Decomposition of Change

I’ve been solo-playing Muck & Brass, 4 games so far. This has revealed several problems and addresses:

1. Leaving acquired-company track in place after a merger is confusing. It is very hard to tell which merged company has track where, especially after the 4th or 5th merger.
   • Address: After an acquisition replace all acuired track with the acquiring company’s track. I’d avoided this solution previously as overly fiddly and requiring of large numbers of track bits for each company (30-40), but I’ve reversed that view. The confusion is much worse.
2. Too much money in the game. Final scores after the first game were $500+ for all players. Given that the players start with $45 this growth rate is excessive.
   • Address: Increase track building prices to $10 for a single and $30 for a double build. Also change all dividends to round down (truncate). Subsequent games have borne this out as a sufficient and accurate change.
3. Companies were too rich. Several companies ended the game with several hundred dollars in their treasuries. Additionally all foreign ports were built. All of them.
   • Address: Double all foreign port prices. Subsequent play tests suggest this was excessive when combined with the increased building costs. I’ve now reduced the price increase to about 40% which seems about right but I’ve not played with it yet.
4. Development was too weak and never chosen after the early mid-game. This was caused by two factors: one mergers are SO much more profitable that development is ignored, and two, once past the mid-game companies are sol diluted that development raises income too slowly to affect noticeably dividends.
   • Address: Increase the power of development so that two locations that are connected by the same company are developed per turn. Untested.
5. Dividends for merged companies (remainders going to treasury were too fiddly.
   • Address: All dividends now round down with remainders discarded. This has play tested well.
6. Overly hard to keep track of what shares are available vs issued.
   • Address: Put bank pool boxes back on the map. This has worked well in play testing.
7. Cash advantage too strong in turn order.
   • Address: Turn order is now from poorest player to cash-richest player. This has worked notably well in play tests and affords and interesting alternating pump strategy of oscillating between high and low cash to profit from each end of the turn order.
8. Hard to remember which company had which colour trakc (when using pens).
   • Address: Add little colour-in boxes to the bank pool boxes to show track colour per company. Possibly a better idea in concept than usage. I’ve not used the boxes.
9. End-game too diffuse and difficult to predict. In part this was from an excess of poorly defined and chosen game ending conditions.
   • Address: New game ending conditions: only one active railway or 7 dividends. That simple. It works.
10. End-game scoring was a pain. Foreign ports were especially annoying.
    • Address: No more end-game scoring. Cash is it. Yep, nice, clean, simple, works.
11. Game ended on 5th dividend. Too fast – not enough control over game-ending. Uninteresting.
    • Address: See above tweaks to game ending conditions. This seems to be enough. I’d like the game to almost invariable end on the 6th ro 7th dividend with the primary question being, Which?. Last night’s game suggest we’re there now.
12. West midlands boring, unviable, too diffuse. Well, its true!
    • Address: Removed Straford-upon-Avon and Northampton. Hey, it works!

The remaining concern is that mergers may simply be too profitable and attractive. I’m not convinced but I’m concerned. In the last game the NER ran over the game, ending the game with 28 shares issued and a final income of $183. Merger mania. Foreign ports are nice, but very expensive. Mergers give safer special dividends that imply less variance in future revenue potential of the shares than foreign ports. I’m very uncertain how or if to address this.