I have posted revision #65 of Muck & Brass¹ to the distribution point and access instructions are about to be sent out². Future releases will bear their own release numbers. Please append commentary, questions, reactions, thoughts etc as comments to each version’s announcement³ post so we may easily track exactly what is being talked about⁴.

The playtest files for Muck & Brass are ready and I’m braced to let them rip on the unsuspecting. Those that have contacted me should expect to be receiving a message with the super-secret (hush now!) instructions on how download the files.

I’d like all textual feedback (session reports, questions, reactions, commentary etc) posted as comments on this blog, I’ll post an entry to the blog with each new release of the game files (hopefully there won’t be many) and y’all can append comments to that for feedback etc. Then as I make a new release, there will be a new post and an associated comment stream etc for that version of the game. I’m hopeful that the only needed changes to the game will be small rules tweaks for clarity and perhaps the odd adjustment of a port or city value¹. Pictures, movies and other media are always welcome and may be sent to me via email or even better, uploaded to my anonymous FTP server at ftp://ftp.kanga.nu/incoming. Please mention the FTP upload in a posted comment so I’ll know to get the files!

Brace yourself Edna, they’re comin’ ovah!

Another realisation that struck during last night’s 2 player game of Muck & Brass was the value and utility of using the secondary companies as capital sources for primary companies via mergers. For some reason that use hadn’t struck me but as a technique it worked out well in last night’s game. It also clarifies the strange see-saw of incentive and interest that run among clear plurality holdings, ports, mergers, capitalisation and turn order control. The end-game is rife with cases of money-losing investments being the levers necessary for even more profitable returns. The classic example from last night was a share of the LB&SCR which was purchased for $61 and rewarded a lifetime revenue of around $16, but enabled other activities and incentives with the L&SR that generated ~$200 in dividends.

It is a strange thing to discover one’s own game.

Work and local testing is continuing apace. I’ve gotten in several games with the new rules (and scores of simulated games) and so far it is all looking good. The big surprise was today’s two player game which worked far better than I expected.

I shouldn’t be so surprised. Muck and Brass, unlike Wabash Cannonball / Pampas Railroads etc is not primarily an auction game, but is much more about positional and timing advantages than auction values. As such with only two players the auction becomes a linear extension of that two player tactical battle and really works quite well. Of course eventually one player will tend to run away and be simply uncatchable, but that’s to be expected in any two player zero-sum perfect and certain information game, and this should be recognised when it occurs and the game conceded at that point. Don’t be too quick to pull the trigger though: there’s an awful lot of ground that can be recovered with careful exploitation of the default turn order. Still, it is a pleasant surprise and I’ve added two player support to the map and rules (a small change in all).

The last change, and this is a small one, is that I added another port to Liverpool and London with costs around $100. The current distribution of ports and their costs is a mix of guesswork and inspiration. So far it has mostly seemed about right in our games. I’ve added the very expensive ports for Liverpool and London simply to allow trimming back late game behemoths with egregiously expensive (and historically accurate) ports, thus providing a dramatic and welcome turning point in the late game.

The next round appears to be done:

Changes:

• Images scaled to fit on US-Legal sized paper
• The winner of a share pays time for a Capitalise, not necessarily the action selector
• Time limit per round changes with player count (Thanks Tim!)
• Moved the charters spaces off their own sheet onto the board edge, Wabash Cannonball-style
• Put marked spaces on the charters for shares, sample colour markers etc
• A few notes for playtesters in the rules
• Several small clarifications of prices and edge/corner cases (eg no bids on a share)

New rules. I’ve worked through a few dozen simulated games with the changes and they worked well. The goal is to play face-to-face tonight and tomorrow night. If that proves out I’ll start sending copies to playtesters.

Capitalisation may be too expensive. Too often the only correct bid is however much or one more than the player with the second most cash has. Sometimes the correct bid is to even bid more in order to fund the company or to hide cash for turn order advantage. Surprisingly rarely is it to bid less than the second richest player. The result is that the only player who has an incentive to choose Capitalise is the player with the most cash. This is a problem of the first water, exacerbated by the ability to hide capital in company treasuries for recovery in end-game payouts (admittedly a loss) in order to gain preferential turn order.

In noodling the area last night I came up with a curious idea:

What if the player that wins a Capitalised share has to pay the 3 months, not necessarily the player that selected the Capitalisation action?

Among other things this would give the ability to fork the other players. They either allow the Capitaliser to get a share (cheaply) or they sacrifice positional advantage. That can be a hard position, especially in the setup for mergers and ports. The buyer-pays-the-time pattern would apply to both the directly selected Capitalise choice and those forced by ports and mergers. A player already past the round-cut-off would not be excluded from bidding – thus weakening or at least bounding the fork-ability.

We played a four player teaching game of Muck & Brass last night and there were a few production-level problems. Until now I’d habitually played on a large map printed on a large format plotter. I’ve recently been rejiggering for maps produced on my HP K8600 and had so produced a reduced-size map for Muck & Brass, but hadn’t actually played on it. I had those nice big maps already in my game crate you see?

