Reading Railroad - Endgame scoring

There have been a number of different schema discussed or suggested for endgame scoring in Reading Railroad. The "current" scheme, and the only one used in any of the 3 playtests so far, has been "Free-building" - free form word building with your collected Letter tiles, where you are limited by the size of your largest network as to how many tiles you can use. Scoring is based on the lengths of the word or words made, squared.

This was the original rule in Scott's first draft of the rules, and it was nice because it didn't require any components like scoring cards, nor any work to figure out whether the goal words should be private or public, and how you actually go about getting them. However, it defeats the basic design goal of the game, which is that the game is not a word game, it's a connection/set collection game with word building as a main mechanic.

The heart of the game is supposed to be collecting the correct set of City tiles in order to satisfy the Goal cards. Reading Railroad could be expressed another way, and it would look more like a euro cube pusher: the City tiles could be colored cubes, and the Goal cards could indicate an assortment of cubes in demand The game is about collecting the appropriate cubes to fulfill the demand cards by connecting cities on the board. It just so happens that the mechanic for connecting cities is spelling words out of scrabble-style letter tiles. This is exactly the game I'm trying to make out of Reading Railroad - a cube pusher with word building as a mechanic. I thought it would be more fun to go with the theme of word building and make the cubes into letters (i.e. there are 26 colors of cubes). The Demand cards are specific groups of these cubes (letters) which happen to spell a word. I feel this emphasizes the uniqueness of word building in a non-word game.

What Reading Railroad is not is a word game at heart. That's the whole point.

So it's always been my plan to replace the Free-building endgame with some kind of targeted word scoring. Some kind of card or list which tells you which set of letters to collect, so you can reasonably plan which cities you want to connect. I'm as yet unsure how I want to accomplish that. here are some of the ideas that have been floating around thus far...

* Each player gets a secret goal card with some 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and maybe 8 letter words on it. These are the words they're trying to spell with their City tiles. Maybe one of these cards is face up for everyone to use as well.

* There could exist cards which have 3/4/5/6 letter words which build on each other (add a letter and anagram to get from 1 word to the next) which are either available to purchase and would be secret, like Tickets from Ticket to Ride, or which are in a face up pool for players to claim at some point during the game. there would be N-1 pools to ensure competition, and there would be an innate risk/reward in whether you claim the card with a 3 letter word, or hold out for that 4th or 5th letter (because it would score better that way) and risk someone else taking it from you.

* There could be stacks of cards for 3/4/5/6/7 letters, the top of each face up for players to claim during the game. the deck of 3-letter words would be the largest, and the deck of 7 letter words would be tiny. This could result in a viable small-word strategy vs a long-word strategy. In general small words will pay off worse than long words, but they're much easier to accomplish.

* There could be a set of words (a thematic phrase) printed on the board which constitutes sets of letters to collect. The scores for these could be printed on the board as well, right under the word. This could be by itself, or in addition to some hidden goal scoring.

* There could be a deck of cards with 8-letter words on them, and each player could be dealt 4 or 5 of those, from which they choose 2 to keep. In order to qualify to win the game, the player must be able to spell both of their 8-letter words using their city tiles. Players that qualify then use the Free-building endgame scoring.

Today while considering which endgame scoring system to use, I thought of this hybrid:
* Pool of N-1 cards - each card with 3/4/5/6 letter words that build on each other.
* When you would take a city tile you could instead take a card, as long as you can spell one of the words on it.
* At the end of the game City tiles are used, once each, and no more of them than the number of cities in your largest network, to spell the words on the cards you've taken.

I am going to continue to ponder this, but I need to make a decision soon. I need to send the game to the KublaContest in about 2 weeks! If worst comes to worst I could submit Reading Railroad with the free-building endgame, but I'd rather not... it's a whole different game!

Reading Railroad playtest

I had a good test of Reading Railroad on Friday in which I got some good suggestions from players and cemented an opinion about the Investors that I've been worried about... basically that they don't do what they're supposed to. But that's easily fixed.

