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:
- 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!
- 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.
