In a recent comment Ben Keightly argued that ‘Ohana Proa both is and should be a resource management game, and to an extent he’s right. And wrong – well, if not-what-I-want can be accounted as incorrect then he’s wrong. Ultimately all games are resource management games: players have a variety of fungible resources, abilities and opportunities to exercise them during the game and the player that manages the use of their resources, abilities (really just another resource) and opportunities (yet another resource) most effectively will (should) win. Ergo all games are resource management games and it is thus a uselessly global and tautological definition.

At a lower and more useful altitude I define resource management games as games in which the resources in question are (generally) enumerable, limited, and usually highly granular. At heart resource management games are exercises in scarcity. At a crude character level players must mete and dole and shave their pennies while still accomplishing the victory conditions. However, that’s not my interest or goal for ‘Ohana Proa. I’m not interested in ‘Ohana Proa being a game of managing scarcity, rather it is intended to be (and is) a game of jocund excess. The resources I’m interested in players managing are not discrete enumerable elements of fish and shells and VPs and kula, but of opportunities and mutual player (dis)incentives and posture. Any reasonable player in ‘Ohana Proa will have more fish and shells and kula etc than they necessarily know what to do with, they are going to be fundamentally rich and they are going to stay rich if they pay even marginal attention¹.

Being rich is not the problem. Spending the wealth is not the problem (there’s always the turn order auction for that). The problem is simple: prestige. To get prestige the players must individually create and sustain situations in which the other players consistently give them disproportionately more than they give each other. It really is that simple. You have, more or less, all the wealth of the world, you are rich, but there’s a strict protocol for prestige-generating gifts and you need to manipulate the system so that you get to give more, more efficiently, than the other players. There’s a big machinery behind that prestige-giving protocol. There’s routes and auctions and fish and shells and kula and rot and a whole mess of details, all of which, Ben is quite right here, are almost busywork details.

There’s a common (and false) stereotype of rich people’s visiting gifts being things like a small pot of hand-made jam or the like (recently reiterated in Six Degrees of Separation, a wonderful movie BTW). ‘Ohana Proa perpetuates this sorry model except that now the players have to grow their own berries, pick their own fruit (for themselves or each other), boil their own mixtures and in general go through a whole big and somewhat extraneous ritual just to get the little jar of hand-made jam to give their friends when they visit. But they have lots of friends and managing (there’s that word again) both the production pipeline of jam (kula) and the rate of opportunities to deliver (density of deliveries to islands connected by multiple players) as a set is difficult and the heart of the game.

Ahh, so there are resources to manage: the kula production pipeline and deliveries to multiply connected islands! Too true! Those are the primary resource challenges of the game, which makes it kinda sorta a resource management game except that the primary resources are:

1. Opportunities to make deliveries to islands which are connected by multiple other players
2. Network meshes that generate sufficient resource flow to afford those opportunities

And those things are not generally enumerable, particularly limited (scarce) or granular. They are more akin to diffusive field effects. Yeah, at a grand-level it is all busywork. All the little fish and shell etc stuff is noise, but it is important noise. It is busywork that builds the stuff that starts the multi-step inferential pipeline that establishes the incentives for the players to emergently create those opportunities and network-properties for your personal victory.

Quoting Ben again:

The way markets and kahunas interacted with the network is so interesting. It reminded me very strongly of the illustrations you sometimes see depicting gravity, with large planets sagging the 2D space-time grid. The way these interactions worked was clear as day. Unfortunately we were watching them happen from behind a pane of glass, and not consciously participating in the process.

Again, he’s right. My challenge is to diffusively but yet tangibly connect the players with that rubber sheet. I think, hope, that the recent rules changes, especially finishing splitting kula and damping the effect of kahuna will help make that diffuse connection more tangible.

New rules.

New player aid.