The Investor tile makes everyone pay (lose points) for each Resource tile they have in hand. It's supposed to punish people for building up tiles in hand. Of course, that's sort of like gibberish if there's not a good reason to build up tiles. Under the current rules, the only real reason to build up tiles is because you have letters you can't make a word out of. There's not really a strategic reason to build up tiles in hand. I tried to add a strategic reason by adding the coins, but I failed to reward longer words with enough coin for it to matter.

So number 1... I need to change the coin payout to (much) better reward building a longer word, and number 2... the Investor needs to punish the player hoarding tiles, not all the other players. Currently drawing the Investor tile has the following effect: You get penalized a little, but no much because you just spent most or all of your tiles, and everyone else gets penalized for all the tiles they drew at the end of their turn - even if they spent every tile they had before drawing new tiles. That's the opposite of the intent. The Investor should only tax the player drawing tiles.

A minor rule change to go with that... if the Investor hurts only you for hoarding tiles, there's no good reason not to draw another tile to replace it (currently you don't). It would be pretty harsh to get double punished because you happened to draw an Investor tile!

The players had some suggestions about the endgame scoring target words, which have not been implemented yet, but I described after the game. The suggestions were along the lines of having cards with words on them, rather tan the idea I had about having a set group of words (a thematic phrase) on the board. Several of these cards would be face up, and as soon as you've collected the right City tiles to make the word, you can claim the card. You'd 'cash in' your letter tiles to do so.

One suggestion was that there be a larger number of 3 letter word cards (maybe 10), fewer 4 letter words (8?), maybe 6 5-letter words, 4 6-letter words, and 2 7-letter words, and the game would end when one (or 2, or whatever) of the stacks ran out. This would lend validity to a 'short word' strategy vs a 'long word' strategy, and sounds pretty good.

Another suggestion was that the goal cards be like the Tickets I described in my last post in that they have several words on them, so you can choose to score a smaller word, or go for a longer word and risk someone else taking the card out from under you. Under this scheme, there probably wouldn't be private Ticket cards, and there would probably be a pool f N-1 face up cards to work towards (where N is the number of players). When one is scored, another is turned up to replace it. The game end in this case could be all city tiles on the board are used, or the deck is exhausted, or a single player scores 4 cards, or a single player collects a certain number of City Tiles, or anything, really - I'm not sure what would be best.

I'll have to talk to Scott and put some thought into the game end conditions and how exactly to do the endgame scoring words. I think he'll be happy if I quit pushing for private Tickets which you buy - I think that was adding too much complexity for his liking.

In Friday's playtest I also tried another new idea. I thought (and still think) there ought to be a way to invest in getting more tiles at a time, so that you can build up to a bigger word, which you'll play for more Coin. The investment should end up costing you potential endgame, since it will help you get more points in game. It would be an option for someone going for a "Wordsmith" strategy. My idea was to have a "Factory" which you could buy for a number of Coin, and the Factory would count as 4 City tiles, so it would put you up to the next threshold so you would draw 1 more tile per turn. I used a game end trigger of 15 City tiles, so buying a factory means you'll have a MAXIMUM of 11 tiles to use, which seems like it would impact the endgame pretty significantly. In the end though, no one bought a Factory, and the 15 tiles may have proven to make for too short a game. Although, when one player got 15 tiles, another had 14 and the third had about 12. Maybe that's a good enough number of tiles... then again there were several tiles left on the board, and I think it might be better to allow players to collect them.

I think the coin value of letters which I used did not properly reward longer words, so there was still no incentive to save tiles. Therefore the wordsmith strategy didn't make much sense, and nobody was interested in a Factory. Next time I will a triangular payout for words - 0/1/3/6/10/15/21 for 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 letter words. That should give a lot (maybe too much) incentive to store up letters to make bigger words. Contrast that with playing small words to get first dibbs on City tiles, and to get more City tiles overall, not getting hit as hard by the Investor, and not having to know big words and I think that will better represent a wordsmith strategy vs a non-wordsmith strategy.

