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Hey everyone, just found this site today and spent the last few fours reading through all the posts. Lots of great stuff here. Anyways, I created a game back when I was just 16 years old. It never got past the planning stages until I was 19. I fine tuned my idea and created a demo which my friends and I played for months. I had a lot of fun working on it but life got in the way and I soon forgot about it again.
A few weeks ago for some odd reason I got the idea in my head to try and remake my game. I have long since lost the demo game I made 12 years ago. But seems it's all still in my head. Over the last week I have managed to recreate the game board and all the rules.
12 years ago communities like this didn't seem to exist, well I never looked but I didn't have internet back then. While my friends loved the game and said it was great, well, that's what friends always say to other friends even if it sucks. So this is why I'm posting this today, I want feedback from people I don't know who love board games and aren't afraid to be blunt in their opinion.
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The game is a city builder. Players move around a city grid, buy land, and build income producing skyscrapers. I know what your thinking, another Monopoly rip off. Well it's similar in the fact that you land on properties, buy them, develop them, and collect rent when other players land on them. But that's where the similarities end. The game board is laid out in a street grid with multiple ways for players to turn. Players can easily avoid landing on your property if you over develop it. This means you have to compete with other property owners on your block to pull in rental income. As properties are developed you will see the city rise up out of the street grid and form a cool looking skyline.
Other game features include paying bills, playing the lotto, and even playing the stock market. I designed the game to be very easy to learn while requiring strategy and planing while playing. Players aren't forced down a predetermined set path.
With all that said, the game still needs lots of work. Even though this is technically the 3rd version of the game, I still consider it a first draft. Follow the link below to see what I have so far. I recommend looking at the game board before reading the directions as it will make more sense. If you have any questions, just ask.
(Link Disclaimer: I'm a horrible speller, you may find spelling errors in the directions, please feel free to point them out so I can fix them. Also, all the art work was done by me in MS Paint so it's not very pretty! Keep in mind I'm no artist and it's a first draft.)
While most everything is print ready and your welcome to print out and play test, I will admit it won't be easy to do. While pawns, dice, and poker chips are easy to come by, you may have a hard time finding buildings. If you have small kids you could steal their legos and use them as a stand in. If you can't play test it I completely understand, it's a lot to work to get all the pieces required.
Please give your honest opinion about it. I would also welcome suggestions on how to improve the design. I'm not easily offended so don't be afraid to be blunt. Just don't be rude =) I have always felt like the game is missing something and I can't put my finger on it.
Ok, I'll rambling, I'll shut up now..
Thanks Mitch, good to be here. I never knew Monopoly had a stock Market add on. I guess I should do some research to make sure I'm not ripping anything off!
One suggestion is to have the rents become independent events. Instead of relying on the luck of dice to force your opponents to pay rent, you could peg the period income from landing on the green S to the amount of property that you control.
Well, having play tested a earlier build of this game I can say it was a lot of fun for me to see what decisions other players make. When one is moving through the city center you basically have the choice after the dice roll to land on one of 3, sometimes 2 properties, that is unless your roll sends you to another type of space like Lotto, Stocks, or a Intersection. This is where strategy comes in, something Monopoly didn't really have.
Once all the properties are sold off and start to be developed it becomes very hard to avoid landing on one, the question is which one. This always leads to interesting trades and partnerships between different players. It's really what I think makes this game so much fun.
The game can take long, but that's not so much related to the time it takes to control blocks, as player trades speed this up as every player is looking to control blocks and it's in everyone's best interest to trade. What tends to drag the game out is the amount of money pouring into the game, this aspect needs to be balanced, more money sinks added ect. This is why the Red $ spaces where added in a earlier version. And there are more negative $ spaces then there are positive. Again, this needs to be rebalanced carefully to fix the "taking forever" problem.
With that said I do like the idea of somehow changing the way the Green $ spaces and the Red $ spaces work depending on how much property you own. That would certainly counterbalance the penalty for overbuilding and add more fun strategy to game play. I never cared for the randomness of it. The question is how would you do that with making the game too complicated? right now the game is very simple to pick up and learn for a new player and I really want to try and keep that.
Due to the potential for excessive paper money handling, you could abstract the income using poker chips.
(Now, you have the potential for excessive chip handling, LOL). Seriously, though, if the poker chips could be used to represent net income, you might find it easier to pay for things in chips. In fact, what if the player were obligated to spend a certain amount of the income each turn, essentially reinvesting in the real estate empire? This would keep the physical money handling to a minimum. Examples of "phantom" transactions:
1. Demolitions of any properties you control
2. Quarterly taxes - landing on the red S is unfair taxation! :)
3. Development on the current space occupied by your piece
4. If you allow players to borrow money from each other - a "book" transfer system might be cool
With rents as independent cashflow events, there is now an incentive to build out your parcels.
Wow, lots of suggestions there, thank you so much much for putting so much time in your post. Well where to start, your money idea. I'm personally not that concerned about the amount of paper money exchanging hands. It is a lot, but adding "phantom" transactions might be moving too far into the complicated game play arena. While I'm sure most members of the community might disagree with me, I think a simple to learn game play is important. I completely agree with some of the problems you mentioned, I just think their is a less complicated way to solve them, we just have not found it yet =) Using chips as currency only replaces one problem with another.
With that said, you mentioned the red $ space being an unfair tax, I completely agree. Changing that and the green $ spaces to work with properties owned is a great suggestion. But again, how to do it...........
I completely agree, that's why I'm here. I know my game has some issues and could be much better. I again thank you for taking the time to respond and I look forward to knocking ideas back and forth.
As far as the scale of the game board goes, it's not really that important. The key important features of the board are the 34 property spaces, allowing for 12 of each building type, the intercity street grid, and the outerloop designed for rapid movement around the board and a money sink. The board layout is something I really like and took a lot of redesigns to get it right. The number of $ spaces still needs to be balanced. And perhaps adding more types of spaces other then stock and Lotto in the intercity grid. I don't know, that might make it too complicated. I need to play test it myself to really figure some of this stuff out.
The board itself I created by endless cutting and pasting in MS Paint. Ya I know, lol. But I'm no artist. A little history on the medians in the city center, they were added after play testing. We found that the streets were too narrow and once the skyline started to rise players kept knocking buildings over while moving there pawns. It was a simple fix and as a bonus made the street grid look nicer. With that said the game board itself needs A LOT of LOVE from a real artist, it's proof of concept more then a finished product. I'm happy with the design, not the look!!