The really short version is that my response to recent playtester feedback was overly generous and enthusiastic. The correct response is more conservative and curmudgeonly. I’m keeping the response to Slow Start, albeit slightly muted. That’s fine and even admirable. Automatic proa upgrades is not such a good idea. I considered that model extensively in the early development of the game and threw it out then, which I then forgot more recently. The game needs an additional drain on fish/shells for the first few rounds while the players build their networks. The drain doesn’t have to be big, but it has to be non-negligible. This prevents a too-early and crippling kula rush before the route-network can support it. I tossed out the ability to cash in kula for VPs immediately upon receipt as it destabilised the kula and VP markets in oddly feed-back-prone ways. The split kula remains as a fine way of maintaining off-turn player involvement while also adding pleasantly collusive elements, but the prestige and VP allocation is heavily adjusted with an eye to reducing the total number of manual transactions per turn and per gift.

Note: The kula/prestige/VP values are not final – I’ve not quite finished running models.

I also threw out the redundant About Fish & Shells section of the rules, which saved half a page. The only original material there was the statement that VPs could be discarded for fish and shells, which has been moved further up the document.

In summary two changes remain in the offing:

1. Adjusting kula/prestige/VP values
2. Pull in the end-game prestige line a bit (~27?) while also shortening the prestige multiplier brackets.

Kublacon saw another ‘Ohana Proa playtest with a response ranging from I want to play this again, I want to play it on Monday, bring it with you on Monday! to This is good but these bits need fixing. Happily all the complaints aligned with the extant problem list. Against my better and more generous nature the current idea is to make the following sweeping changes. They analyse Okay but I’m not sure I like the resulting picture, but suspect parental bonding for this latter.

1. Tone down kahuna:
   • 1.5x production rather than 2x.
   • When a market is delivered to an island over a player’s route that also has a kahuna on that island, the kahuna-owning player earns VPs for the delivery in addition to the moving player. This may allow VP doubling for one’s own kahuna. not sure yet (ie the models haven’t finished running)
   • Building a kahuna once both have been built teleports one of the pre-existent kahuna to the new location
2. Rejigger kula:
   • Rework all cost relations
   • Kula do not reward VPs upon receipt, but may be immediately discarded upon receipt for VPs or fish & shells
3. Gut proas.. Players proas increase by one every turn unless their proas are already larger than the turn count. Automatic proa increase may be refused in return for resources and players may buy ahead for standard cost. If they buy-ahead then the next free proa doesn’t affect them. This is a standard tide-that-floats-all-boats

The most interesting change here is gutting the proas. Automatic increment removes a primary concern from the game, but also adds a potentially interesting decision without affecting any of the other base structures of the game: buy ahead for this-turn advantage or hang back for this-turn resource advantage? Removal of VPs from kula receipt is a little less interesting as the primary effect is to make kula dumping (stale kula gifts to players earlier in the turn order in the second delivery round) less significant. The second order effect of adding a thin kula management layer to the kula dumpee is mostly uninteresting.

New rules and player aids are on the slip.

A productive evening:

• Put in a double switchback exploration round for the start
• All players start with 2 explorers and 2 proas (need more resources too! forgot that)
• Advanced Game has been made default, Beginner’s Game added for the kahuna-less game
• Reciprocal kula implemented.
• First pass at new kula value/pricing done

So far the models look Okay, but I’ll probably need to adjust the Prestige Track end-point upward a bit to 37, 39 or 42 or so.

The new kula language:

There are (blue) fish and (red) shell kula items, each available in two values. Small value kula items may be enhanced to larger value kula items.

Kula token costs:

(Table here of values. In short, fish kula are 3 or 7 VPs, shell kula are 5 or 11 VPs and costs are 7 or 5 resources for low value kula (basic/beginner’s game), 17 resources for big kula, and 11 for upgrades.)

Players may only spend resources on kula if that kula item is immediately given to another player as part of a delivery (see Deliver). Enhancing a stale kula item (face down) to a larger value creates a higher value stale kula item (face down).

When a market is delivered to an island containing a market of the same colour, the moving player may give a kula item to each player with a route connected to the destination island. The kula item given may be newly purchased with fish and shells, or may be an item previously received from another player (optionally enhanced). The gifting player receives all the following:

• 1 point on the Prestige Track for giving the kula item
• 1 point on the Prestige Track if it was a large kula item
• 1 point on the Prestige Track if the kula item was just bought with fish and shells for this gift
• 1 point on the Prestige Track if giving the kula item to a player with a kahuna on the destination island

The player receiving the kula item receives half the value of the kula item as victory points rounded down, or full value if their kahuna was present on the destination island. They also receive one victory point for each kula item they already possess.

