/board develops and new buildings (tiles) are placed
• It is viable to stay with an undeveloped 8-speed ship with two discs and a cargo hold
• The undeveloped ship strategy is the most programmatic (fewest significant decisions), most risky and most subject to interference from other players
  • Undeveloped ships are dependent on rapid short-term opportunity exploitation which in turn requires frequent actions and results in a short/fast game
  • If the undeveloped ship dawdles the better equipped ships will out-pace them
  • If multiple players do run undeveloped ships they will drive a short/fast game that will likely seem to be decided arbitrarily
    • I find longer games with more developed ships more interesting
• The more ship improvements the players do, the longer the game will be and the more of the board will be developed
• Just one undeveloped ship moving fast and staying focussed can drive a fast/short game
• The value of Build/yellow decreases during the game, sometimes precipitously.
• Build/yellow can be worth a lot early in the game
• Exception: Heavily built ships with two movement can reliably profit from Build/yellow energy to place Galactic Infrastructure (cubes on routes) to help manage their naturally short (2) movement distance
• The bigger your ship is the more often Galactic Infrastructure (cubes on routes) is more useful than privilege markers on tiles
• Teleports are remarkably hard to place usefully
• Clever teleport placement may invert some of these observations
• I have yet to see a clever teleport placement
• With rare exception there are more VPs for building factories and flipping consumer tiles than doing milk runs stuffing goods into an already flipped consumer
• Establishing and then running a production loop is almost invariably less profitable than focussing on building factories and flipping consumer tiles
  • This is directly opposite from Merchant of Venus’ reward patterns
• Exception: Ships with huge hold-spaces (7+ capacity?) can profit enormously from a well-optimised production loop (ie privileges claimed on all steps) on a 25/10 consumer.
• The usual reason players act is that they become unable to sustain comprehension of their intended move. Their mental stack overflows, they lose track and so they act instead of continuing to search for the optimal risk/value return for energy accumulation. This is often (almost always) a mistake.
• Usually getting more energy and doing more later is markedly more efficiently profitable
  • Unless someone gets there first
• The game is all about acceleration curves against game length
• Each player’s ship investment has a pay-off curve
  • A undeveloped ship is faster to build, runs more quickly but makes fewer points per natural action
  • A big ship takes longer to build and runs more slowly but makes more points per natural action
• The players emergently determine the game length
  • Which player’s ship’s reward-curve/opportunity-exploitation-rate/game-length sums best when the game ends is the core question of the game

Building on the previously discussed variant Ben Keightley proposed a twist on #bgdf_chat:

[2008-11-07/14:02] <cocadieta> JC, you around? I had a flash of inspiration this afternoon re: Confucius.

[2008-11-07/14:03] <cocadieta> The bonus card drafting variant (unplayed!) sounds good but really pushes the main problem further up the pipe–say two people are in line to run ships out to sea, the second person could either luck out or get hosed by the card draw.

[2008-11-07/14:04] <clearclaw> That’s why the variant shows the pipeline of cards as well as the current draft set.

[2008-11-07/14:05] <cocadieta> Idea: At the beginning of the game, shuffle the bonus cards and deal five to each side of the board. The left side are the bonus cards available to military conquests, the right side to boats.

[2008-11-07/14:05] <clearclaw> Oh cute!

[2008-11-07/14:07] <clearclaw> So there’s the possibility of the 6th fleet getting stuck.

[2008-11-07/14:07] <clearclaw> There are only 3 possible army cards

[2008-11-07/14:07] <cocadieta> Nahh, if the stock of 5 runs out, players can pull from the other side.

[2008-11-07/14:09] <clearclaw> So players pull any of the face up 5?

[2008-11-07/14:09] <cocadieta> Exactly.

[2008-11-07/14:09] * clearclaw ponders.

[2008-11-07/14:09] <clearclaw> That makes ER cards FAR more valuable

[2008-11-07/14:10] <cocadieta> They’re already that valuable, just at random times.

