Carcasettlers - My first post here

Welcome to BGDF! I read through your rule set, and it sounds like it could be the start of an interesting game.

I just played the Railways of the World Card Game the other day, and it seems like a straight mix of Railways of the World rules and Ticket to Ride rules, so your approach is in decent company.

I'm not sure I understand exactly how your overlay tiles work - won't that obscure info on the underlying tiles?

I do like the ability to upgrade to a City somehow - though it sounds like in this game you could build a city, then have an opponent take it over (and it sounds like that's largely the point). Could a similar alternative be to simply put a marker under a meeple (or replace a meeple with a different bit), and indicate that that represents collection of an additional resource WHEN COLLECTING RESOURCES? That would maintain the potential for another player to outnumber you and deny you your resources.

Welcome!

You'll have to excuse me for my questions since I don't have the component list, but what are these harvest tokens? Where do they come from? How do they range in value? And how are they assigned? Do they start in play or are they added? At random, in a sequence or by selection? I assume that having a 7 harvest token is better than a 2... so how do you know if your efforts are going to be rewarded or not?

Also, I was wondering whether you think that players will build large resource areas or small ones? Do you envision any cooperation like in Carcassonne or will it only be competitive? Will players work together or will they tend to be isolated? I know that some of the greatest challenges and rewards of Carcassonne come from building the largest city or field possible. Do you think that players will be rewarded by doing this?

As far as suggestions go:

I suggest you ax the 'murder' option. Not only is it a thematic non-starter for a Euro game, it also will make people upset to lose what they have placed. In addition, the move option will function effectively the same way on the turn it is played, but it will create a more complex set of decisions since they will have to figure out where to put it.

I also suggest that you can purchase any number of special cards/tiles on your turn and play any number of special cards/tiles on your turn. At one action a turn, you will find that towards the end players will have more resources than they know what to do with. Plus, multiple plays may allow for greater potential depth in the strategic decision-tree.

First off, I think rcjames was referring not to how 7 is a bigger number than 2 but how 7 is 6 times (right?) more likely to be rolled than a 2.

As for how to involve resources more. I would have more things cost resources. If players have many options of things to build or upgrade on a turn, you're giving them more opportunities to spend.

And here's an idea inspired by your suggestion for how upgrade buildings could work as extra harvest tokens. What if the bag of harvest tokens are only 2s, 3s, 4s, 10s, 11s and 12s. So the best you can draw out of the bag is a 4 or a 10. The buildings could be built with a roll value of 5 or 9 and then be upgraded to 6 or 8 and finally to 7. So every time you upgrade a building you up your odds or rolling it.

So if I am piling on meeples to outmaneuver you for a particular 'resource field', and you are escalating as well, and then the field is completed and the random draw is a 2 (1/36 chance of rolling)- I think we'd both be disappointed to have fought so hard over something that's not that good.

But handing out extra resources I don't think is good. Like Richard said, it will be extra bad for those who lose the competition for most, and it could easily lead to a rich-get-richer scenario, which in general isn't fair or fun.

I do like the idea proposed earlier (by two of us!) that the larger the area, the MORE LIKELY or MORE OFTEN the resource is rolled (by putting more pips in it). So like say the area is 5 tiles big - then you would put 5 pips worth of resource production on it (like a 3 and a 4, or just a 6 or an 8). If it had 1- tiles in it, then maybe you put both a 6 and an 8 on it. This makes larger areas 'better' than smaller ones because they're more likely to pay off.

- Seth

This is certainly a game I'd take a look at. I'd love to see how the "steal a city" mechanic works - would you be able to steal something that's already completed? This would be different from carcassonne, where once its finished its finished, but it would make for some nice cutthroat gameplay if you can steal something that's able to be harvested.

Carcassonne CITY scoring happens only as the city is completed, and you cannot add Meeples after that. However, consider Carcassonne FIELD scoring, which is what this game is using - it's only scored at the end, but the 'control' of any given field (the player who would score for the field if scoring were done right now) could change hands back and forth. I think it's like that, only instead of scoring at the end of the game, any given field could 'score' each turn (after the resource is completed, whatever that means) as its die number comes up.

Upon further reflection, perhaps these 'resources' to which the OP is referring are actually like the cities in Carc. Once a CITY is complete, you put a resource token on it, and it starts producing resources (when it's number comes up, for the player who currently has the most Meeples touching it). I finally am starting to get it (I think)!

I maintain that the SIZE of the 'city' should indicate how likely it is to produce (how many pips it gets), while any player touching the 'city' should get 1 resource while the majority player gets 2 (3?). Or maybe players should get 1 resource per meeple, with a bonus of either more resources, or a BETTER resource, to the player with the most.

These dots are called "pips" (also "pips" are the dots on standard dice), and they refer to the number of times out of 36 you're likely to roll that given result. Check it out:

If you roll 2 6-sided dice, there are a total of 36 possible outcomes. Of those, only 1 of them totals "2" (snake eyes) and only 1 totals "12" (boxcars). But there are 2 ways to get a 3 (1 on the first die and 2 on the second, or 2 on the first die and 1 on the second), and so on.

So as a visual aid to help you know how likely a number is to roll, Settlers gives you those odds on the tiles in the form of what we call pips.

This can be useful to compare settlement locations in Settlers, which touch 2 or 3 different tiles - you can add up all the pips and that will tell you in general which of 2 spots is likely to be more productive, Of course, that's not a guarantee, and there are other factors such as which resources you get (you might settle for smaller chances of production if you like the resources a lot more)... but that's what pips are and how they work.

Hi Bhazzard, I just wanted to suggest that the theme and art quality of a game like this will likely make or break it in the market. If it looks too much like Carc. than people might say "I already have something like that", or "it is just trying to be like this other game I have" and the same if it looks too much like Settlers. As I thought about it I came up with a few themes that might be interesting but this is what I found most interesting - I thought it might be really interesting if the game has a contemporary metropolitan look to it. The "resources" could be different types of busyness districts (banking, manufacturing, retail, utilities) and the "fields" could be suburban residential sprawl ready to consume products coming out of your cities, roads could be supper-highways or a metro system. This is just one idea, but the options are really limitless. Even though your game has some shared mechanics with these other games it can grow to become something else entirely.

Let me know if you need an artist to sketch up some different ideas in this area.

Regards,

Matthew Kiehl

http://mdkiehl.wordpress.com

bhazzard,
I like the concept of letting the player choose between high-risk high-payoff vs low-risk low-payoff, as would be the case in the example you cite.
Bear in mind that over a large number of rolls, your expected return is [probability x production] not [probability + production]. So in the example of 6 "points" to spend, the optimal choice would be a 3-pip harvest token and a 3-pip production token, giving a yield of 9 (i.e. substantially better than the expected yield from 1-5 or 5-1, but only slightly better than 2-4 or 4-2).
This is not necessarily a bad thing, just a thing to keep in mind. Also, if you have limited numbers of the harvest and production tokens then the player's optimal choice may not be available.
Another thing to bear in mind would be to balance the number of pips with the expected size of the fields. For example, if playtesting showed that the harvest tokens used most frequently were 2 and 3 pips, you may find that most dice rolls yield no resources. I suspect that lots of playtesting would be needed to get the right balance between resource density and total game length.
Regards,
kos