I’ve spent the last three hours trying to work out a coherent and functional and (relatively) simple set of merger rules that handle all the cases. Ooof. I don’t think I’m there yet but at least it is closer.

So far I’m tending strongly to resolving the case where the new minor is already connected by track from one or more companies, by a) merging the other companies first (active player picks which is the parent), b) selling a share in that merged product, and then finally c) issuing a special dividend for the merged company before starting yet another minor. As is typical in such cases the concept is far simpler than the language.

BTW: There’s a similar mess in Stephenson’s Rocket when a train line manages to merge into multiple other lines all at the same time. There it is complicated by the share trade-up rules, but at least they don’t also have Special Dividends.

At the prompting of Benjamin Keightley (Coca Lite) a number of small clarifications to the rules:

• Clarified that resources are produced for every island along the path of a market delivery.

• Addressed the case where claiming produces a stack of more than 5 markets.

• Tweaked the end-game condition to over 33 prestige.

Also added one brand new rule to partly address the minor problem of dumping kula items on a player who is far out of contention:

• Kula recipients also receive points for each kula item they already have.

New Rules and Player aid posted.

Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters makes shares valuable beyond their mere revenue value. The shareholders divide the company treasury evenly amongst themselves (another dilution factor here) with any remainders going to the Director. Basic shares then cash out for $4 each and Grouping Shares cash out for $10 each. As an aside, this treasury payout model is a very attractive method of stashing cash away so that it doesn’t affect your turn order position while also keeping it in-hand for the end-game score – as long as you don’t trade those shares up to grouping shares.

Pampas Railroads also makes shares valuable beyond their mere revenue value. There the concept is that a company has a base value which is a function of the number of links it has built, and that value is cashed out in the end-game to the players. Additionally there are special particularly expensive off-network locations that may be build, foreign connections, which significant boost share value but also signal a company-specific dividend (ala Wabash Cannonball’s Chicago).

Wabash Cannonball’s simplicity of ignoring shares is attractively simple. Player scores are merely the cash they have on hand when the game ends. However there also seems value in shares being worth something. Pampas Railroad’s company value system is unpleasantly fiddly for the game-value it generates. WS&IM’s straight share value is at least something but is interestingly flat. I do however like the idea of the treasury paying out to the share holders in WS&IM. Perhaps a combination of the two?

Proposal: Shares are worth $1 for each city the parent company is connected to, and the company treasury pays out divided across shareholders, remainders going to the bank.

Additionally, is it worth implementing an equivalent to Pampas Railroads’ foreign links? England certainly has a plethora of ports that could be used. They could be both very expensive (and thus an attractive way of sucking capital out of a company as a minor shareholder), and an additional source of per-company special dividends. But should they still affect end-game per-share value, and if so, in the same way?

Proposal: Each foreign link adds $10 to the end-game per-share value.

The initial map shown in the previous post was drawn with yEd, a fine and remarkably useful graph editor. I’m still fiddling with that graph but think it is time to export it to SVG and resume via Inkscape. It is time for annotations, score tracks, actoin markers, stock pools etc – all things which aren’t really part of the graph and are thus better performed by a more general purpose tool. Thankfully yEd can export to SVG, making this easy.

Merges are going to be interesting. The basic concept is that when CompanyA connects to CompanyB’s home station, the two companies will merge. Further, the active company will pay out a (Wabash Cannonball) Chicago-like dividend immediately prior to the merge. The two companies will then merge: stock in the active company will trade-up into stock of the parent company 1:1, the incomes will be summed and the track markets for the companies collected. Then the active player will select one of the four minor companies to add to the game and auction a share of that company in the standard fashion (shades of both Wabash Cannonball and Pampas Railroads).

This gets a little more interesting if the new minor’s home base is already connected by track. Obviously the new company should start and merge immediately, but there are several ambiguities and choices in exactly how to do that. For instance, should the minor share be sold, and if so, what should it pay out before it merges? Or should a parent share be sold and the parent then auto-pay? What about if the minor company is already connected by the track of several different um-merged companies? How to resolve that? Should all the connected companies merge? What if there are more than two? Three? Four? Five? Should there be an order of the merging and paying, or should it all happen at once in a grand orgy of unification?