[2008-11-07/14:11] <clearclaw> But now it is perfectly controlled and can be timed to a nicety.

[2008-11-07/14:11] <clearclaw> In particular it makes the bribe cards even stronger

[2008-11-07/14:11] <cocadieta> A game where all of the bribe cards got dealt to the left of the board would be much different than a game where they were all dealt to the right. Definitely.

[2008-11-07/14:12] <clearclaw> Not just that, but the certainty that you could get the bribe card you wanted exactly when you wanted it

[2008-11-07/14:17] <cocadieta> The bribe cards are already the most valuable cards in the game. It seems inappropriate to hide them behind random draws of any kind.

[2008-11-07/14:18] <clearclaw> There’s some truth there.

I like this change.

Alan Paull’s otherwise excellent game, Confucius. can seem overly chaotic as the Emperor’s Reward cards start being played late in the game. Ben Keightly and I have discussed this on #bgdf_chat:

[2008-10-01/11:30] <clearclaw> I am building a bureaucratic force of extraordinary magnitude – http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/2692463

[2008-10-01/11:31] <cocadieta> Neat, that was the game I played last night.

[2008-10-01/11:32] <cocadieta> For my last action I got to choose whether J R or Dave won.

[2008-10-01/11:33] <clearclaw> Hehn.

[2008-10-01/11:33] <clearclaw> I’d love to talk more but have to run. Back in ~45 probably.

[2008-10-01/11:39] <sedjtroll> So does Confucius often come down to such a kingmaker decision?

[2008-10-01/11:39] <cocadieta> It’s easy for it to.

[2008-10-01/11:40] <cocadieta> This is the first time I’ve seen it quite so clearly, but there was nothing terribly special about this game (other than three new players).

[2008-10-01/11:40] <sedjtroll> Oh. lame

[2008-10-01/11:46] <clearclaw> No, in this case that’s a positive quality

[2008-10-01/11:46] <clearclaw> The entire game is about creating tied situations.

[2008-10-01/11:46] <clearclaw> A kingmaker position is merely an instance of a tied situation.

[2008-10-01/11:47] <cocadieta> That’s how I looked at it. Two players won. That I had to ‘pick’ between them isn’t really important.

[2008-10-01/11:47] <clearclaw> Quite.

[2008-10-01/11:48] <cocadieta> The money isn’t too lucky but the bonus cards are.

[2008-10-01/11:48] <clearclaw> If there had been an incentive created by one of the players for you to go one way or ther other it would have been more interesting. This was just the degenerate case.

[2008-10-01/11:48] <clearclaw> Aye, the Emperor’s reward cards are swingy

[2008-10-01/11:48] <clearclaw> What complaints I have centre there.

[2008-10-01/11:49] <cocadieta> In last night’s game, I had a 30% chance of pulling a card worth 8 points to me (!!!)

[2008-10-01/11:49] <clearclaw> They’re hard to remove cleanly

[2008-10-01/11:49] <clearclaw> Wowzers.

[2008-10-01/11:49] <clearclaw> I’ve not looked hard at the distribution.

[2008-10-01/11:50] <cocadieta> The situation was: Hoju was about to resolve and I saw my position there go from a very safe second to an impossible-to-fix third.

[2008-10-01/11:51] <cocadieta> I ran my boats out to Africa and picked up a bonus card. If it was the Hoju bribery card or one of the two wilds, I could have knocked someone out and gone back to second. The VPs in the region were 8/8; I had two markers and a gift invested in the region.

[2008-10-01/11:51] <cocadieta> Brutal, but then again, them’s the breaks.

[2008-10-01/11:52] <clearclaw> Yow. Those forced minister cards are (overly?) brutal.

[2008-10-01/11:52] <clearclaw> They haven’t determined one of our games yet but they’ve come close.

[2008-10-01/11:52] <clearclaw> They make the navies far more viable than they appear at first glance,.

