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:
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:
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.
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:
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 rules have been updated.
I’ve renamed Corner Property to Corner Lot as being a little more colloquial.
I’ve made a first draught of the rules. I’ve made the cards required for play (thanks go to Ariel Seoane for helping with the art) and hope to play at tomorrow’s gamenight at SB-Boardgamers.
The above doesn’t account for the probabilities of multiple cards of the same value in a lot, thus increasing over-payment, or the potential of players passing and thus driving prices down. It also ignores the fact that cards pay out 6 times per game, thus making the big cards even more valuable than they already are. And there are some other nice fat holes in the logic. Still, $500 per player in a 4 player game seems a reasonable sum.
Hurm.
An idle thought to enliven the mix:
Quick changes that seem useful:
Vague possibilities: - Turn-order players in order of cash or income
Still have to determine starting capital.
1830 uses a remarkable auction format for distributing the private companies at the start of the game. In somewhat abstract terms:
In essence bids on properties reserve the ability for that player to compete for the property later. They pay a premium for that privilege. As several properties are worth considerably more than their face values, there is competition both to acquire those properties and to force the eventual purchaser to pay reasonably for it.
1830’s private auction is often cited for being excessively complex and opaque. It is the primary point of differentiation in the early game and new players have a very hard time with it as each of the private companies has special powers, but also various pairs of private companies can synergistically work together. It should be no surprise that I’ve long admired the private auction and wanted to base a game around it just that portion of the game, much like Günter Cornett and Michael Uhlemann’s Greentown is a rendition of the 18xx route-tracing game, and Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling’s Cavum is a rendition of the 18xx track building game.
Option: Lose the chips and suit the cards with 5 suits.
My sense is that the game is too long, the deck needs to be smaller, there need to be fewer rounds etc. It needs a diet. I haven’t investigated that yet.