Below is a possible introduction section for the rules. Some of the stated goals, like the duration, may be ambitious, but that’s the nature of good goals:

After the birthplace of the steam engine, railway development in England was a rocky and tortuous affair. Bankruptcies were common. Struggling railway companies merged and then merged again, acquired other companies and became not-so-vast agglomerates. In Muck & Brass players will invest in railway companies and then attempt to leverage their investments for profit. Railway companies will start, grow and then merge into each other as yet more companies pop up to join the frenzy of growth and mergers.

During the course of the game players will buy and sell dividend-paying shares at auction, build track to increase the income of the companies they own shares in, and develop the industrial base of cities the companies serve to further increase their income. After a period of heady growth companies will begin to merge, creating both ever larger income vehicles and prompting new companies to join the growth and merger fray.

By carefully controlling and timing the purchase and sale of shares, the railway networks their companies build, the development of the cities they connect and the mergers of the companies, players may leverage their investments for great profit.

The game ends after one or more of:

• the seventh (7th) general dividend

• only two operating companies have unsold shares

• only two operating companies have a legal track build and can afford it

The player with the highest net worth at the end of the game wins.

Muck & Brass supports 3 through 6 players, is particularly recommended for 4 or 5 players and plays in around 90 minutes.

I’ve spent the last three hours trying to work out a coherent and functional and (relatively) simple set of merger rules that handle all the cases. Ooof. I don’t think I’m there yet but at least it is closer.

So far I’m tending strongly to resolving the case where the new minor is already connected by track from one or more companies, by a) merging the other companies first (active player picks which is the parent), b) selling a share in that merged product, and then finally c) issuing a special dividend for the merged company before starting yet another minor. As is typical in such cases the concept is far simpler than the language.

BTW: There’s a similar mess in Stephenson’s Rocket when a train line manages to merge into multiple other lines all at the same time. There it is complicated by the share trade-up rules, but at least they don’t also have Special Dividends.

At the prompting of Benjamin Keightley (Coca Lite) a number of small clarifications to the rules:

• Clarified that resources are produced for every island along the path of a market delivery.

• Addressed the case where claiming produces a stack of more than 5 markets.

• Tweaked the end-game condition to over 33 prestige.

Also added one brand new rule to partly address the minor problem of dumping kula items on a player who is far out of contention:

• Kula recipients also receive points for each kula item they already have.

New Rules and Player aid posted.

Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters makes shares valuable beyond their mere revenue value. The shareholders divide the company treasury evenly amongst themselves (another dilution factor here) with any remainders going to the Director. Basic shares then cash out for $4 each and Grouping Shares cash out for $10 each. As an aside, this treasury payout model is a very attractive method of stashing cash away so that it doesn’t affect your turn order position while also keeping it in-hand for the end-game score – as long as you don’t trade those shares up to grouping shares.

Pampas Railroads also makes shares valuable beyond their mere revenue value. There the concept is that a company has a base value which is a function of the number of links it has built, and that value is cashed out in the end-game to the players. Additionally there are special particularly expensive off-network locations that may be build, foreign connections, which significant boost share value but also signal a company-specific dividend (ala Wabash Cannonball’s Chicago).

Wabash Cannonball’s simplicity of ignoring shares is attractively simple. Player scores are merely the cash they have on hand when the game ends. However there also seems value in shares being worth something. Pampas Railroad’s company value system is unpleasantly fiddly for the game-value it generates. WS&IM’s straight share value is at least something but is interestingly flat. I do however like the idea of the treasury paying out to the share holders in WS&IM. Perhaps a combination of the two?

Proposal: Shares are worth $1 for each city the parent company is connected to, and the company treasury pays out divided across shareholders, remainders going to the bank.

Additionally, is it worth implementing an equivalent to Pampas Railroads’ foreign links? England certainly has a plethora of ports that could be used. They could be both very expensive (and thus an attractive way of sucking capital out of a company as a minor shareholder), and an additional source of per-company special dividends. But should they still affect end-game per-share value, and if so, in the same way?

Proposal: Each foreign link adds $10 to the end-game per-share value.

The initial map shown in the previous post was drawn with yEd, a fine and remarkably useful graph editor. I’m still fiddling with that graph but think it is time to export it to SVG and resume via Inkscape. It is time for annotations, score tracks, actoin markers, stock pools etc – all things which aren’t really part of the graph and are thus better performed by a more general purpose tool. Thankfully yEd can export to SVG, making this easy.

