I’ve temporarily renamed the game to Capitalist Zoo. I’m not fond of this name either, but it is at least better than Shadow Clan. More changes to come.
Upcoming topics (not in order, mostly just notes for myself):
Producing the relatively large number of terrain tiles for prototypes has been a concern. In fact I just bought a copy of Roads & Boards plus &cetera just because I expected that I’d also be able to use the many hundreds of bits from those games in the prototypes for this one. Of course it didn’t hurt that I also like Roads & Boats.
And of course I’ve pretty much decided that hexagonal tiles (such as in Roads & Boats) are an unnecessary complexity for this game. Oh well. The problem remains: How to produce the several hundreds of terrain tiles needed?
Solution:
Two types of buildings:
City State centres occupy a contiguous block of tiles of a certain shape with specific terrain requirements, When upgraded to a larger city centre the new location may not be more than one tile removed from the prior location. Each type/scale of city centre comes with a range. All contiguous buildings (contiguous with the City Centre) within that range or which are connected by state own transports to contiguous buildings within that range, are part of the City State.
Other buildings are production buildings. They are of three types: buildings Producers, Translators and Money Producers (need a better name for this one).
Producers accept no inputs and produce whatever it is they produce. This process is identical to the farms and shepherd shacks in Neuland.
Translators accept a specific mix of inputs of specific types of products and in return output of a product of yet another type. This process is identical to most of the buildings in Neuland.
Money producers accept a specific mix of inputs of specific types of products and in return give the moving player abstract money in their account.
Physically buildings consist of one or more contiguous tiles with terrain limitations. Contiguity will usually require tiles sharing edges but in certain very limited cases may be defined by sharing corners or even by range measurements. Uncertain.
Building tiles are placed on terrain tiles.
Product markers are placed on building tiles. Typically there may be only one product marker per building at any one time, no matter how many tiles the building covers. Some special few buildings may accept multiple product markers (function of tech level?).
Some buildings produce transports given the right inputs. Thus a stable that is adjacent to a paddock may accept food etc as inputs and output horses. Similarly shipyards produce ships, wainwrights produce wagons etc. The produced transports are owned by the city state. The producing player is rewarded with investment value in the city. The producing player may move the transports out from the production centre, and in fact all the transports of that type that are members of a set contiguous with that production centre with the following constraints:
Players may move products over transports to buildings in connected (or same) City States. Such movement requires payment for use of the transport to the owning City State. The product must continue to move off the transport to a building which can accept it for production. Any required fees for this additional movement must be paid.
Remember, players don’t own transports or buildings, cities do.
Different transports have different capacities. Transports cannot carry loads of too high (or low) a tech level. They are also limited in capacity. This limits the transfer bandwidth between cities.
Orchestration of transport logistics and timing is expected to be significant to good play.
This game has occupied my commutes, my showers, my pre- and post-sleep musings, and even a few of my dreams. A great many things have been assembled. It is now time to try and get that melange out of my head and assembled into an externally logical system.
The assumed presentation is a modular map built from square tiles. The square tiles would represent one of six terrain types: ocean, marsh, plains, hills, mountains, impassable. The players would start the game by assembling the tiles into a pleasing pattern. Possibly there would also be preset patterns of scenarios for more canned experiences.
Once the map was established the players would in turn each found one city state in some location on the board. A city state would be defined by its central location, initially something like a meeting hut, later something akin to a City Hall, Palace or other capitol building. Subsequent buildings within range of the central building would be considered to be part of the city state.
City states consist of contiguous sets of buildings. City States are defined by their centres and a range factor from their centres. That range gets larger as the city cntre is upgraded. City states may overlap, in which case one either overtakes (war/conquest) the other, one simply absorbs the other, or they co-exist with clearly defined (possibly porous) boundaries.
City states will be invested in by players. These investments will initially take the form of straight cash. Later investments may take the form of building contracts, logistical supplies and material supplies. The lead investors in a city state will guide the city’s decisions. Minor investors will not have a part in this decision process.
This is not a negotiation game.
The basic expected pattern:
City states are ordered in terms of descending bankroll
In order Each CIty State takes a turn. A turn consists of:
Repeat #2 for the next City State
When all City States have been processed, repeat from #1.
