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.

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!

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:

• Starting capital is increased to $600 divided among players
• 5 Wildcards are placed beside the tableau
• Each wildcard has a cost of $20
• A player may purchase an available wildcard for cost on their turn as a normal action
• When a player buys a wildcard they must assign it a revenue value ($3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, or $12)
• Unbought wildcards reduce the revenue of all cards of that suit by $2 at revenue time
• Players must pay $5 for each wildcard they own to the bank at revenue time (deducted from revenues)
• Purchased wildcards accumulate their revenues on the wildcard at revenue time
• The owning player receives this money during end-game scoring
• Melds with wildcards score bonuses in the normal way
• Wildcard duplicates of cards already held score both bonuses as if they were an additional suit of that value and an additional card of that suit

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.

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

Age of Steam: Sun

AoS-Sun-1

Age of Steam: London

AoS-London-1

Age of Steam: South East Australia

Game #1

AoS-SEAustralia-1

Game #2

AoS-SEAustralia-2

Game #3

AoS-SEAustralia-3

Age of Steam: Wales

Game #1

AoS-Wales-1

Game #2

AoS-Wales-2

Game #3

AoS-Wales-3

Age of Steam: Korea (using Nitrogen rules)

AoS-Korea-1

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…

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.

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 timing¹. 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.

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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:

• 5 wildcards (one in each suit) that are set out beside the markets during setup
• $20(?) cost and no stated revenue ($?) on the wildcards
• Players may buy a wildcard from the display as their turn
• The card must be assigned a value when it is taken – this is marked by putting that much cash (from the bank) on the card.
• At the end of each round:
• Each player has to pay $2 to the bank for each suit in which they have properties cards whose wildcard has not yet been taken
• Each player that has taken a wildcard has to pay $5 to the bank for the card
• The bank pays the card’s revenue to the card
  • The revenues accumulate on the card and are not available to the owning player
• During the bonus phase:
• The player retrieves the accumulated revenues on their wildcards
• Melds score as normally, counting the wildcard as if it were the claimed card
• If the wildcard duplicates a card that the player also has, then it counts as being of a different suit for the N-of-a-type bonus.

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.

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 starting capital has been set at $480/players. This was where I’d started actually but I wasn’t quite sure it was right. It is right, or at least close enough to right for more than government work.
• No more emergency fund raising. The rule simply isn’t needed and has been excised.
• The partially hidden variant has been normalised as the basic form of the game and the other variants discarded.
• The $10 cards are being put back to being $12 cards. Again, this is where I’d started with the initial design, but then I vacillated and dropped it back down to $10. I’m not entirely convinced the $10s should be $12s, but it sure looks like it.

The rules have been updated.