Those are not the only problems. As the graph is roughly circular, gaps between home stations are small which makes early merges easy(er). Additionally, if I copy the double build rule from Pampas Railroads, which I’d like to do, merges could be extremely rapid with the game ending in but a few turns and the first-to-merge having a near unassailable advantage from their early merge-dividend payouts. Thus merges will need to be delayed and possibly the double-build ability constrained.

UPDATE: ALL 100 GAMES IN THE REPRINT HAVE BEEN SOLD! THE ORDER LINE IS NOW CLOSED!

Given the amazingly fast response and surge of interest in the Pampas Railroads P100, John Bohrer at Winsome games has generously offered to print Pampas Railroads before we get to the full 100 orders! As of this posting we have 76 pre-orders. Now to get this great game printed!

If you are local to San Jose California and can collect the game directly from me, please use the following payment button to order Pampas Railroads (US$40):

If you are elsewhere in the continental USA or Canada, please select the following payment button to order Pampas Railroads (US$40 + US$10 S&H):

For buyers in the rest of the world, please select the following payment button to order Pampas Railroads (US$40 + US$15 S&H):

S&H charges are sufficient to cover up to two (2) copies. If you’d like to order more than two (2) copies at a time please contact me on BoardGameGeek (user: clearclaw) for specific S&H costs for larger orders.

Note: The reprint will not come with crayons. Winsome Games has run out of crayons. You will need to supply your own drawing implements. Do not use Crayola or similar children’s crayons or dry-erase/whiteboard pens as they will stain the board. I strongly recommend using wet-erase/overhead pens. They are readily available at most office supply stores. Wet-erase pen clean up perfectly with a little water. Another choice is china pencils, usually available from cooking supply stores. That said, TEST THE PENS YOU WILL USE ON THE BACK OF THE MAP FIRST!

I will report progress on the collected payments toward the required total in the Pampas Railroads forums on BoardGameGeek. As soon as enough money is collected I’ll send it to John Bohrer at Winsome games, he’ll do the reprint and send the games to me and I’ll send them out to all you lucky players! Of course if progress is too slow and the money simply isn’t appearing fast enough I’ll cancel the order line and reverse all the transactions – which would be a real shame. Pampas Railroads is a great game and deserves to be far more widely known and played – we played last night and had a wonderful time.

Not a whole lot here yet, mostly just sounding out the graph, start locations for the initial companies (pink) and subsequent second stage companies (green).

Harry Wu’s Wabash Cannonball centres on share dilution. Each share pays an N’th fraction of the income of the parent company where N is the number of issued shares. This simple pattern, seemingly introduced in Han Heidema’s Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters, is fascinating in the implications it provides for temporary emergent self-interested player alliances. I’d like to do something further with that idea, carrying the core notions one step further out. Thus the notion of Muck & Brass.

At the simplest level Muck & Brass is still a share dilution game, except that now companies may also merge and in merging their incomes and issued shares would aggregate, potentially offering even higher rates of return for (some) shareholders. Mergers would also offer an additional game-ending clock.

The current prototype consists of a map of England, Wales and Scotland, with a Pampas Railroads-style graph super-imposed following mostly historical train line paths and about 7% of the rules written. The intended model is very reminiscent of Wabash Cannonball nee Pampas Railroads with the additional of the merger mechanism and a more Pampas-like handling of development values and track development. There’s also a hint of Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters and Stephenson’s Rocket in there too.

I’d like a 90 minute playtime, but I’ll settle for 135 minutes. I’m not sure I’m skilled enough to cram in the level of distraction I want in just 90 minutes, but I’m working on it.

Winsome Games sells only within the USA and only accepts payments via US Post Office Money Orders. This makes Winsome’s games effectively unavailable to foreign buyers/players, which is a real shame.

In order to help out I offered to collect foreign orders late last year, make a single large group order from Winsome Games and then ship them the individual games overseas when they arrived. Ultimately the thirteen (13) copies were purchased in that order set.