[2008-10-01/11:53] <cocadieta> I’m happy to accept them as swingy, and also I realize I have to revise my line that the bonus cards are worth about a point or two each.

[2008-10-01/11:53] <clearclaw> I think I’d prefer the game without the Emperor’s Reward cards, I see them as something to be polished out, but they are tightly married to the rest of the system.

[2008-10-01/11:58] <cocadieta> I like them though I know why you aren’t crazy about them. I wonder what it would do to the game to keep them face up and let players pick them.

[2008-10-01/11:58] <clearclaw> Or perhaps a narrow draught pool. THAT would be interesting!

[2008-10-01/11:58] <clearclaw> (and face up when drawn)

[2008-10-01/11:59] <clearclaw> (unless drawn blind?)

[2008-10-01/11:59] <cocadieta> There are always two cards available, that kind of thing?

[2008-10-01/11:59] <clearclaw> Yes.

[2008-10-01/12:00] <clearclaw> Aside: In our last game we had a player do 15 fleets at once.

[2008-10-01/12:00] <cocadieta> I like the sound of that. I don’t mind the chaos and the huge swinginess of the cards–I think that’s perfectly in line with the insane swings that e.g. the students can have on the game–but the blind draws and secret holdings are maybe a little much.

[2008-10-01/12:00] <cocadieta> That’s great!

[2008-10-01/12:01] <clearclaw> Aye. I do like the draught pool idea.

[2008-10-01/12:01] <clearclaw> I’ll try and write that up later as a proposal.

[2008-10-01/12:01] * clearclaw will probably dig lightly at Faidutti.

[2008-10-01/12:01] <cocadieta> Ha, ha

[2008-10-01/12:02] <clearclaw> Undoubtedly he likes the chaos. His style.

[2008-10-01/12:02] <cocadieta> Yeah, absolutely.

[2008-10-01/12:02] <clearclaw> This variant will lead directly away from that quality.

[2008-10-01/12:02] <clearclaw> I expect it will be accused of attempting to turn the game into something that it isn’t.

[2008-10-01/12:25] <cocadieta> J C, will your ego be bruised if I type up that variant as part of a reply to J R’s report?

[2008-10-01/12:26] <sedjtroll> I think JC’s ego is impervious

[2008-10-01/12:51] <clearclaw> I am currently in the process of putting that variant into an OtherWise post which will be cross-posted to BGG as a variant proposal

[2008-10-01/12:53] <clearclaw> Outside of that yes, my ego will not be bruised.

[2008-10-01/12:53] <cocadieta> I mentioned the variant in J R’s report. If you’d like I’d be happy to credit it to you as well, it just didn’t seem worth it.

[2008-10-01/12:53] <clearclaw> I’m not overly worried.

[2008-10-01/12:53] <clearclaw> (or underly)

Ben’s post to BoardGameGeek:

I really love this game, and I think navigating its insane chaos is a very unusual challenge. I agree that the luck of the money draw really just means players need to be prepared to spend only a little or a lot on any given turn, and there are plenty of cheap as well as expensive things to buy. Poor planning will make anyone susceptible to bad card draws, but a versatile board position and gift pool should ensure that you always have something to do.

After last night’s game, my new feeling is that the bonus cards are a little too lucky. Chaos is the order of the day here, but it’s basically ‘fair’ chaos: I have, at every moment, a very good overview of everyone’s position and incentives (to borrow a word–hi, J C). That is, except for bonus cards, which are hugely variable in worth to every player, randomly drawn, and secretly held. I love the swinginess of the cards, I love the chaos they create, but I don’t appreciate their random draw.

Proposed variant: At the beginning of the game, shuffle the cards and keep them face down. Flip over the top two (three?) cards; when a player wins a bonus card, he selects one, keeps it face up in front of him, and flips a new card to replace it. I feel like this would preserve the crazy chaos of the game but continue to allow each player to have a ‘complete’ picture, letting him make more informed decisions. I also don’t think it adds much, if any, complexity to the game.