Upon receipt of a kula item, the recipient may immediately give a kula of the opposite type in return to the giver and may spend fish and shells to buy a kula for this purpose. In this case the player reciprocally giving the kula receives:

• 1 point on the Prestige Track for giving the kula item
• 1 point on the Prestige Track if their gift was more valuable than the gift they were given
• 1 point on the Prestige Track if the kula item was just bought with fish and shells for this gift
• 1 point on the Prestige Track if giving the kula item to a player with a kahuna on the destination island

and the new recipient receives:

• 1 point on the Prestige Track for receiving a kula in response to their gift
• 1 point on the Prestige Track if it was a large kula item
• half the value of the kula item as victory points rounded down, or full value if their kahuna was present on the destination island

At the end of each turn old face down kula items are discarded back to the supply and new kula items rot and are turned face down (see Rot).

• Dividends are always truncated (this got lost somewhere).
• The moving company always merges away and pays the special dividend
• Clarified already-connected merger case
• Double builds are only available to the clear plurality share holder
• Clarified mergers and new shares
• Removed the artistic extra dividend markers from the map
• Added income markers to the manifest
• Simplified London development to must always be the most valuable city
• Reduced double development cost to $3
• Cleaned up language in definitions
• Extended setup section to be more explicit
• Clarified that inactive company treasuries are not paid to shareholders
• Simplified and clarified game ending language
• Clarified that build expenses are always paid from company treasuries
• Clarified port expenses
• Added Dieter Danziger and Lokomotive Werks as inspirational
• etc

A few things I like here:

• The forced directionality plus the limitation on double builds of mergers makes poaching a bir more constrained and I think interesting. It also makes foreign ports a little more interesting as well as posing the nominal director’s interests in opposition with the minor shareholders.
• The simplified London value ruling makes London far touchier in the early game, triggering an explosion of development if it is developed. Nice.
• Inactive treasuries not paying out makes the first share of a secondary company pleasantly risky and asymmetric

A quick outing of Muck & Brass at the last hour of the gamesday last night. After ~14 hours of gaming and it being the wee hours of the morning we did not play well and it really didn’t get a good or fair showing as a game. Which was all fine as that wasn’t the point. It was nice to watch the exercise while having other people make most of the game decisions. More importantly I got my first reasonably external look at the game.

Being in a rush I completely forgot to teach that new companies build a track as they open, which would have changed a lot. I also simplified the London rules down to London must be the most valuable location on the board which added some nice tension and was simpler. A few rules holes were found by the ever inquisitive Michael Van Biesbrouck (mlvanbie), which was appreciated. eg What happens to corporate treasuries for companies that don’t float? Oddly enough all my companies have always floated when I solo play so I never considered that.

Other quick notes:

• Merger rules should be clarified
• Game-end condition needs to be clarified
• Possibly force the direction of mergers and merger dividends (moving company must pay) as this seems the more interesting decision and makes track building more subtle
• Remove extra dividends from board art
• The value and power of turn order was only appreciated post-game
• Too-rapid mergers can lock out players without reasonable futures, and additionally put the leading players incetivised to keep them locked out by over-paying for secondary company shares; a curious form of financial bludgeoning

Another more basic observation, and this goes back to earlier plays of Lokomotive Werks, Dutch Intercity, Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters and Wabash Cannonball and my 18XX history is that many people don’t grok income vehicle lifecycles. Of course this concept is central to good 18XX play and for the more recent games some of this is my fault as game teacher, but there seems to be a hole there in the gaming panoply. Players seem to natively assume that everything they can buy is good and that the only difference is that some things are better than others or need to be set/combinatorial collected in order to realise their best value. The idea that some investments vary from good to bad to horrible to great depending on a game-based lifecycle appears unusual and unfamiliar. (Aside: 1825 Unit 1, 1825 Unit 2 and 1825 Unit 3 are of course entirely driven by this concept of optimised portfolio management) This probably ties to the general paucity of phase-driven games. That might be an interesting area to explore with Modern Mogul or Trade Winds.

Time to get cracking on the rules again.

