Developmentally challenged

First targets for development:

• The route auction may be removed. Most of the time it will be a no-op but I’ve left it in as in a few cases it clearly isn’t a no-op. Are those few cases enough to justify an entire phase for every turn? Frankly, I doubt it…except that when it is needed, such as when a player on initial setup is geared to make (say) 11 VPs plus 4 fish on the first turn of the game (maximal possible opening)… To remove the route auction (which was a hold-over from Lancashire Railways FWLIW), perhaps all that’s needed is an auction for turn order for the first turn and let later turns take care of themselves?

• The special case rules for the cases when players don’t have enough resources or discardable VPs to satisfy the various MUST rules need to be cleaned up and simplified (must explore at least once, must delivery, must buy a proa if can’t delivery, must give kula to bases etc). I expect that I’ll simply disallow deliveries to bases without matching kula, allow proas to be bought for straight VPs without resources, and simply mandate deliveries if possible.

• I already removed the constraint on how many VPs may be discarded per turn. I’ll probably also remove the constraint on kula items having to have both fish and shell kula tokens. The bonus value for shell items is already large.

• The costs for upgrades (5 fish or 3 shells) feel a bit too high. I’m not sure if that’s the real cause, but the game feels lurchy.