I followed that with the following post:

The more I think about this proposal the more I like it. There are a few questions:

• Does the draught pool refill immediately when a card is taken (this is significant for the cases in which players take more than one card with a single action via the navies)

• May a player draw blind?

• Size of the draught pool

I hadn’t thought these through when I proposed the variant on #bgdf_chat. My general view is that the Emperor’s reward cards as currently implemented are unnecessary complication to be polished out by development. I’ve spent a few hours looking at doing that but the cards are tied deeply into the rest of the system and can’t be removed easily without grossly affecting other key game relationships.

The more cards are in the draught pool the higher the probability that one or more of the cards will be specifically useful to any given player. Additionally the exposure of the cards in the draught pool increases their value for the players as they know what they are getting/competing for. There’s also an argument that the card values are decreased because they are also revealed to the other players, however this value change seems small.

Fleets are the only way to acquire multiple cards with a single action. We’ve had players send 15 fleets out in a single action in more than one of our games, thereby taking three cards at once. I strenuously doubt that any player will ever send out 20 fleets with a single action and thus take 4 cards at once. I’m willing to discount that contingency or cover it with a special rule that the last card is blind. 15 fleets is rare enough as to provide a reasonable outer bound.

Allowing the draught pool to immediately fill as cards are drawn allows such a fleet player to benefit from luck of the draw without any foresight by other players. If not a step backward, this is not an improvement.

Blind draws effectively recreate the (overly) chaotic system which we’re trying to address. Blind draws would be better if the drawn card were then revealed by the player, but that’s a band aide atop the problem, not an actual improvement. Of course the player drawing immediately after another player’s draw may also profit from the blind flip as the draught pool is restocked. This could be prevented by also revealing the next N cards which will be put into the draught pool as other cards are taken. I like this idea but am unsure if the complexity is justified.

Initial conclusions:

• Draught pool is three cards wide

• Draught pool is not refilled until after the player’s turn

• Emperor’s Reward cards may only be taken from the face up draught pool

• Players must keep their Emperor’s Reward cards revealed to all players

Possible extension:

• After player turns the draught pool is refilled in order from an additional set of face-up cards

Having thought about it a bit more since that posting, I like the conclusions and extension above. I have yet to play with this variant. I’ll try to get it on the table today.

Gulf, Mobile & Ohio by Eddie Robin is a member of the Winsome Games 2008 Essen Collection and it is an odd game, a curiously odd game. Every player I’ve taught it to has exclaimed what a strange game it is!

On the face of it the game is relatively simple. Across player turns a variety of companies start and grow, worm-like from their start locations to connect to other cities and each other. There are 25 companies, each represented by two shares, a founder’s share and a secondary share. Initially only 8 companies are available, scattered about the edges of the board. During the course of the game additional companies from the rest of the 25 become available based on the activity of earlier companies. Victory points are earned by connecting companies to cities and to each other. Money is used only as a funding source for winning shares which give the right to build with a company.

Physically the companies are represented by coloured cubes placed in hexes. The restrictions on cube placement are simple:

1. A railway company must start with a cube in its home city
2. Company cubes are placed in hexes adjacent to one or more cubes of the same company
3. One one cube may ever be placed in an empty/clear hex
4. No cubes may be placed in the gray mountains
5. Any number of cubes may be placed in cities
6. No cube may be placed such that its ownership cannot be traced unambiguously back to a single railroad company.

Given that the colour of cube used by a given company is dictated by which cube colour is most plentifully available at the time the company was founded, that last placement rule is a doozie. In short it means that every worm-pattern of cubes of a given colour for a given railway company is surrounded by a one-hex penumbra of hexes not containing that colour – and the player does not get to chose what colour that is (and thus what other colours it can connect to.