Seth Jaffee is encouraging me to enter ‘Ohana Proa in Kublacon‘s game prototype contest. ¹ I’m tempted but it would require sorting out the specifics of reciprocal kula Right Now (tm) which is rather more analysis that I’d set myself for this week. Still, the work does need to be done and Ben and Morgan are waiting for the new changes…

Humbug! I should shut up before I too persuade myself. Two against one wouldn’t be fair.

The core elements of a future’s market are:

1. The sale of the agreement to purchase a set quantity at a set price at a set time in the future
2. The sale of the agreement to sell a set quantity at a set price at a set time in the future

That’s it: The purchased promise to transact volume at price on date. Future’s markets rely on two things:

1. A reasonable certainty on market prices in the future
2. Unpredictable and yet reasonable risks which could significantly affect the prices at that time

Wealth of Nations delivers (a poor) something of a futures market in the way that commodity prices vary with supply and demand (which is clever and works well), but does not allow direct speculative exploitation of that market. I’m specifically interested in a direct speculatively exploitative futures market in a game…

It seems difficult but not impossible to implement direct representation of a futures market in a game if the game is going to play quickly (less than 2 hours). If the players are to build the systems which establishes the reasonable certainty then I suspect it may be impossible as too many iterations are required to build the player investments to deliver that certainty – with fewer iterations the sunk costs of chaos are too low.

Perhaps if the game provided the backdrop of both the base market and the base forces which drive the general curces of future market behaviour? Thus the game would effectively guarantee that the basic curves of value and time were as so, but the players could affect those curves or deliberately cause events to throw them off? Hurm. Curious. That puts the players more in the role of market manipulators, attempting to buy one side of the speculation prospects up cheap before forcing the market in that direction. Hurm. Yeah.

So how would the market represent? How could players see the value curves they would be speculating on, let alone the player manipulation incentive grids for exploitation? That’s a problem.

Imagine a linear track of value. Each commodity has five markers on the track:

1. Historical market high (plus a date/age?)
2. Historical market low (plus a date/age?)
3. Current price
4. Price at the end of last turn/epoch
5. Price at the end of the turn/epoch before last

That would seem to sum most of the really basic data needed for market behaviours: trend, range, and velocity. (Later update: Of course it misses volume, which is also key)

I wonder?

This is such a curiously ungainly area for a game.

This is a temporarily named place holder with apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan. It is all in early gestation and may yet be stillborn.

Core problem: Iterative exploitation of leverage opportunities across a three-layered market: Production/sales, transport, futures.

Core concepts: factories, multi-typed transport (road, rail, sea/canal, air etc), 18XX technology/obsolescence, player-grown undirected graph of transport-coloured edges, speculative futures market, demand-based pricing market, hedge operations

In short this is a melange of notions that muddled through the shampoo while in the shower.

The L&MR has moved back to Liverpool and the smal town of Selby has inserted itself between York and Sheffield (which is at least mildly historically accurate). This puts both the L&MR and L&SR three builds away from the hinge-point in Peterborough, and gives the three southern companies time to start soaking up the northern connectivity to London (Peterborough/London or Peterborough/Cambridge/London), thus moderating the early income power of the northerns, weakening the hinge point of Peterborough and encouraging the northerns to more strongly nest their track around Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield while remaining positioned for both mutual merger and possible assault on the EUR via Peterborough. I’d guess that in a third or more of games the northerns won’t reach London before the 3rd General dividend, which is a nice quality point of variance and control. As a side effect it also makes the Peterborough/Grimsby link a lynch pin in the southern’s assault on the northerns, which seems reasonable, while also making complete northern/southern segregation until the late game quite surprisingly viable – if turn order is good it is now possible for the northerns to prevent the southerns from merging into them quickly/easily.

So far so good.

Another thought model struck however. Instead of simply auctioning the first shares of the 5 initial companies in order, how about allowing it to mess about a bit?

Proposal: The game starts with the auction of a share of the L&MR. The next player can auction either a share of the L&SR or another share of the L&MR. The player after that can auction the next company in order that hasn’t sold a share yet, or a share from any earlier company which still has unsold shares. Each share sale would be accompanied by a free track build.

This feels like an astoundingly Bad Idea (tm), but it is also kinda cute and appealing. I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t do it.