Well. last night we played on the new smaller map using 1cm cubes for everything (shares, track markers, player markers, etc) and the new smaller edition map was just a bit too small for convenience. Not a lot, but a bit. Another 15% or so would have made things ever so much more handy. The income tracks page had the same problem but rather more so. You see, my old big maps had nice big income and company treasury spaces on them:

The income track on the new smaller page isn’t really big enough to use 1cm cubes for income markers¹, not conveniently, and the company spaces to hold the shares and treasury are actually rather perfectly sized in terms of things fitting but are quite poorly sized for telling what company they apply to once they’re in there, let alone handling the money for payments² or moving shares about. Not so good there.

To that end I spent some time today scaling the map back up. It now fits and prints fairly comfortably on three sheets of US-Legal paper in landscape mode³. I used a 35 point overlap in my test run which seemed a fine value when I came to piece the three pages together. Happily that also puts the two joins that traverse the map in relatively visually convenient places. The income tracks etc are proving a little more troublesome. The company charter spaces need to be bigger (see below), the labling larger and outside the charter box, and the income track spaces at least 30% larger⁴.

I’m still fiddling with the new income track image and don’t yet have something I’m happy with. If it weren’t so damnably visually confusing and tempting to error I’d drop the income track idea entirely and just provide an income box to stack poker chips equal to the company’s current income.

The other lesson from last night’s game was that Capitalisation when early in the turn order is bad, but the reasons it is bad are not intuitive to players trained on more traditional German game fare. Rapid Capitalisation pushes money into the companies too fast for (that) player’s advantage and grants too much positional opportunity to players later in the turn order. Unlike Wabash Cannonball, Muck & Brass is not predominantly an auction game. When I ran through the reasoning and tempo and positional considerations around auction choices with the players post-game the light started to dawn, but only slowly. They intuitively saw the shares and auctions as a pricing and funding exercise, much as they’d been trained to in so many other German auction games, and not as an income and positional advantage management problem. When I got to the bit of how having money is desperately important, especially in the early game in Muck & Brass, they nodded understandingly, but when I then continued onto how having less money (cash) than the other players is in some ways even more important due to timing-related positional advantages I lost them. The players also did not understand the tactical advantages of port builds versus mergers. Again the patterns are fairly obtuse. They understood the words, they understood the sentences, but even when I walked through an example post-game the lights didn’t come on. Again this seems like habituation from prior standard German faire: of course players advance their most differentiated investments as that’s where their deltas are! Much like the weakness of large investments in Age of Scheme: Routes to Riches and the far larger value of minor investments in that game, the merger/port choice puts the focus and value on profiting through minor investment incentives, not through major investments. As a designer I (self-servingly?) don’t see their incomprehension as a problem, more evidence of the game having both a learning curve and potential tactical depth.

Even with all the early Capitalisations and thus the super-funding of the companies and the resulting loss of tension in the early game as the struggle among positional advantage, turn-order and investment portfolio was (mostly) lost, it actually worked pretty well. The game ended in the fourth round and the game was (effectively) dictated by the division of the super-treasury of the mega-merged company. That was a little disappointing but it was also clear to the players how that had occurred and they had ideas as to what to do about it next time. That was pleasing – and reminiscent of our early days with Wabash Cannonball.

Play time was a little under 90 minutes including rules teaching. I took a few pictures of the game and will post them later. Meanwhile Tim Harrison has questioned the action divisions across player counts. I recall working it out but I should review it again and ensure it is right.

There has been some delay since I opened Muck & Brass to external playtesting. The delay is because I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to receive and collect feedback.

Historically I’ve used a mixture of email and BoardGameGeek geekmail. That worked fairly well but was also less interactive than I would have liked. In particular the feedback was always private (I’d prefer public feedback) and there was never any cross-discussion among the different groups (a side effect of privacy). (I think) I’d like a more facile system which not only more easily supported discussion between playing groups as well as between the groups and me, but also allows photographs and other non-textual elements to (more) easily accompany the discussion.

There is also the very small question of how to distribute the game files in the first place. The rules, shares and tracks sheet are already freely available. All that’s left is the map image. I’d like to know where the files are going and to track who has them. I can’t do that perfectly of course, but I’d like at least a good notion.

Email works well except for the privacy problem already noted. For large photo or movie sets which were clumsy to send via email¹, I’ve provided an FTP site where they could upload the images and then reference the upload in their email. That worked well but the disconnect between the email and the FTP upload was occasionally jarring. I’m a habitual IRC user and am on #bgdf_chat pretty much 24/7/365. IRC is great for discussion and could be used for the file distributions via DCC SENDs, but it has concurrency and ephemeracy problems. I’m likely to have playtest groups scattered about and would like them to be able to communicate to me and each other asynchronously and IRC just doesn’t do that. Another option is to use the comment system built into this blog (Wordpress). Groups would post their feedback as comments. This Wordpress installation currently doesn’t support attachments to comments, so media components would still have to posted via FTP and I’d have to come in later to attach them more directly to the blog. We could also create a game entry for Muck & Brass on BoardGameGeek and have the reports posted there as standard session reports. That seems like an abuse of the system to me but others clearly have different views on that area. BoardgameGeek session reports also don’t come for free as supporting images couldn’t go through moderation, thus requiring them to be either hosted off-site or in contributor’s individual galleries, both of which solutions have their own ephemeracy problems. Movies and other media forms are also not supported by BoardGameGeek unless hosted off-site (YouTube et al), introducing yet other dependencies and problems.

