Selling a shared foreigner

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.