Structurally the game is a process of iteratively managing timing, opportunity and positional advantage. This is not a game of building up companies, establishing an economic powerhouse, carefully assembling synergistic systems or running faster. This is a game of ensuring that other player’s choices are minimally profitable for them and that your choices sum to be (a little) better timed and a little more profitable than their’s. The game is a minuet dance, a delicate series of fencing moves, parries, ripostes, lunges and recoveries, each one a tactical dance move carefully gauged to give little ground to others while grabbing every advantage possible. Advantages are often measured in single dollar differences.

While the shares are made available via player-selected auctions, winning a share has little long term implication. What is being auctioned is the opportunity to build for a given railway company. Building is done both to gain victory points¹ (building is the only source of victory points) and to minimise or constrain the opportunity afforded to later players by that build. The bid money is spent directly on building track for the company with any unwanted or unspendable excess discarded. As the mesh of railway lines extend to new cities, railway companies that start in those cities become available for auction. Thus each build can also extend the set of companies available for auction by later players and so builds are carefully gauged, often with extra cubes unprofitably placed simply to prevent or discourage victory-point-generating connectivity by other colours. Sometimes shares will be won and no track built at all (all the bid money simply discarded) as building would create too much victory point opportunity for later players, either by exposing the colour for easier connection by other companies and players, or by making more companies available in the game which offer too much positional opportunity to other players. Measuring opportunity cost, both for yourself and others is a constant challenge.

In short, often, usually, later players are able to get more victory points for less cash than earlier players as they can build to connect to the colours already present on the board. However someone has to go first and if you never go first you’ll never win either. Remember that bit about how company colours are determined? Carefully tracking, controlling and predicting what colours will be available when and to whom, and thus what companies could build to connect where and to how many other colours is the logical centre of the game. It all depends on what shares are auctioned when and by which player in turn order considering the balance of cash holdings across the set of players. This is the core of the dance: watching cash holdings, opportunities, turn order, and income and selecting shares to auction and bidding and forcing others to bid exquisitely close to the line. Single dollar differences can make a huge difference – even if those extra dollars in a bid are discarded as opportunity cost in order to not build track or are used for blocking builds to prevent other future connections.

Ultimately shares also pay dividends at a fixed rate of either $5 or $3 per share. Shares are the income source the players use to fund future auction bids. Establishing a good income source is unsurprisingly important but is also not as critical as maintaining a tight control of opportunity and timing. A player low on cash often has better potential advantage to manage opportunity than a richer player who must balance their choices across more players and a wider bid opportunity variance. Thus a low cash player can re-establish themselves by very careful management of what is auctioned and what is built when and where as the richer player waits to swoop in with their cash behemouth. They can effectively force the richer player into ungraceful diseconomies simply because the rich player must spend their money or lose their positional advantage. This is not easy and is near impossible if the gap grows large, but it can be done and it is a wonderous thing to behold when done well.

Passing, a player passing on their entire turn, is a common action choice as part of the dance of opportunity control. Much like in King of Siam, passing is a way forwarding the onus for an unwanted decision to a player who cannot afford not to make a decision². Of course they will attempt to make the decision that offers the east opportunity to the other players while also preserving their own victory opportunity, but careful play will limit their available choices while moving turn order forward to something more attractive to you. In this way the dance is lurchingly moved forward to the next unwilling player.

It is hard to describe Gulf, Mobile & Ohio as a strategic game. It is also hard to describe it as a tactical game. The decisions made each turn seem entirely tactical, but rest on an analysis that should extend out 2, 3 or even 4 turns into the future as the opportunity implications are assessed and weighed. This process seems tactical as that analysis needs to be performed on every turn given the current play state but also seems strategic as the look-ahead is fairly deep and there are core patterns in the game which can be built and leveraged.

Expect your early games to be filled with runaway winners. It can take a while to comprehend how to use the tools that the game provides. I’ve played about half a dozen games now, all with either 3 or 4 players³ and do not yet feel I’ve a good grasp of the game’s depths. I’ve merely seen a few small patterns and the hints of many more in the wings⁴.

