Investment/Rail game

The money is just for buying shares. You're bidding with employees which is a fixed aspect of the railroad. I haven't decided if it will be the same for all the railroads or what that number will be.

The winner will be the person with the most money at the end (including shares at the current market value).

I don't know yet :). It could be when a person has a certain amount of money, or I might include special cards in the deliveries deck (like taxes or special bonuses for certain rail lines), and after x number of those cards come up, the game ends.

I mentioned the Big Cheese to make it easier for someone familer with the game to know what I was talking about and then I tried to explain it.

The Big Cheese has one great mechanic, but then there's nothing more to the game besides that mechanic. The way it works is you're a VP at a company running a department with 10 employees. You're bidding on projects (from a deck of cards turned up one at a time) that you want your department to do, and your bids are to allocate that number of employees to the project. If you win the bid, you put the employees on that project card so they're not available to bid again. Then you remove one employee per turn (thematically, there's less work to do as the project progresses), so it's available again for bidding. When you remove the last employee the project is complete and at that point you get credit for it. The projects have different point values and involve a die roll so when you're bidding you don't know exactly what you'll end up with.

What seems to be going out on a limb is that the "players" are the rail lines, and the human players are buying the right to control one or more of the "players".

I like the way players can get some points for another players work by being a minority shareholder and having their stock go up.

The different deliveries will have different payoffs, so you'll want to bid more for higher payoff ones, but if you wait for the big ones, you opponents will clean up on the little ones and if they only bid a few employees on each one they'll have the back in a few turns when the big one comes up.

There will have to be some reason to bid with one line over another. When a person controls more than one rail line, they'll have multiple sets of workers which might let them dominate too much.

Jason

As I said, I did abstract away the track laying aspect. I'm glad you agree this was the right move. Tracklaying has been done very well already.

I think it's unlikely at this point in my "career" as a game designer that I'll come up with a truly novel mechanic, so I think it's best if I borrow other mechanics that have been tried and tested and concentrate on getting them to work together. Even if I do invent my own mechanic, chances are someone's already done it and worked out the kinks, so I'm better off knowing where the mechanics come from so I can take advantage of using a version with the kinks worked out.

I agree, which is why I'm asking for input so early in the design :).

Between stock certificates and delivery cards, even a scaled down prototype will probably need at least 100 cards, which will be a lot of work. The input I get here will help make that first prototype better.

These ideas both sound good. Besides what you said about the land speculation, the Big Cheese mechanic could be used to buy the Race Horses/Dogs, and they could have attributes about how many dice you get to throw for them in a race each turn, like 2d6 or d10. You get VPs for how well each of your animals performs.

Jason

I was thinking of the training, so when all the trainers are removed, it's ready to race.

I think you're right, it's just that you did a good job summing up the land spec game and the animal one does have some potential.

I also missed the concept that you're buying shares in a relitively small amount of land instead of entirely owning a large number of plots of land. I like your way better. It seems to have a lot of potential, but it will also be hard to develop

Jason

As Scurra said, the person with the most shares isn't necessarily the CEO either. Call it thematic license :)

I'd certainly be willing to work together on the idea.

I've been thinking a lot about using money to hire more workers. It makes sense that players should be able to, but it would help a leader run away with the game.

There should be something in place to prevent the strategy from degenerating into accumulating as much stock as possible (such as a tax on each share owned that comes up from time to time).

Jason

You're right, I hadn't considered that. I was considering the theme to be of secondary importance, but this is a good example of why that's a poor design tactic.

I don't think that's a good solution; it puts you in a situation where it's bad to have workers available to do work; or not spend all your resources. I also don't see how this solves the problem in the first place; it still takes longer to finish a job if you throw more people at it, only now you have more incentive to do that.

Also thematically, you have to pay more to keep your workers idle than to have them do work. I'm not sure this would be better than (more workers) = (job is finished slower).

It also seems like play would be very complex (do you try to keep all your workers occupied by bidding high, or try and keep them available so you can be working on a lot of projects at once, but get nailed by lots of upkeep payments?) But that might not necessarily be a bad thing, especially if we can balance the upkeep amount well enough.

We could also have a use it or lose it situation, where you can hire additional workers, but if you leave workers idle they get bored, so a certain percentage of your idle workforce quits each turn. The hiring process should be difficult enough that this is a bad thing.

That could work, but it doesn't really relate to this issue. We could change the Big Cheese mechanic so that the length of time to complete a job is printed on that job card, and it's constant regardless of how many workers are working on the job. When that much time elapses, all the workers are released. That does break some of the elegance of the mechanic though, because now you need to add something to keep track of how much time has elapsed.

I just took it to be an fairly abstract game and didn't even think about it that way. It does make the theme of the game a lot better to look at it like that. :)

All I knew about One False Step was what's on the cheapass site. I just a read a review on BGG. It sounds like you're bidding for control of a city, and the higher the bid, the longer it takes for the city to come under your control (by the BC mechanic). The review doesn't say what you're bidding, but presumably it's not workers, so it doesn't help us with the worker mechanic.

It does raise an interesting new point though. The workers are a hold over from my original train themed game. Now we're talking about building improvements on properties (I think). So we can change the theme a little so we're bidding some resource.

If we now have a fixed number of workers doing the job, regardless of the bid, and we're bidding tons of concrete (for example), the workers can only handle one ton of concrete per turn, so the mechanic will work as far as higher bid takes longer to complete. Thematically we're bidding to produce more grandiose structures on the property, which will need more concrete (and take more time).

The problem with this is that there's no reason you should get back the concrete after using it on the building. We could say there's a warehouse with a fixed amount of space and a certain amount of the space gets allocated for the job (we can't leave it on site in case it rains or gets stolen). This is weak too though because if we're so good at refilling the warehouse instantly, why do we have to pre-allocate all the concrete needed for the job?

Sorry if this is a bit rambling; I'm trying to brainstorm and just throwing random ideas in the air.

Jason

Isn't a Dutch Auction a way of selling multiple items to the highest bidders?

You blind bidding idea sounds like it could work very well, but it will change the playability quite a bit from a regular auction. The alternative is to just ignore the thematic problem Seth pointed out and concentrate on game play even if there are holes in the theme. The best way to tell which is the best thing to do is probably to playtest both.

There's also the issue of being encouraged to have most of your bidding resources tied up instead of wanting to keep them free for the next auction. It all comes down to whether the penalty for idle workers is small enough to just ignore it and bid 1 for every auction or severe enough that it's more important to concentrate on minimizing your idle workers than playing the game.

Jason

I thought it would be more like you bid as much as you like, and if you have the high bid, you win the job (we're still talking about The Big Cheese here).

I'm pretty sure it goes as you've described it you keep bidding until nobody wants to raise it.

I misunderstood that before. I thought we were still bidding higher.

Because of the way I misunderstood it, I thought it would be possible to win with a final "low" bid of 10 because you were bidding up, the last bid must still win; therefore should only be allowed to increase by 1. To me, it followed from incorrect starting assumptions.

So maybe the "low bid" thing won't work after all, unless maybe there's some penalty to pay when you win a bid (you pay something per worker not assigned to the job). That might make it so you want to bid higher (cause you can't afford not to). But this is making less and less sense.

This is exactly what I was getting at. It becomes a trade off of minimizing your penalty while maximizing your workers available to win other bids. I think the game falls apart at that point and it just won't be fun.

At this point, that's what seems to be the way to go, but after this thread of conversation, I'm not very satisfied with it any more.

Jason