Rails Across America

I'm about to take the game up to GameStorm in Portland in hopes of getting some more live playtests in. The board is about 22"x30", and to date I've been making boards by printing out nine sheets of 8.5x11" paper and trimming them and taping them together. This works fine at home, and is cheap and quick. But for travel, a rolled-up poster-size paper board isn't so hot. It gets battered, and it wants to curl instead of lying flat, and it's hard to transport (even in a cardboard tube, it doesn't stack or pack well).

So this weekend I tried something I've never done before: I made a quad-fold board. This was an experiment; if it worked I'd have a board that would pack safely in a cardboard box ("just like a real game!"). Fortunately my goal was not to make a professional-looking product; I just wanted something flat, transportable, and semi-durable.

So I went down to Michael's and bought a couple of sheets of 20x30" foam-core posterboard. The astute observer will note that this is smaller than my board size by 2 inches in one dimension, which annoyed the daylights out of me, but there were no larger sizes. Fortunately my board image has plenty of nice-looking but inessential border space; I was able to trim down the extra width without sacrificing functionality or distorting the geometry. But it's not as pretty, alas. (Note to self: in future, design prototype boards to be 20"x30" or smaller.)

A while back I had bought a can of Elmer's spray-on adhesive. I printed out my latest board image and trimmed the pages, sprayed the backs, then applied them to the foam-core. This didn't go well. Turns out the Elmer's is more tacky than sticky, and I didn't get a good bond. Also I didn't manage to get the central sheet down quite straight, so the whole board image is slightly cock-eyed on the foam-core. (I knew that would be a problem, and sure enough, it was. I had measured and marked carefully but still screwed it up. I'm a klutz.)

When it was all done, the corners of the sheets really wanted to come loose and curl up. I used Elmer's white glue to stick them down firmly. This contributed to the ugliness because the glue dampened the paper and made it ripple; but at least it stayed down after that.

The next step was to cut the board. Helen has a really nice straight-edge cutter, which I completely forgot about when making my initial cuts. Instead I used a rather dull X-Acto knife and a ruler, with messy results. Helen stopped me at that point and got the cutter for me, which made the rest of the job really clean and nice.

Foam-core board is a sandwich of styrofoam and thick glossy card stock. You can draw or glue artwork to the card stock, and the foam provides stiffness and thickness. I made a longitudinal cut down the middle of the board, not quite all the way through the foam, so that the artwork and foam were cut but not the cardstock on the back. Then I deepened the cut for half of its length, to cut completely through the board and both layers of cardstock. I turned the board face-down and cut the backside at right angles to the first cut, this time not cutting the cardstock and artwork.

Here's a rough diagram:

+--------------+-------------+
+              |             +
+              |             +
+--------------+=============+
+              |             +
+              |             +
+--------------+-------------+

The cross in the middle is where I cut. The horizontal cuts are made from the top (graphics side) of the board: ----- is half-deep, while ===== cuts all the way through the entire boards. The vertical cut | is made from the underside of the board, and is half-deep. The result is a board that bends down at the left-horizontal cut, and up at the vertical cut, allowing the board to be folded to one-quarter of its unfolded size.

And this part, thankfully, worked well (especially after Helen gave me the cutter). The final result is not gorgeous, but it is fully functional. The board and all other bits fit nicely into a flattish cardboard box for packing and transporting.

The next time I do this, it will go better. I'll use a different glue, take more care about positioning the pages on the foam-core board, have my artwork ready at 20"x30", and use the good cutter. I'm convinced that a pretty nice-looking and fairly durable prototype board can be made using this method. It's cheap (the foam-core is about $5) and quick to make.

(Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention: my silly indecision about a name continues, but this board is labeled Hammer and Spike and I'll (probably) stick with that. No name makes everybody happy, but I have to call it something, and I'm getting tired of calling it the "Nameless Rail Game." A certain (former) friend's suggestion to call it "Rickety Rails" was rejected outright.)

Next stop: GameStorm!

Recently the game got its first live playtest, and I was pleased to see that it went well. The best news was that all players thought it was a very good game, and needed only a few "little tweaks" to be considered done. I know better; no game is "done" after just one playtest. I expect to be adjusting and tuning things for months to come. But no one thought the game was boring, so that's good news.

It may run a bit long. Certainly the session went way too long; but most of the players were game designers themselves (and all were experienced gamers), so there were frequent pauses to discuss the design and its problems and to brainstorm possible solutions. I am looking for ways to shorten the time a bit, but only more playtesting will tell me how long it really takes to play. And (more good news) I was actually the only one who felt that the session took too long; the other players disagreed.

I am learning the difference between designing a game and developing a game. Part of development is this process of playing the game again and again, making changes, and seeing how they change the play. This design went from an early vague notion to an initial set of rules I called "Straw Man 1". After many solo playtests and a lot of computer simulations, I progressed up through "Straw Man 6". At this point I thought it was worth showing to other people; also I felt that I could not make more progress without seeing some live playtests. The version that got tested was dubbed "Tin Man 1" (because tin is more solid than straw). I am now working on "Tin Man 2", looking for ways to address the concerns my playtesters found. I hope to take Tin Man 2 to a local Games Day soon, and to a couple of conventions (GameStorm in Portland, and KublaCon in Burlingame near San Francisco) over the next few months. When some future version starts surviving playtests without needing more changes, it will become "Steel Man 1" and I'll start to feel like it's getting close to done.