Merges are going to be interesting. The basic concept is that when CompanyA connects to CompanyB’s home station, the two companies will merge. Further, the active company will pay out a (Wabash Cannonball) Chicago-like dividend immediately prior to the merge. The two companies will then merge: stock in the active company will trade-up into stock of the parent company 1:1, the incomes will be summed and the track markets for the companies collected. Then the active player will select one of the four minor companies to add to the game and auction a share of that company in the standard fashion (shades of both Wabash Cannonball and Pampas Railroads).

This gets a little more interesting if the new minor’s home base is already connected by track. Obviously the new company should start and merge immediately, but there are several ambiguities and choices in exactly how to do that. For instance, should the minor share be sold, and if so, what should it pay out before it merges? Or should a parent share be sold and the parent then auto-pay? What about if the minor company is already connected by the track of several different um-merged companies? How to resolve that? Should all the connected companies merge? What if there are more than two? Three? Four? Five? Should there be an order of the merging and paying, or should it all happen at once in a grand orgy of unification?

Those are not the only problems. As the graph is roughly circular, gaps between home stations are small which makes early merges easy(er). Additionally, if I copy the double build rule from Pampas Railroads, which I’d like to do, merges could be extremely rapid with the game ending in but a few turns and the first-to-merge having a near unassailable advantage from their early merge-dividend payouts. Thus merges will need to be delayed and possibly the double-build ability constrained.

Not a whole lot here yet, mostly just sounding out the graph, start locations for the initial companies (pink) and subsequent second stage companies (green).

Harry Wu’s Wabash Cannonball centres on share dilution. Each share pays an N’th fraction of the income of the parent company where N is the number of issued shares. This simple pattern, seemingly introduced in Han Heidema’s Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters, is fascinating in the implications it provides for temporary emergent self-interested player alliances. I’d like to do something further with that idea, carrying the core notions one step further out. Thus the notion of Muck & Brass.

At the simplest level Muck & Brass is still a share dilution game, except that now companies may also merge and in merging their incomes and issued shares would aggregate, potentially offering even higher rates of return for (some) shareholders. Mergers would also offer an additional game-ending clock.

The current prototype consists of a map of England, Wales and Scotland, with a Pampas Railroads-style graph super-imposed following mostly historical train line paths and about 7% of the rules written. The intended model is very reminiscent of Wabash Cannonball nee Pampas Railroads with the additional of the merger mechanism and a more Pampas-like handling of development values and track development. There’s also a hint of Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters and Stephenson’s Rocket in there too.

I’d like a 90 minute playtime, but I’ll settle for 135 minutes. I’m not sure I’m skilled enough to cram in the level of distraction I want in just 90 minutes, but I’m working on it.

Seth Jaffey mentioned using tokens to track player investment in City States, each player having a limited supply and needing to allocate them judiciously. The idea has merit, but not I think where Seth was thinking.

A core problem with the current nascent design is transports in the mid and late game. There’s simply little to reason to build them as they’ll generally benefit others more than the builder. The core problem here is that by the early mid-game each player will already have established investment presence in all the City States, thus causing the end-game to devolve into a series of simple localised efficiency struggles. Having transport, aka communication, fall out so severely in the end-game is uninteresting and needs address.

Nothing determined yet, but I’m mostly musing along the following lines:

• Players start with no/few tokens.

• Players may opt to buy additional tokens at certain game events (probably building events?)

• Players may assign tokens either to transport or to infrastructure in City States on specific game events (research/building?)

• Players with transport tokens in a CS are paid cash every time transports are used, proportional to their plurality (land and sea differentiated?)

• On tech upgrade of a City Centre the player with the least tokens plus any players within +2 tokens of that are cashed out of the city and paid cash proportional to the current value of the CS. All remaining players must then discard one token from the CS. Removed/discarded tokens are either returned to their players or perhaps discarded back to supply

• On subsumption of a City Centre by another CS the players in the acting CS are rewarded with cash proportional to their token plurality and the value of the subsumed City Centre

City centre ranges:

T4 may yet grow by one. The T6 Metropolis not only has infinite range (and is thus not shown), but also marks one of the end-game conditions. Board size across player counts will necessarily be a function of the above.

Ooof. That wasn’t so easy. The main changes are adjustments to the action costs for the different buildings and their products. A few buildings were lost in the process and the tech tree had to be adjusted to suit. None of the changes were particularly large but they are rather sweeping. For instance, the ramp of action costs was flattened, so that late products don’t cost many more actions than early products. That has the happy effect of putting the driving focus on the tech tree and the resultant building rotting.