Pavlov, meet the back of my fish!

New rules.

Very early first draft reaction to the playtest (I haven’t calculated how the economies balance — this is the very first draft):

• All leaf nodes removed (recursively). One node added in Papua New Guinea.

• Bases renamed to kahuna

• Kitoum renamed to prestige

• Vocabulary added to the Core Concepts section

• Turn order control through route bidding simplified

• Requirement for connected routes removed

• Island scoring removed

• Explorer tokens removed

• Still have to pay for delivering over another’s route, but they also get resources for the island reached (one per route etc). If they have their kahuna on there the moving player gets a prestige point

• Player giving kula gets one prestige point for giving kula, one if it is a new kula, one if giving to player with kahuna on island, and one per maximal value kula token in kula item (may be too much?)

• Player receiving kula gets half of value of kula in VPs (rounded down) or full value if their kahuna is there

• Kula tokens are 1/4 (fish) and 3/6 (shell) and cost 3/5/8 for small/upgrade/big

• Turn order is reversed in Repeat phase rather than reverse order deliveries.

• Kahuna nee base section rewritten

• Kula and Prestige nee Kitoum section rewritten

That’s a pretty big set of changes. In part I’m going to have to rely on the claiming turn order auction to sock up resource value variances, which is a poor and cheap solution (even if I was relying on it before too). Now to start running the numbers…