The picture below shows the end of a 4 player teaching game. The player closest to the camera (green) won in the last two turns of the game despite being behind in points but marginally ahead in cash and income for the entire game.

Perhaps oddly I find 4 player games far easier to teach than 3 player games. The edges are a bit softer and the timing controls are a little less fragilely unstable with 4 players than 3. There is enough to digest and dance with here that the extra ease granted by a 4 player game is welcome learning space. However for those same reasons I find the game noticeably improved with 3 players. That’s where all the safeties and guard rails are off and every decision is filled with knife edges.

Isaac Bickerstaff (Verkisto) posted new share images for Wabash Cannonball and the Erie expansion (Wabash.pdf, Erie.pdf) a while back. I’ve dawdled on doing anything with them as I was mostly content with the originals and wasn’t yet sure how I physically wanted to produce them. This afternoon I finally got off my kiester and made them.

A laser printer produced good enough copy. I’d hoped to mount back-to-back copies so as to make double-sided shares (unthematic but simpler to handle), but in testing that proved overly difficult within the desired tolerances. The next stab was at cold laminating and then cutting to shape. The plastic laminate would add thickness and the paper would provide its own colour (on one side at least). I’ve done this before for other games, and it works well enough. But fate had it that the cold laminator was on the other side of town, an Office Max was in the middle, and I needed to stop at the Office Max anyway to get some more wet erase pens for Pampas Railroads since my red pen exploded last week¹. Oh, and I’d just bought a few bags of penny sleeves for Tahuantinsuyu’s cards. A quick check revealed that Isaac had thoughtfully sized his share images to fit penny sleeves perfectly!

1. Two packs of 3”x5” index cards from Office Max
   • One in five colours (red, blue, yellow, green and purple – available in rainbow and day glo, I chose rainbow as slightly more pastel/muted)
   • One in stripes (red, blue, yellow, green or purple against white – again picking rainbow instead of day glo)
2. One stick of liquid permanent glue with applicator
3. 20 minutes with the glue and a rotary cutter

I put the unlined sides of the cards to the back, leaving the lined sides to be covered by the glued on shares. This lets the shares effectively be double-sided without the effort of having to register both sides. While most of the colour matches are obvious, I used purple for the Wabash and purple/white striped for the Erie. The moisture content of the blue warps them almost immediately – they are now sitting in an ad-hoc vise atop my water heater to dry out into flat form. They look rather nice! It would have been nice to find gray index cards for the Wabash, but that was not to be. It is possible that other stores carry them (I haven’t researched). Isaac’s Erie share is an odd shade of purplish tannish gray rather than the straight tan of the original. A purple/while stripe seemed an acceptable compromise.

Given that we mostly play on Ted Alspach’s redraw of the map (much larger and more colourful), these replacement shares will mean that the wood cubes are the only original component I use in play. Given how much I like and admire Winsome Game’s game art in general (it is the model of functional clarity), and have repeatedly said so publicly, this is rather oddly hypocritical. Huhn.

I’ll try to remember to get some pictures posted. With luck we’ll play with them tomorrow.

Wabash Cannonball Expansion - Erie Railroad belies its effect on the game with its small size. The Erie RR is nitroglycerin in a cocktail shaker. It makes the already rather delicately knife-edged game of Wabash Cannonball even more tetchy with the penalties for mis-steps ever larger and the path ever narrower and risk-fraught.

The Erie expansion consists of a single new Erie company with a single share, 14 cubes (1 income marker, and 13 track) and a slip of paper containing the few special rules governing when and how the Erie becomes available for play. More specifically it has enough cubes to reach both Detroit and Chicago.

