Game #8: City Builder

Most of the updates in your version rules help clarify things, but in a few cases, you change a rule in a way I don't want. For example, I don't think overhead should be paid for workers involved in a bid even if they lost. Thematically, it makes sense that the company requesting bids pays for the cost of preparing those bids. Mechanically, it encourages people to bid higher because they don't have the fear that if they don't win the auction they'll have to pay higher upkeep fees so they may as well bid as low as possible to try and guarantee a win.

I've updated my version of the rules with most of the syntactic changes you made. At the very least, mine is formatted nicely :). http://jason.profquotes.com. The summary there is very out of date, it was an aid in creating an early draft of the rules, and now it's just there for archival purporses, so you might want to ignore it and just read the rules.

I have sample cards for all 5 districts more of the contracts. I'd rather have had time to get those on the site before posting, but I'll put that together and work on the district tiles.

Jason

Yep, I've already added that to the rules and cleared up the other questions.

I also agree, the rules should have diagrams. I intend to add them.

I think Jeff was just saying that the calculation needs to be in the rules unambiguously (and now it is), not that I had to explain the ramifications of it.

As I said, the text is cleaned up to address this, I will add the images to the rules, it will just take a day or so. For now, I think everyone knows what the card text means based on what we've posted already, so it's not a huge priority.

Well, here's my intial response after a couple read-throughs ... On a general note, I think you do have a start to an interesting game. The mechanic discussed in such detail regarding how the number of workers bid determined how long the job took isn't even the most interesting part, in my eyes. I think the balance needed between simply getting cash from doing work, and smartly investing in the different stocks is really the thing this game will hang on.

Now on to the detailed stuff ...

Seems the second half of this sentence is unnecessary, since a couple sentences later, you say, "Shuffle the contract cards and place the stack next to the land tiles." This second sentence seems simpler, and since the exact location of the contract deck with regards to the land tiles isn't overly important, I think it should do the job just fine by itself.

I'm sure this will make more sense once an example of the land tiles is available to be seen ... but since that "stock value marker" isn't listed on the components list, nor ever mentioned again in the rules, I'm having a hard time visualizing how it will work.

I think that your idea about replacing the diceroll with a player decision *is* the way to go ... it allows the players to do a number of things: improve their own stocks, screw their neighbor, and determine if the game ends or is extended another turn. I think you should continue to develop that.

One thing I just need to flesh out in my head -- let me know if I stray off track. The fewest workers bid on a job wins it ... and the amount paid out by the job is larger if you use more workers. Also, having more workers on-hand allows you more flexibility in bidding, but is costlier as overhead.

Is it possible to fire all of your workers, never win a bid, and win based upon the money made on stocks?

I think it might be good to see a fictional round or two of the game played out ... it would help me get my brain around the different decision points and possible strategies.

Nice start so far!

-Bryk

Ok, I've read through the rules a bit, and unfortunately, I just don't know how intelligently I can comment on this one. I think I finally understand how the game system works, and I admit that many of my early concerns are indeed dealt with by the rules as they now appear, but I just can't tell whether this game will be fun to play or not. I really think I'd only be able to know via playtesting.

One of my bigger concerns about the game is the bidding system. I'm worried about the "head-game" aspect of blind bidding combined with "in event of a tie, both players lose" kind of effect. This makes the game very rewarding of guesswork, which can be a real turn-off of a mechanic, but in some sense, it does fit the theme, I guess.

I don't like it that you pay overhead after every single bid. I think this will make the game turns feel very repetitive, and that people will go broke very quickly. Moreover, it's not interesting to have a consequence after every bid, since not all players will be (or should be) interested in bidding on every item. It seems like it would make more sense to have 4 contracts up for auction each turn, bid on those one at a time, then have "overhead" costs and removal of workers from contracts, etc.

I'm trying to analyze how the bidding decisions will be made.
Advantages to bidding high: payoff will be higher, will tie up more workers so I don't have to pay upkeep on them. Advantages to bidding low: tie up fewer workers, so I'll have more bidding power, more likely to win bid.

But the problem is, there's no actual rhyme or reason to any of this, because only a unique bid wins. So it isn't just "bid low" or "bid high", it's "bid low, but differently than everyone else". This is different from most bidding games, where the idea is that if you're willing to pay more than everyone else, you can win. Here, the similar idea should be "if you're willing to do the job for less than anyone else, you can win". But it doesn't work that way, in part because of the minimum bid, but also because of the structure of the allocation of workers as the bidding commodity.

