The dollar auction model mentioned below is attractive but may not be enough. I’m also concerned that the early stages of the game will be relatively uninteresting as the player’s only opportunity is to invest in/build their starting cities, and given the action point bonus of operating in multiple cities, their unfailing interest will be in linking the city states as rapidly as possible with transports.

A new proposal for initial setup:

1. Setup map
2. In random order have players place city markers on the board, one per player. There may be spacing limitations.
3. In that same order conduct a standard auction for turn order. as each player passes/drops they take the lowest available turn order slot.
4. In the new turn order have players select their starting cities.
5. Give each city cash proportional to the square of the turn order bid of the player in the inverse position in the turn order. Thus the first player’s city gets cash equal to the square of the last player’s final bid, the second player’s city the square of the second to last player’s bid etc.
6. The players may then invest this money in buildings and actions freely, producing products and transports, and having the city consume/place/etc them until the money is exhausted.
7. Start the actual game.

The square may be too high a proportion. It may also be necessary to force the last/low bidder’s payment to $0 in order to prevent excessive bid inflation: All players bid high in order to flood the setup with early cash. It isn’t clear that this would be a problem however.

An optimisation pass. There’s a large discussion below about building limits, transport connectivity, city centre ranges etc. It is complex. I’m concerned that with buildings flipping ownership as city centres upgrade that tracking ownership boundaries could be needlessly detailed and complex. I really don’t want to introduce border markers or ownership markers. There’s more than enough detail and complexity in the game at that level already to be interesting.

Thus the optimisation pass.

The new model is to just use ranges. A city centre has a range. When it is upgraded its range increases. When a City State has a turn, all buildings within range of its city centres activate. Very simple. Look at the city centre, count outward from there to every building in range: they’re all available even they are also in range of another City State’s city centre. As a side effect city centre upgrades become more interesting. They provide an additional way to control turn order on a micro-level by moving city boundaries and activating buildings more frequently than before. Combined with the new war patterns, this would seem to present some interesting player-driven controls.

Additionally this range model by implication partially resolves an ambiguity around transports and inter-city trade. Just when can a player send a product from one city to another? If only the buildings within range of a city centre are activated, then only those buildings may be used to transmute products. QED. Ergo, an activated building may retrieve an already built product from a remote inactive city to satisfy one of its inputs, but may not send its own products to an inactive building. This model is additionally pleasing as it pushes the consumption choice to post-production versus pre-production. Cleaner, simpler, and more available to borking by other players — what’s not to like?

I’m re-examining the premises for war. I like the idea but am uncertain whether the complexity and detail is justified. This almost certainly means it isn’t justified. Ergo I may end up killing war from the design before I’ve adequately explained to you poor readers what it was before I mercilessly defenestrated it. So be it.

The core concepts of war are simple: City States may construct buildings whose outputs are transport-like devices that can destroy other buildings or transports, or which can take over (conquer) other City State’s city centres.

Destruction of buildings can be useful for land-constrained City States or City States attempting to achieve or maintain a competitive edges over neighbours. Such military units could also be used to sever key Transport connections for competitors or possibly of the host City State so that other/different/more attractive connections could be built instead. Of course once a warship (for example) has been built and the appropriate transports adjusted, the question arises of what to do with it in other later turns and who might use it to do what and where? There are laws about unintended consequences as well as idle militaries.

Conquest however was intended to be the more interesting affair. The core concept was that military units could attempt to penetrate another City State and to conquer its city centre. Should they succeed, then a large portion of the treasury of the losing City state would be divided given to the larger investors in the winning City State. In this way potentially large lumps of cash could be extracted from the game and handed to players. (Investors in the losing City State would have their investment totals transferred over to the winner according to some ratio) On subsequent turns all buildings within range of both/all city centres would activate when that City State had its turn. Thus the result of conquest are several-fold:

1. The total number of City States in the game would be reduced, thus the maximum length of a cross-City-State production pipeline would be one shorter.
2. More buildings over a larger area of the map would activate on a given City State’s turn. Ultimately the entire map could potentially consist of a single City State. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing.
3. The effective turn order relationships of buildings within City State boundaries would change. Greatly distant buildings would now be able to operate within the same functional City State turn. This change could have significant effects in making and breaking efficiency optimisations.
4. A City State could acquire technologies and other aspects of a city centre without investing in them directly.

I can also imagine tieing city centre count limits to technology level limits of City States. In essence this would be a logically implied branch of the tech tree.

Getting back to the starting position however, what I’m having the most problem with is the war buildings and the war transport-like objects. They just don’t seem justifiable in terms of return for complexity. It will also be difficult to write rules without problems for them. I do like the investment and cash flow effects of war. Those are compellingly interesting.

A thought: Have branches of the tech tree which do nothing but absorb/conquer other City States whose city centres are within range of the tech tree climbing City State city centre.

Hurm. The more I think about this the more I like it. It also ties in well with another post I haven’t finished writing yet on managing building ownership and city centre ranges. I’ll try and get those details posted later today.

I’ve largely assumed that Colonial Zoo maps will not be symmetrical and/or balanced. Some maps may be based on real world maps (Greece and the Baltic appeal to me), and others will be relatively random or artful designs with more concentration on challenge than fairness across multiple players. I have to assume that some positions on the board/map used will simply be better and will give the players that start there an inherent advantage, and that’s a problem.

