2-player Rodeo "Test Drive" (heh)

I played Rodeo Drive with Eric tonight, and we both agreed that the game would be better with more than 2 players. However it certainly worked with 2, and it worked better than it had before because I incorporated all the things that came up in earlier playtests.

The game lasted just over an hour not including the rules, which was only about 5 minutes more. It seems the 3 player game took about that long, and that stands to reason because there are about the same number of bids going on in the auctions in 2 or 3 player. In 2 player we used 4 bid tokens each (bidding on 4 of the 6 auctions), while in a 3 player game we'd use 3 each. Actually, last time we used 2 each, but we should definitely make that 3 - there absolutely needs to be more bid tokens than there are auctions in order to make people contest things.

Eric liked the game. It went well, the updated privileges were good, the scoring was alright, the auction mechanic still works fine. All in all a good playtest.

The main thing I'd like to work on for the game is the specifics of the scoring system/incentive for players to care which auction they are winning. I definitely think there needs to be a geographic element that ignores the colored regions, in order to relate the different auctions to each other. I think the best idea might involve "groups" rather than chains of buildings in a row. That's the direction I'm going to explore next.

The actual rules of the game are solid, just tweaking the scoring to drive decisions - I think this game might be ready for more widespread playtesting soon!