The current merger rules for pre-connected home stations (see below) are backwards. The merger companies were the agglomerates. The GWR (for instance) was a merger of many other smaller railway companies, as was the LNWR the NER, etc. They also (obviously) started later than the companies they acquired.

Thus, I’m reversing the direction of share flow for mergers. If a merger company’s home station is connected when it starts, all the connected railways merge into the merger company (which makes a sort of historical sense), and then the merger company pays out a special dividend. Of course this makes no difference in terms of where the money goes and how much of it, but it does make better thematic and historical sense. It also makes the game slightly cheaper to produce as less merger shares will be needed for the initial companies.

Good progress today. I’ve finally a full working draft of the rules, complete with all companies (initially) historically researched and specified, and the text for the actions even makes some sense.

Next is polishing and bringing the map up to date followed by a good bit of number crunching simulation and analysis. Ah, the joys of abstract game design. But for now it is time to go off and watch some Anime. Blue Seed, Junkers Come Here or Voices of a Distant Star?

A working concept for mergers:

When a company connects to another active company’s home station the two companies merge. A merged company may have several home stations. The company that built the track will be acquired and will merge into the other company.

1. The acquired company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)

2. Each player’s shares in the acquired company are replaced 1:1 with shares from the new parent company. Shares are initially taken from the bank pool of the acquiring company, then shares from the merger supply for that company

3. The acquired company’s income is added to the acquiring company’s income, and the acquired company’s marker is removed from the income track

4. Any unbuilt track markers for the acquired company are added to the acquiring company’s supply

After the merger is resolved the active player selects an inactive minor company to start. The new minor company’s home station will either still be unconnected or be connected by track from one or more companies.

Starting a minor company whose home station is unconnected by track:

• the share of new minor company is auctioned in the normal manner (see Capitalise) with a minimum bid of $5. After the auction play proceeds in the usual manner.

Starting a minor company whose home station is connected by track:

1. If only one company has built a connection to the home station of the new minor company, then the new minor company is considered to be auto-merged into the connected parent company:
2. The unbuilt track markers for the selected new minor company are added to the acquiring company’s supply and may be built in future starting from its home station (see Expand)
3. A share of parent company is auctioned in the normal manner (see Capitalise). The new share is taken from the company’s merger supply if a share is not available from the bank pool
4. The parent company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)

5. The winner of the newly auctioned share selects the next minor company to start, starting the merger process all over again

6. More than one company has built a connection to the home station of the new minor company, then connected companies are auto-merged and the new minor company is considered to be auto-merged into that parent company:

7. The active player selects one of the connected merging companies to be the new parent. Each player’s shares in the acquired company/companies are replaced 1:1 with shares of the new parent company. Shares are initially taken from the bank pool for the acquiring company, then shares from the merger supply for that company

8. The acquired companies’ income is added to the acquiring company’s income, and the acquired companies’ markers are removed from the income track
9. The unbuilt track markers for the acquired companies are added to the acquiring company’s supply
10. The unbuilt track markers for the selected new minor company are added to the acquiring company’s supply and may be built in future starting from its home station (see Expand)
11. A share of parent company is auctioned in the normal manner (see Capitalise). The new share is taken from the company’s merger supply if a share is not available from the bank pool
12. The parent company pays a Special Dividend (see Dividends)
13. The winner of the newly auctioned share selects the next minor company to start, starting the merger process all over again

If no players bid on a merger auction the auctioning player discards the share into the bank pool and receives the current income of the company divided by the current number of issued shares including the just auctioned share in exchange.

While the wording will undoubtedly be tightened, hopefully it at least makes (non)sense. Without adding a host of special rules about building into secondary company’s home stations, which seemed needlessly complex, this was the simplest pattern which combined player-predictability, (relative) simplicity and (reasonable) transparency while also offering potentially interesting game decisions — especially once they start to chain.

The following escape hatch to the share auction is attractive:

If a player auctions one of their own shares and no players bid, the player may put the share back into the bank pool and receive the current income of the company divided by the current number of issued shares including the just auctioned share in exchange.

What a delightfully nasty and abusive money pump, especially in lower player count games! I fear my auction theory is too weak to predict out all the implications. I should probably spend some time talking it over with with the auction theory guys at Stanford before committing, but I sure like the idea so far.

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.

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.