I may make Tin Man 2 available to selected people as a set of downloadable build-it-yourself PDF files. Making a copy is mostly a matter of printing out the board and a few player aids, and then scrounging bits from other games or your generic prototyping supplies. But I want to settle the TM2 rules a bit more, and then I'll have to rewrite the rules and rework the player aids before putting it all out there.

And finally... I may have settled on a name. I am leaning toward calling it "Silver Rails". It's short, memorable, and evocative. It lends itself to expansions: "Silver Rails: Britain", "Silver Rails: Podunk", and so on. (Yes, I know it's the height of hubris to be planning for expansions when I don't even have a finished original. Hubris is fun!) I was avoiding the whole "Placename Rails" name format because most of the crayon rail games use it; but "Silver" is not a placename, so I don't think there's a problem.

More discussion is available at my blog.

A couple of recent additions to the game seem to have really improved it. I am now thinking of trying a live playtest sometime soon.

Here's what's new:

In the original version, every town and city had a fixed color, which (as in Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon) indicates which color of Good can be delivered there. This is still true of the towns, but the six Cities are now large circles that show four "pie slices", each slice in a different color (like a pie chart with four equal segments). Each has a "City Cam" placed over it: essentially a cardboard circle with one pie slice chopped out of it, so that only one of a City's four colors shows through the slice. The visible color is the City's current delivery color; each time a Good is delivered, the Cam rotates clockwise to show the next color.

In other words, deliveries to each City have to rotate through the colors: red, yellow, green, blue, then back to red again. This adds player interaction, because making a delivery to a City might give a new potential delivery to another player, or it might take one away. Players get bonus VPs (in addition to the usual cash payoff) for City-to-City deliveries, so messing with the City Cams is an important tactic, and you need to be aware of what deliveries your opponents may be trying to set up.

Players can build Switchyards in Cities. To do this, you must first deliver at least one Good of each color to a City (so again you must watch the City Cam carefully), and then pay a large amount of money. Switchyards pay off handsomely in VPs if you can build them, but only one may be built per City, so players are also competing for those opportunities.

More recently I've limited the distance that goods can be delivered, in two ways. Your Locomotive Level is one limit: unlike AoS or RRT, this is a limit on how much money you can make from a delivery, rather than the number of links you can traverse. (In this game, some links pay off more money than other links.) Raising your Loco Level costs money and an action.

The other limit is link-based: you can deliver no farther than 3 links without refueling your (invisible, virtual) train. Trains refuel at Stations which the players must build, and must occasionally restock with more fuel. You can refuel at your own Stations for free, and at other players' Stations by paying a small but significant amount to the owner. Depleting a Station's fuel supply is another way to mess with your opponents, because it requires an action and some money to resupply your Stations, and a suddenly-empty Station may cut off a long delivery that an opponent was expecting to make.

Stations are necessary for long, high-paying deliveries, and especially for Coast-to-Coast deliveries which also offer bonus VPs. But they cost money to build and to refuel, so timing and placement is critical. (I'm still tuning this feature for best effect.)

My solo playtests seem to show good player interaction and at least some interesting and/or difficult decisions. I hope that a bit more tuning will result in a game I won't be ashamed to expose to playtesters.

Oh, and I still need a new name for it!

Nando recently asked me for an update, so here it is. The simulator has been very useful, and very illuminating. It's helped me to settle on a number of different tunable parameters, and helped me adjust the map so that it provides a reasonably balanced four-player game.

The bad news is that it's also shown that the game is seriously unbalanced for three and five players, and the only way to fix it is by redrawing the map. I fear that the game will need a different map for each number of players I want to support. That kinda sucks.

If I'm lucky, I may get away with a two-sided board: four-player on one side, five-player on the other, and a designated subset of the five-player board for three players.

Those interested can read a bit more detail in my blog.

My other concern is that the game is simply too unoriginal. It's not exactly like any other game, but it's still a fairly generic build-network-make-deliveries train game. I hope to hold some real-live-people playtests soon, and I can ask the players what they think. If they're unimpressed, I may drop the project.

I've played several simulated multi-player games now, each time with a different scoring system, to see how they play out. The latest was the best yet, and seemed to produce an entertaining and competitive game.

The major changes were:

* Removed the scoring for connecting major cities.
* Changed the way in which Railroad Stations are scored.
* Added "Goal Cards".

Railroad Stations are now scored similarly to the way that connections to major cities were: the more you have, the more each new one is worth. There is a limit of two stations per major city, so there is still tension in deciding whether to build now, or wait until it might be cheaper.

Goal Cards are similar to some of the Operations cards in Railroad Tycoon: each specifies a goal to be achieved, and a VP reward for achieving it. But they work more like the Public Objectives in Twilight Imperium 3: any player can score any goal at any time, no matter who else has already scored that goal. Only some of the Goal Cards are used in any game, so each game is different.

Although there are no longer built-in rewards simply for connecting major cities, most of the goal cards specify connections, some specifically (e.g. "New York to Los Angeles") and some more generally ("any four green towns"). Some of these do allow scoring for connecting certain major cities.

I suspect that there is an advantage for the players who start in the west. The connections there are more expensive, but pay off better: and you pay for them only once, but profit from deliveries many times. That may require tuning.

If I can convince myself that this isn't too much of a Railroad Tycoon clone, there might be a game here.