However interest in further copies overseas continued to mount, aided by my unending praise for the game on BoardGameGeek.. Finally I offered to run an other foreign group order – and the orders just poured in. Winsome Games ran out of stock copies. A reprint was scheduled. More orders poured in. Finally I had to call a halt at 40 copies of Wabash Cannonball. And orders and requests for copies are continuing to come in!

I’ve now sent a nice big US Post Office Money order to John Bohrer at Winsome games and am expecting a big box of 40 copies of Wabash Cannonball to arrive on my doorstep any day now. Then will come the tedious task of filling out 40 customs slips and packing them all up to ship out. I must be an idiot.

But then I read about the simple wonder and discovery that some of the foreign buyers are experiencing, and it is all worth it. Wabash Cannonball is a great game.

This evening I got to talking with a local I rarely play with about various games and his preferences as we tried to determine a game we were both willing to play. He continually described games as good because they were fun or he had fun while playing them. At the back of my head I kept wanting ask him why that mattered compared to whether or not they were good games? However what I really noticed and what got me to thinking was that when I got to recommending games that I wanted to play, all my comments were all about how interesting they were, the challenges they posed, the things that could be learned from them and I never mentioned or considered fun. My focus was on what the players could change in themselves by investing themselves in the game and not what subjective experience the game offered the players. They could change their understanding. They were all good games because they offered a system which would both change its players and allow its players to change themselves in interesting ways in order to play it well.

I have a hard time thinking of games in terms of fun. I played Wabash Cannonball tonight. If you asked me if Wabash Cannonball was “fun”, I’d probably say “No!” and go on to say that it is an outstandingly neat game, that the challenge of balancing and manipulating the alliances in the game (which is the heart of Wabash Cannonball) is very clever, and how aggressive and yet subtle it is. But fun? No, I wouldn’t (easily) say it is fun. It might be, it might not be – I’ve only played it 30-something times as of this writing – and I’ve little idea whether it not it is fun. But I sure enjoy and like playing it. It is clever and neat and twisted and opaque and … But fun? Shrug. Look how neat it is!

This morning a friend pointed me to a DWTripp comment in which he quipped:

I agree. But what we need is Clearclaw here to explain to us… in Vulcan… why fun does not make a game logically a better game. Like Spock, Clearclaw believes that one need not have fun more frequently than every seven years.

During my GoTW thread I commented when asked, “Why do you play games?”:

For the understanding.

Games challenge the ways I think and the types of thoughts I have. At their best they force me to become something I wasn’t previously in both the way I view the world and how I think about that world from that viewpoint. I’m a patterns person. They provide me with new patterns and force me to invent new patterns just to survive – and that’s worth a lot.

I had thought I understood this bit of myself. Now I’m less sure.

The most valuable thing about a share is not how much money it will make, but how it will change the incentive pattern among the remaining players.

The second most valuable thing about a share is the degree to which it makes a company viable (early game).

The third most valuable thing about a share is the revenue it may/will generate.

If you own shares in the company that the player to your right holds, you want that company to reach Chicago more than the player who holds shares in a company that the player to their left also holds shares of.

The mine and forest fields are excellent ways to devalue companies you are not invested in: just cut them off and make it impossible for them to reach Chicago.

Don’t forget Detroit.

No company has to reach Chicago. Sometimes none of them will.

Choosing actions and then doing nothing can be a useful way of controlling the game length.

Time the Wabash and control incentives carefully. It can be a very profitable company. Or not.

It is up to you to ensure that the incentive structures of each other player aligns with your personal pursuit of victory. Partnerships are a wonderful thing. A 2/2 split of the B&O is a beautiful thing. Or not. A 2/2 split of the NYC can be even better. Or not. A 1/1 split of the Pennsylvania is highly unstable.

Use stock dilution to find and break partnerships.

Wabash games are won not through accurate bidding or careful ROI control but by establishing positions such that the other players, through their own greedy self-interest help you win using their actions on their turn.

Track individual earning rates versus cash holdings. Typically one player will have a much higher income than the others, but lower cash holdings. Whether the game ends with this general dividend or the next will dictate who wins.

A typical game length is between 3 and 5 general dividends (inclusive).

Also posted to BGG.