I know you like the Big Cheese mechanic, and it may be great, I haven't played, but I really feel that to fit the theme better, there should be two aspects to the building; one should be "I bid to get contracts", in which case low bid wins. But then the next should be "I must acquire workers/resources/whatever, and I must do so in such a way that when I get paid for completing my contract, I'll still make some money". I know you think you have this effect, and maybe you do, but it seems to me that the only sense in which you do is the abstract sense of "workers working on this contract can't be bid on other contracts, thus can't make me money in other places". But since your pay scales linearly with number of workers on the contract, it seems like there's no particular preference for bidding high as opposed to winning many small bids; that winning often is as useful as winning big, and in fact is more likely to succeed because of the "low bid wins".

But again, it all comes back to that tie breaker mechanic, where "lowest unique bid wins". In practice, I just don't think that is going to work. I think you're going to need some more creative tie breaker mechanic, because it makes the whole bidding process such a crap shoot. In blind bidding games, there's some guesswork because you're trying to avoid bidding more than you have to, so you have to guess what others will bid. In this game, though, you are trying to avoid picking the exact same number that everyone else picks. It's not much different from "I'm thinking of a number between one and ten", or at least, not in a way that is interesting.

I think the concept for the game is sound, and the theme is solid. I even think that "low bid wins" can work, since it matches up well with the theme. But I'm very concerned that the game as a whole has some bugs, and I'm not sure if they're big or small. I bet the game could be lots of fun, or not fun at all, and I really can't tell with this one which it is; I think I'd have to play to know. So again, I'd be really interested in hearing how your playtests go, I think that will answer a lot of questions for you and hopefully will show that most of the concerns I have are totally unfounded.

Either way, kudos for a compact and simple game with some interesting ideas, in spite of my concerns about the actual gameplay.

Good luck with your design!

-Jeff

Is being different from other bidding games really a bad thing? We hope that rather than "no rhyme or reason" this game will simply have "different rhyme and reason" to the bidding.

Being different isn't necessarily bad, although being "different just for the sake of being different" usually is. The point is, standard bidding games cause you to think along the lines of "how much am I willing to pay for this?" Your game about bidding for contracts is obviously going to be a little different. To me, it should cause you to think along the lines of "how much can I take in and still make money on the job?" But it doesn't do that at all. In fact, it's a game of psychology -- "what number can I bid such that no one else will bid that exact number, and everyone lower will be tied?" So I think the biggest problem I have right now is the tie breaker. It will indeed have a "different rhyme and reason", but I bet a player choosing his bids randomly will do as well in the game as someone who's really trying to bid intelligently (try it and see!). I really think your tiebreaker is the chief culprit, and I'm pretty sure it renders the bidding equivalent to "I'm thinking of a number...".

I also think that while it's obvious you want to use this mechanic from "the Big Cheese", the fact that you're bidding small quantities makes ties incredibly more likely, which also makes the tie breaker more important. If you were bidding thousands of dollars, then someone could bid "15200" and somone else could bid "16000" and the chance of ties would be way down. But because you're bidding workers, it won't work that way.

I think the pay needs to not scale linearly...

Me too.

I agree, and I agree that it remains to be seen if the way we're approaching it will work. I suppose we could use other suggestions on how to make a "bid low" auction work... Do you have any suggestions for alternatives?

Again, I think you should try what you have before pulling up the rug, but if I were going to make a game about bidding for construction contracts, it would work like this (and I may have said this). First, there would be an auction phase where you place a "sealed bid" on the contracts you want. (this could be a closed-fist auction, like what you have). The amount you bid is the amount you'll be paid, either immediately, or when you complete the job. In the next stage, you must pay money to acquire resources/workers/whatever. Maybe it's a second auction, where some workers are more resourceful than others and you want to get the best ones, but want to get them for cheap. Maybe this one is a traditional auction, so that to get the best workers, you probably will have to pay more, but they'll get more of the job done quickly. Maybe each job is characterized by a "size of the job", represented by X cubes that are placed on the card, and when the cubes are gone, the job is done and pays out. So each worker removes a different number of cubes from the job, and you want to acquire the workers who remove the most cubes.

This is just a rough sketch, the point is, it divorces the two kinds of bidding. The first kind is "how much will I get paid". The second concerns "how cheaply can I do the job, such that when I get paid, I'll turn a profit?"

Again, this is a very different game than what you're talking about, but I think it's more thematic, and also makes your "bid low" auction more interesting.

It seems like most people don't like the tie goes to the next highest bidder mechanic, but I can't think of an alternative, and I haven't seen any suggestions. Based on how strong the opposition is, I'd be happy to change the mechanic, but to what?

I think if it's open bidding, it will just degenerate to the someone winning with the smallest possible bid every time. No matter what I do to influence higher bidding, everyone will have the same costs associated with bidding so the minimum possible profitable bid will be the same for everyone, so why not bid it?