I suspect there is no good easy answer, but I’m still thinking about it. I suspect I’m going to end up doing all of the above while encouraging the combination of this blog and #bgdf_chat as the default venues, the FTP site being used for asynchronous media. Perhaps.

The Muck & Brass rules are being exposed to a rather larger audience than they’ve had before. I’d greatly appreciate comments as to their clarity and utility, any problems with comprehending the game. unanswered or difficult to answer questions the rules left you with, etc left as comments on this entry. I am particularly interested in gaps, contradictions and unnecessary repetition. I’ve laboured to cover every possible contingency in the rules, but only just the once.

I have a rather non-traditional rules-writing approach (passive voice, no examples, close to minimum spanning tree etc) which approximates my ideals for rules. I’m interested in other’s perceptions of the rules as written. I should note that I’m actually not averse to examples, but I dislike putting them in rules until the very last minute (ie right before publication) as otherwise I find it too easy for the examples to start supplanting and extending on the actual rules rather than just exemplifying them. I loathe rules in which the examples actually define or supplant the game’s rules. The Platonic ideal of course is for the rules to simply not need examples as they are already so clearly obvious!

I somewhat inadvertently opened Muck & Brass to external playtesting on BoardGameGeek:

I (currently) have not provided a playable map image (the posted images are deliberately too small). The online rules are maintained at the latest version (don’t worry if they look like crap in Acrobat, they print beautifully). Within some limits I’m willing to send printable map images to interested folk. You’ll need to provide perspex and pens, shares (I’ve posted share images; I use glass bits) and income/action/etc markers (I use 1cm cubes from an educational store). As always, YMMV. As a game Muck & Brass is roughly in the middle of the set formed by Wabash Cannonball, Pampas Railroads, and West Riding/The Riding Series and yet is little like any of them. It bears little similarity to the rest of the Historic Railroads series after Wabash Cannonball (Preußische Ostbahn, Gulf, Mobile & Ohio etc).

What you’ll need

To produce a working copy of the game you’ll need:

• A copy of the rules. The fonts may appear poor on-screen due to bugs in your PDF viewer. Don’t worry about it as it will print beautifully.
• To print the map. Contact me to ask for a copy of the image file. Be persuasive. I print it on 24”x12” paper. You can also split it over several smaller sheets. Whatever works for you. Problems in getting a good print, paper, printers, scaling etc are your own. Really.
• To print the income track.
• ~30 shares in each of 10 colours. 3 of them should be market shares, the rest merger shares. I cheat and use glass blobs and don’t visibly distinguish between market and merger shares. I could as easily use the same 1cm cubes I use for the income markers etc below and likely will in future. If that doesn’t work for you I’ve produced PDF share images which can be used instead (I wouldn’t and don’t bother). Print three pages of each share onto coloured construction paper (see your local office supply store). They are sized to fit well in penny sleeve card protectors.
• BGR shares PDF
• CR shares PDF
• EUR shares PDF
• GWR shares PDF
• LBSCR shares PDF
• LMR shares PDF
• LNWR shares PDF
• LSR shares PDF
• NER shares PDF
• SWR shares PDF
• Track markers, ~50 in each of 10 colours (same colours as the shares). Settlers-of-Catan road markers are ideal or you can just use wet-erase pens and put the game map under a sheet of perspex when playing as I do here. As wet ease pens come in only 6 colours, either hatch the rail lines when you run out of colours (yet to happen here) or have the merged company used the darkest of the merge-company pen colours and quickly scribble the previously built track in the new colour to free up the other pen colours (ie what I do).
• Income markers, one in each of 10 colours, ideally the same colours as the shares (I use 1cm cubes from an educational supply store).
• Action markers (I use 1cm cubes again). They can be different colours or all the same. You could also use cards or tiles instead. It really doesn’t matter as long as the distribution is right and you track the durations properly
• 3 Capitalise (3 months)
• 5 Develop (1 month)
• 7 Expand (2 months)
• Player markers each of 3-6 colours (however many players you have) for the player action track. Again I use 1cm cubes.
• Money, lots of it. I use poker chips. I haven’t formally estimated bank size but $7,000 should work comfortably.
• A General Dividend marker. I simply scribble with a wet erase pen on the the map as each one is paid. You could also use a marker if that works better for you.

Feeback

I’ve not figured out how I’d best like feedback. I’ve no privacy bones. Email or comments here on the blog are likely best. I’ll work out something.

Enjoy.