Hello everyone. This is my first post on the forum. I've been working on a few games in parrallel, all at varying points in their progression. One game I've been working on in the for the past five months or so is a game about manufacturing widgets. In this game player balance when to invest in machinery, how to run those machines, how to ship the products, when to hire employees, and how much to sell those products for (with a blind bid against other players). Players balance these descisions against increasing demand and a lowering market prices.
The issue i'm running into is how players keep track of their profits (money). Currently, a turn takes about 20 seconds but it takes a player about another 35 seconds to add up how much money they spent. This makes the game much less fun. I've tried having tokens with a money value on them (red or green depending on if you have lost or made money) and players discard them (or take them in the case the player has less than $0) as each part of the turn is played. However, I find that because there are so many things that cost money each turn that it becomes equally not fun. I had the thought of attempting track progess in a way other than money but am not sure what the best way to do that might be. The thought I had is to add a sort of progress track and try to simplify the transactions. For example shipping costs by rail are currently $1 per unit where shipping by air is $3 per unit. These would simply turn into moving up or down 1 to 3 spaces on a progress track regardless of the number of units. This would also encourage players to take more risks and attempt to produce units faster to reduce shipping costs. My fear is that something like this will take away from the realism and turn players away.
Does anyone have any thoughts on better ways to do things? I realize it may be difficult to help without a better understanding of the game but thank you nontheless. The end solution may be to simplify the game more than I would like but I'm exploring my options.
~Alum
Thanks for in input Orangebeard,
I think spreading the costs out and segmenting the play into phases could be the way to go. Each player takes a turn choose what investments they would make, followed by each player producing / shipping units etc. The reason I am currently using different colored tokens instead of play money is because I would like players to be able to have negative money, representing an investment. Additionally, a money tracker may may be good for things like fixed costs. Since these are going to occure every turn and change less than other costs, it could be used as a reference and a time saver. Thanks again for the great feedback.