Also, in this game, blind bidding fits in with the theme better.

Tai Pan is a game that uses blind bidding (though a normal high bid wins), and the tie-breaker mechanic is a die-roll. It seems like my tie-breaker is better and less arbitrary than that.

I like the fact that if you win with a less likely, but higher bid, you'll have to wait a bit longer for your payoff. What are you suggesting to replace it? The player gets his workers back instantly or after a fixed amount of time, and the player gets paid at the beginning or end if he doesn't get the workers back instantly. None of those sound good to me.

The way to keep overheads low is to fire most of your works, and with a low bid system where you don't even have to tie up your workers on bids. If we have that rule, that will be the only viable strategy.

The problem with introducing liability is that it will very likely be a random mechanic. So perhaps once everyone has taken their turn and set up a building, a “liability card” can be drawn that affects everyone who has fewer than the number of workers listed on the card. In order to fix the problem, the player will have to pay the amount indicated on the card, or abandon the project. This means that players can make other players bid too few workers, causing their projects to have too many problems to be profitable.

I'm uncomfortable with introducing another random element. What sort of liabilities would the card have? Pay $X to complete your project?

For one thing, without stocks, it would just be an inferior version of the original big cheese game.

The stock market was intended to be one of the main points of the game. It lets players make a profit from someone elses sucess.

My original plan was to introduce a stock element to the big cheese, everything else evolved from that. The Investment/Rail thread is a nice summary of that evolution.

...[snip]...

Okay, so I'm petering out towards the end. But you get the idea... you're encouraged to build districts that complement each other. This is why I would suggest everybody filling out their own board for this; otherwise, bloodthirsty play would cause sewage plants built next to houses, and while I can’t say that doesn’t happen IRL, I’m not sure that’s what you’re shooting for here. Having lots of money also helps with VPs, but may not win the game by itself. Still, it’s another path to victory.

That does sound very good. I've never played princes of florence so I don't know how similar that would be. It does seem like your idea would be a major change of direction for the game, but it might be good. For one thing, a high-bid mechanic would work because now you're trying to entice those projects to build on your land instead of simply trying to build them.

I like that idea, but it wouldn't be the same game at all.

Jason

Any building game starts to resemble other games of the same type (my own "Planning Permission" game has quite a few aspects in common with this design now, which it didn't at the start!)

I reckon that some sort of Dutch Auction system ought to be possible for this game, although figuring out how to implement it would be tough (even Merchants of Amsterdam requires a mechanical device!) But it would seem to be the ideal mechanic for this game; a contract is offered at so many workers, and if no-one takes it then the number of workers is reduced by one and this continues until someone accepts it. As I say, I can't see a game mechanic that would make it work though.

FYI, just found a game on BoardGameGeek that uses a "low bidder wins" auction style. It's very different from your game in every way, but check it out if interested in seeing another implementation of low bid winning the auction:

The game is called "Ponte Vecchio":

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/viewitem.php3?gameid=324

There's a lot of good ideas there. It sounds like it's worth another playtest.

This is very good. One of the problems I had with my original idea even when I thought it was going to work out was it seemed a bit too light for my tastes (there's nothing wrong with a lighter game, but I prefer some heavier strategy). Multiple resources would require more planning of how to allocate your cash resource.

If there are 3 bids for $1 and I bid $5, do I get 2 resources because I'm the second lowest bid, or 4 because there's 3 bids at lower values than mine?

This mechanic also means it's easy to get a small amount of resources; you always get something unless you bid 0, and it's virtually impossible to embargo another player.

On the flip side of that coin, it's very difficult to get a large amount of a resource; no matter how high you bid, you'll only get at most 1 for each player in the game.

I'd suggest having tiles for each resource type. At the beginning of this phase, we randomly take a certain number of them (which resource is on each tile is random) and place them face down, so it's known how many they are but not how many of each resource.

Then the highest bidder can take as many as he wants (including all of them) but his bid price is for *each* tile he takes. If there are any left, the second highest can take as many as he wants at his price and so on down as long as any resources remain.

Before selecting which tiles to take, the player may look at all the tiles and choose which ones he wants. The other players don't see the tiles until it's their turn to take some.

This sounds good, but after my playtests of citybuilder, I'm not sure about the lowest unique bid mechanic.

I like the resource trading idea. The allocation sounds workable but too automatic. You allocate resources to finish the most nearly done project as quickly as possible.

This is an interesting idea, but it seems like it would decrese the possibility for planning and strategy and make your actions a lot more forced.

Or just have some random event (like the robber in settlers) to discourage hoarding.

Overall, there's a lot of great ideas here, and it's definately worth another playtest.

Thanks for brining up the game with your friend.

Jason