The Erie RR becomes available for Capitalisation when any of four specially nominated cities have track built in them by another company. The Erie’s home station is roughly in the middle of the northern edge of the board. It has no special rules except that:

• It can build into New York City at a cost of $6 for an income boost of $8
• The N-companies-out-of-shares game-end condition is increased from 3 companies to 4 companies

Functionally the Erie RR is simple enough except in the implications:

• The Erie can only be Capitalised by explicit choice. Why a player would Capitalise the Erie is a difficult question:
  • Because the acting player can win it and profit
  • To tempt another player into a posture that can then be wielded against them (push a short game against a player positioned for a long game and visa versa)
  • To drive an early/faster game-end
  • To tempt another player into sundering their extant alliances
• The player that wins the Erie:
  • Is almost certainly no longer a functioning member of any prior alliances as their incentives now orbit the Erie RR due to their high cash investment in the Erie RR
  • (Likely) explicitly postured for a long game but with greatly reduced ability to influence game length
• The Erie RR is more valuable to owners of NYC RR and Pennsylvania RR shares
  • The Erie is most likely to share cities with the NYC RR and second most likely to share cities with the Pennsylvania RR.
• Once the Erie RR opens the Development actions becomes much more interesting to all players
  • Once the Erie RR player runs out of Expansion actions, or runs out of cash, very likely their most attractive action is Development
  • If the Erie RR player can benefit multiple of their companies with Development (thus the interest in the NYC RR and the Pennsylvania RR), then so much the better.
  • Due to the steady depletion of Development actions by the Erie RR player, the Development action becomes more attractive for the other players. Their shares are less diluted with the removal of the Erie RR player’s maniacal focus on the Erie RR and Development is thus more likely to lead to a direct/tangible cash income increase for them.
  • Increased use of Development as versus the standard routine of Capitalise/Expand affords control of additional control game length and control of who is the start player for the next round.
    • It becomes easier for low player count games to end due to track cube exhaustion
    • It becomes easier (albeit likely still rare) for middle-player count games (ie 4 players) to end due to Development cube exhaustion.
    • Exact control of game length is more diffuse while the Erie RR player’s maniacal focus encourages all the players to posture more heavily toward a specific game length
• Detecting when it is no longer viable to invest in the Erie RR versus when it is too soon (not enough cash or game-control) is delicate and fraught with failure
  • The Erie RR will likely need somewhere between $20 and $30 (possibly more) in order to fully afford its own expansion opportunities
  • Due to the single share all capitalisation must occur from the initial share sale. Forest development is an unviable capitalisation source.
  • Whether or not the Erie RR will get those opportunities is uncertain
  • As only one player can Expand the Erie RR, company income growth is necessarily slow as compared to collusive Expansion alliances among other players
  • However due to lack of dilution, income growth is fast(er)
    • With a large caveat for Chicago Dividends
    • Those same Chicago-bound alliances encourage the Erie RR player to sabotage the other RRs by running them short of cubes
      • The opportunity cost of not spending that Expansion on the Erie RR is high

The Erie RR is highly attractive due to the massive potential profits. Should it get to both Detroit and Chicago it can easily pay $25/share! However as noted above this great profit potential comes with risks for all the players, not just the Erie RR-investing player. That balance of risk and reward forces the players to begin positioning themselves in relation to the Erie RR from the initial auction of a Pennsylvania RR share at the start of the game and every portion of the game after that becomes a question that also needs to be evaluated in relation to the Erie, whether or not it is in the game yet.

I recommend Wabash Cannonball Expansion - Erie Railroad only to experienced Wabash Cannonball players. Unless the players comprehend not only the base game’s arithmetic and alliance system, but also how to posture against game length and how to adroitly wield game-length control against the other players then the Erie will simply walk all over them and render the game results an opaque who-goofed crapshoot. With skillful players however it becomes a delightful game of balancing on razorblades and juggling waterballoons of nitroglycerin. It is quite the designer tour-de-force. Amazingly subtle and pervasive. It is rare that so little turns so much of a game on its ear without also breaking it. Everything is the same and yet different. Bravo!

