And the eyes have it

The art needs some cleaning but is functional. Unfortunately I’m running into problems with Inkscape: bringing up the fill tools is taking the better part of 20 minutes while it spins on sbrk(). Gahh. Hand editing SVGs with a text editor is not my definition of fun. Heck, I’m not fond of XML at the best of times.

Things to note:

• Yeah, the number of routes and islands has changed again and probably not for the last time

• The Market Development Chart is sized per island, one less box than there are routes to the island

• I don’t like the numbers on the nodes, but they’re functional. The other choices are:

a) Use names on the islands and on the Market Development Chart. I think this would be visually confusing and a royal pain in the arse to correlate between the map and the chart

b) Embed the Market Development Chart on the board with a track of markets beside every island. Long term I think this is the better choice but it is also the more graphically complex and busy – especially since I’ve not yet decided on what bits I’ll be using for the prototype. Until the game settles down I think I’ll stick with the charts.

• The Proa Track goes to 9. I still figure that 7 is the maximum but I want freedom to experiment. End-to-end on the map is 11. It is possible albeit unlikely that goods at either end will be unable to be delivered. Thus the deadlock rule for the game ending (which I’m not entirely happy with).

• Yeah, six places on the turn order track. They’d have to be insane, or at least not me, which is pretty much the same thing. This is clearly not a six player game.

It is tempting to toss the Kitoum Track and Score Track and just use tokens/poker chips for tracking each much like the equally useless money in Stephenson’s Rocket. Zero effective difference of course other than perception, but that approach may please the people who like Hidden Trackable Information.