Smelting for copper

Four of us had a go at Muck & Brass with the new action system this afternoon. In short, it was wonderful, really wonderful and far less unstable than the earlier version. Early conclusions:

• It was more intuitive to describe the action system in terms of days than points. Actions take days (time) and the players take turns in the order in which they are available
• Ending on 7 days or two exhausted actions is too rich. It wasn’t terrible but we always ended on actions rather than points. 5 days may be too short but it is clearly either 5 or 6 days
• The secondary companies are odd. Simply, odd. It is tempting to have them float on one share, but that feels too large a change for their modest oddity. I’m not sure they need to be addressed but it is tempting
• The Foreign ports are probably over-priced by ~30%
• 3 Capitalisations, 5 Develops and 7 Expansions seems right
• The requirement for London to be the most valuable city forces the early game into an expansion frenzy. This is good, but I’d forgotten it in my earlier thought cases.
• One player strongly disliked the action/time track being way from the geographic map. That’s easy enough to fix.

In all, an excellent outing.