Intuitively. Age of Steam’s variant on the classic Dollar Auction may be the right approach. The basic model would be that a turn order would be establish randomly and in that turn order the players would each found a City State by positioning a city centre for it somewhere on the map. Once that was done the player order would be randomised yet again and the players would iteratively bid part of their starting money for the initial turn order.. Bidding would proceed rotationally in turn order and upon their turn a player could either up the bid by whatever factor they wish, or drop. If they drop they would take the lowest currently unoccupied place in the turn order. By upping the bid they would remain in the auction for turn order. Once bidding is concluded the first and second place players would pay the full value of their final bids to the bank, the player last in turn order would pay nothing, and those in-between would pay half their final bid rounded up. Once turn order was resolved, in the new turn order the players would exclusively choose which City State they wanted to adopt as their starting position.

I got around to describing the game to a few locals this evening. Some of the responses were amusing:

1. Every time I think I’ve got the hang of the game there’s another level.
2. This sounds totally like the sort of game I think you’d design: Phase driven, lots of things to do to cause others pain, and most of that pain actually helps you.
3. Who do you expect to get to play this monstrosity? Oh, me. Yeah, I want to play that.
4. You’re evil. You really hate us players don’t you? I like. When will it be ready?

Nothing amazing but pleasing none the less, especially since the game specifically started out as an attempt to design the type of game I strongly dislike, but in a form I’d like. I really dislike what I call economic snowball or economic engine games. Examples include such stalwarts as Puerto Rico, Das Zeptor von Zavendor, Phoenicia, Outpost, Power Grid, St Petersberg etc. They are utterly not my thing and are for me an almost painful playing experience (a year later and David Eisen is still telling the story of the single game of Power Grid he got me to play). The problem was then to successfully design a game founded on the same principles as they, but one that I’d actually like and want to play. Thus the goal of Colonial Zoo was born: Take something dreadful, make something worth playing.

The other amusing aspect of this evening’s conversation was a few statements I made whose truth I recognised only after I’d said them:

In Colonial Zoo the players push money into the City States and then suck money back out of the City States. They do this repeatedly and end up with more money than they started with. Once they have more money they then want a way in which they can shove even more money into the game and take it out in larger lumps too, faster if possible. Basically they want a higher bandwidth money pipeline. This is a primary force behind (expensive) tech upgrades: they increase money bandwidth.

Additionally if the game stays at a low technology level the players will optmise themselves very well for that pattern and will be making more money at it than you are. You will be losing. So you’ll want to upgrade the technology level to cause their pipeline to break and throw them off balance while they optimise for the new level. Of course they then do the same back to you, but that takes a while and as the new technology level is higher bandwidth you’ll be making more money than they could or did. This process then repeats as you break them, they break you, etc. As such the game becomes a rolling process of always building the next better/bigger without ever getting a chance to stabilise on anything before it starts to fall away. It is rampant consumerism gone wild.

Or, to paraphrase a friend from tonight, You are building an economic engine, it just keeps falling apart and breaking and big chunks of it disappearing while you’re doing it. That sounded pretty much right to me.

Terrain is being simplified. Marsh and hills are out. I’ve been unable to come up with a good enough functional justification to keep them. The new terrain set are:

• Ocean (blue)
• Plains (green)
• Mountains (brown/gray)
• Impassable (white/black?)

Another small change is the handling of transport locations. When produced transports accumulate on their producing building and can then move out from there to form contiguous set with the production building similarly to the pattern described for buildings below. Caveat: Transports don’t have to be set-contiguous with the building that individually produced them, they merely need to be set-contiguous to a building which produces those transports and is owned by that City State (may not be the same one that produced that individual transport token).

None of this is a change. The changes relate to the placement of deployed transport markers.

Sea transports are placed in the centres of tiles and there may be a considerable of transport markers in any given location. A sea transport is considered contiguous with the 4 orthogonally adjacent tiles/buildings. Land transports are placed along the shared edge of two land tiles and are considered to be contiguous with 6 tiles: the two tiles which form the shared edge and the additional two tiles at either end which share corners with the end of the shared edge.

Building tile size has been adjusted to be somewhat smaller than terrain tiles so that there is room between buildings to see the colour of the underlaying tile and to plsce transports along that edge.

Possibility: Add blue stick-like markers which may be placed during setup along the edges of land tiles, Settlers-of-Catan-roads? style, to denote rivers. This would not only potentially allow waterway-specific transports (barges, canal boats, etc), but also lakes, inland seas, and also opens the possibility of deliberate canal construction and bridges over waterways.

Complexity: one step backward into simplicity, one step forward into detail and morass.

Building ownership is relatively simple and yet complex, as it affects movement costs and thus action limits, and controls the order in which buildings activate (the order of their owning City States).

The basic policy:

1. Only CityStates? may construct buildings.

2. Buildings may be constructed:

   • contiguous to the city centre
   • contiguous to a chain of buildings one of which is contiguous with the city centre
   • contiguous to a transport chain which is contiguous with a matching transport production building which is contiguous with either the city centre or a building chain which is contiguous with the city centre.

Where this gets interesting is when buildings are removed from the may due to tech upgrades in their owning city or directly connected neighbours. Possible results:

1. The subject building remains connected to the city centre. In this case there is no change.
2. The subject building is no longer connected to any city centre. In this case the building is considered un-owned and may not be used. Any product markers on it must be discarded (or left until it is owned?).
3. The subject building is no longer connected to its original owning city centre but is connected to a different City State’s city centre. In this case the building is now owned by the other City State.
4. The subject building is no longer connected to its original owning city centre but is connected to multiple other different City State’s city centres. In this case the building will belong to the closest City State with ties broken by transport technology level, distance, breadth of connection, and City State treasury size. If there’s still a tie the building is unowned and is treated as in the #1 case.