I've taken an extended break from the hobby after getting into graduate school, so my creativity is feeling a bit rusty. Perhaps airing my ideas here will help me figure it out. My questions:
1. Is the theme insensitive/in need of a new flavor?
2. How do I avoid making the game overcomplicated? I want mid-level Euro, not heavy Euro.
3. What's the right ratio of central colonies to players? How do I make sure that players are influencing more than one colony regularly, rather than putting all their eggs in a particular basket, without putting in feelsbad mechanics where players can just completely shut them down.
Game scenario - players represent investors (not countries) that fund the colonies in the new world. In the center of the table are several "colony" start tiles that players can add to by purchasing tiles from a rotating bank of tiles. In essence it's like Suburbia/Castles of Mad King Ludwig (games that I love), but you're abstracted by one step: you don't actually own the colonies, but if you have shares in a colony that's succeeding, you gather more points than others.
Improvements to the colony could include commodities via plantation tiles that produce coffee, cocoa, sugar, cotton, or other New World-themed commodities. Similarly, refineries could be built in a plantation that could increase yield or worth for tiles on that colony.
Other tiles could also be purchased, such as native encampments, governors, or others, and players could interact with one another by adding and removing tiles from a colony. It would be nice if I could include a mechanism that made a colony that sells a majority of a certain good to get more money from that good, but I sense it may take too much work on the players' part to track that.