Buildings would be largely analagous to the buildings in Neuland or Roads & Boats. Player participation however would be strictly along the Neuland pattern. Players would only own product markers and product markers would decay across turns. Like Roads & Boats, players would not own buildings or transports, just product markers. Thus the challenge becomes one of sequencing product marker translations across chains of buildings both within and across City States efficiently. Additionally the challenge is to sequence the City States so that their order of operation allows for most efficient action sequencing. Finally the challenge is to cause City States to construct buildings that most advantage your action sequencing without undue benefit to others.
Assumptions:
The thematic premise to date has been competing city states (cf early Greece) with players variously investing in the city states and potentially guiding their life cycles, or exploiting the facilities the city states proffer to generate profits. As such the core pattern is a mix of macro-investment tightly combined with micro-investment. A player may guide a City State to built the QRS building so that they can then use that building to produce products which they sell/use to make large profits with another or the same City State, or another player, or perhaps at another building nearby or elsewhere. Thus it is expected that the relationships and connectivities of the city states will provide a large and evolving context which the players will build and evolve, all the while also exploiting the details of the imbalances in that system to their own advantage.
I realise that many players yearn for in-game identities. They want to be the…XYZ. They want to have an identified anthropomorphic role. It has been difficult to determine such a role for this game. Several concepts cam to mind: clan heads, apocryphal jewish investors, Illuminati, conspiring hidden hands etc. I’ve been rather fond of a forced misinterpreation of the Commonwealth term “Shadow Cabinet”, which while it means something else entirely, by name suggests the sort of hidden role the players would take in guiding the lives and fate of the City States.
I am increasingly unfond of the current name of Shadow Clan. It is too melodramatic and suggestive of things this game is not intended to be.
At core this is an attempt to design a game-type I strongly dislike, but in a manner that I’d enjoy playing. I strongly dislike economic system/snowball games (eg St Petersburg, Phoenicia, Power Grid, Das Zeptor von Zavendor, Outpost, Civilisation (and all the other 4X variations) etc). However I do like logistical graph manipulation games. The result is that in many ways this is an attempt to make an economic snowball game which is also an interesting logistical graph manipulation game.
The core game problem is assumed to be competition for share of the pie. The player with the largest percentage of the pie at the end of the game wins. Most likely this will be expressed in terms of money, and thus the pie will effectively be the bank of all money in the game universe with the game ending when the game system runs out of money. The player with the largest net worth at that point (largest fraction of the pie), wins.
The parallel to the 18XX is deliberate. However I’m not interested in producing an 18XX clone and thus will be resisting thinking about or phrasing this game in terms of 18XX comparisons. I expect that this and future blog items will show that this is difficult.
The 18XX are effectively all about owning the most valuable shares at the end of the game. Cash is important, but pretty much only as a way of gaining the most valuable shares. I do not want to follow that pattern. The loose expectation here is that players will build and iteratively exercise logistical systems in order to make profits. However the key element is that they won’t build a profit engine in the 18XX or Outpost, sense, but rathr engage in a game-long sequence of logistic moves and relationships which variously result in net profits (and re-investments etc). Thus it is expected that the game will rely much more on timing, presence, and connectivity than systemic relationships.
To give a sense of where I’m heading the primary game inspirations from the logical perspective are things like:
And on the investment vehicle side are games like:
Hopefully this will give a sense of where I’m heading, or perhaps trying to head.
I’ve the sense that the game would do better with a silly theme. Perhaps something like robbers competing in robbing banks and each other’s hoards or some such. Suggestions are welcomed.
New/better/polished rules.
Cleaned up some ambiguities, fixed the initial deal, I Win! cards are now worth points, tweaked the variants.
The deal description is wrong.
The first player should get the 1/5/9 in one suit, the 2/6/7 in another, and the 3/4/8 in the third. The second player should get the same thing but with the suits allocation rotated once. The third player should get what’s left, which is the same distribution with the suits rotated the last time.
I’ll get a formal versioned PDF of the rules put together and posted soon.
‘Ohana Proa did not make the cut for Hippodice. It scored 3.33 versus the required 3.1.
I’m pretty satisfied with the the game as-is. The rules are in good shape, it plays well, I enjoy it. Perhaps it is time to start talking to the Peter Eggerts of the world.
Onward ho!