Chris Johnson (fnord23) kindly noticed an error in my charts for Pampas Railroads. Corrected versions are in the normal place.

In a recent comment Ben Keightly argued that ‘Ohana Proa both is and should be a resource management game, and to an extent he’s right. And wrong – well, if not-what-I-want can be accounted as incorrect then he’s wrong. Ultimately all games are resource management games: players have a variety of fungible resources, abilities and opportunities to exercise them during the game and the player that manages the use of their resources, abilities (really just another resource) and opportunities (yet another resource) most effectively will (should) win. Ergo all games are resource management games and it is thus a uselessly global and tautological definition.

At a lower and more useful altitude I define resource management games as games in which the resources in question are (generally) enumerable, limited, and usually highly granular. At heart resource management games are exercises in scarcity. At a crude character level players must mete and dole and shave their pennies while still accomplishing the victory conditions. However, that’s not my interest or goal for ‘Ohana Proa. I’m not interested in ‘Ohana Proa being a game of managing scarcity, rather it is intended to be (and is) a game of jocund excess. The resources I’m interested in players managing are not discrete enumerable elements of fish and shells and VPs and kula, but of opportunities and mutual player (dis)incentives and posture. Any reasonable player in ‘Ohana Proa will have more fish and shells and kula etc than they necessarily know what to do with, they are going to be fundamentally rich and they are going to stay rich if they pay even marginal attention¹.

Being rich is not the problem. Spending the wealth is not the problem (there’s always the turn order auction for that). The problem is simple: prestige. To get prestige the players must individually create and sustain situations in which the other players consistently give them disproportionately more than they give each other. It really is that simple. You have, more or less, all the wealth of the world, you are rich, but there’s a strict protocol for prestige-generating gifts and you need to manipulate the system so that you get to give more, more efficiently, than the other players. There’s a big machinery behind that prestige-giving protocol. There’s routes and auctions and fish and shells and kula and rot and a whole mess of details, all of which, Ben is quite right here, are almost busywork details.

There’s a common (and false) stereotype of rich people’s visiting gifts being things like a small pot of hand-made jam or the like (recently reiterated in Six Degrees of Separation, a wonderful movie BTW). ‘Ohana Proa perpetuates this sorry model except that now the players have to grow their own berries, pick their own fruit (for themselves or each other), boil their own mixtures and in general go through a whole big and somewhat extraneous ritual just to get the little jar of hand-made jam to give their friends when they visit. But they have lots of friends and managing (there’s that word again) both the production pipeline of jam (kula) and the rate of opportunities to deliver (density of deliveries to islands connected by multiple players) as a set is difficult and the heart of the game.

Ahh, so there are resources to manage: the kula production pipeline and deliveries to multiply connected islands! Too true! Those are the primary resource challenges of the game, which makes it kinda sorta a resource management game except that the primary resources are:

1. Opportunities to make deliveries to islands which are connected by multiple other players
2. Network meshes that generate sufficient resource flow to afford those opportunities

And those things are not generally enumerable, particularly limited (scarce) or granular. They are more akin to diffusive field effects. Yeah, at a grand-level it is all busywork. All the little fish and shell etc stuff is noise, but it is important noise. It is busywork that builds the stuff that starts the multi-step inferential pipeline that establishes the incentives for the players to emergently create those opportunities and network-properties for your personal victory.

Quoting Ben again:

The way markets and kahunas interacted with the network is so interesting. It reminded me very strongly of the illustrations you sometimes see depicting gravity, with large planets sagging the 2D space-time grid. The way these interactions worked was clear as day. Unfortunately we were watching them happen from behind a pane of glass, and not consciously participating in the process.

Again, he’s right. My challenge is to diffusively but yet tangibly connect the players with that rubber sheet. I think, hope, that the recent rules changes, especially finishing splitting kula and damping the effect of kahuna will help make that diffuse connection more tangible.