So to get this game ready for the KublaContest, I need to try it with the new coin payout, see if any sort of Factory idea will work, and figure out endgame scoring. I think it can be done in the next 2 or 3 weeks, and then I can send it in!

Butterfly in the sky? No wait, this is Reading Railroad

Scott finally got a chance to playtest his build of Reading Railroad, and since it worked I finally got off my ass and finished my prototype as well. I played a 3 player game using the updated rules Scott sent me after his test. I knew going in that there were a few things I wanted to watch for and likely change. The test went well overall, we were able to play through the entire game, we had fun, and the system definitely seemed to work.

The things I'm looking to change are basically things intended to steer the game toward my original design goal - that you don't have to be a wordsmith to play the game. Also, I'd like to emphasize the in-game point scoring (by making longer words than necessary to connect cities) more, so that it can be a significant source of points in the game.

In game design terms, that is to say terms I personally use when thinking about game design, I'm trying to emphasize a particular SvB. In this case, I'm trying to create interesting choices stemming from the ability to score points either by building bigger words over the course of the game while laying track as cheaply as possible, and forgoing those in-game points in favor of building track to specific cities in order to get the "right" City tiles for endgame scoring. The former strategy I expect will score more points over the course of the game, but will probably end up with suboptimal City tiles or a smaller "biggest network". The latter strategy I expect will yield bigger endgame scores, at the cost of in-game scoring. Thus, we have 2 extreme strategies of which players will do some of each in order to collect enough points to win.

In addition, I'm trying to encourage an additional SvB in the endgame scoring - I plan to have multiple words that can be spelled with City tiles, some small, some large. I'm hoping that there might be a viable "short word" strategy as well as a viable "long word" strategy. The scoring for words will probably continue to be Scott's ingenious idea: [#letters]^2, which would make a longer word worth more points. However, a longer word ought to be more difficult to complete, so shorter words, though less points, could be more guaranteed.

Finally, one more idea I've recently had is to have additional scoring cards one could buy, like a Ticket in Ticket to Ride, which have 3/4/5/6/7 letter words on them which build on each other... for example:
ARE DEAR DREAM REMADE DREAMER
CAR RACE CATER CREATE TERRACE
Where you score for the longest word on the card which you can make out of your City Tiles. You would basically pay points for these cards, an investment in the possibility of more points later.

I intend to enter this game in the KublaContest (KublaCon game design contest) this year, which means I should probably get it wrapped up and in the mail fairly soon, it has to arrive by May 12th!

Conjunction Junction, or perhaps Reading Railroad

Scott and I have been tossing back and forth ideas on the structure of Conjunction Junction (perhaps a better name... Reading Railroad?). Scott drafted up a ruleset, and I massacred it in my usual style. The main thing I realized while discussing it with him is this... and this may be a comment on collaborative design:

I don't think we're working on the same game.

For the most part, Scott's ideas for the format of the game seem a lot better suited to the complexity level we're going for, and more elegant in a lot of ways, so I've completely adopted them over my original thoughts of buying and selling letters and placing letter tiles on the board as track. Instead, the board has more abstract regions which you can "build track through" - and you do so by spelling words with letter tiles. The words don't have anything to do with the board, you just spell words - the longer the word, the more "Track Points" you get, and it costs a certain number of Track Points to build through a region. Leftover Track Points turn into VPs.

This I like - the idea is that you can make smaller words to connect cities, with little or no Track Points leftover for VPs, or you could make bigger words so you get more VPs as you lay track on the board to connect cities. The Cities still have City Tiles in them which you'll use at the end of the game to spell other words for endgame scoring.

This is where there appears to be a difference of opinion on the purpose of the game. In order for a non-wordsmith to be able to do well, I think it's important that the words you spell with City Tiles (which you've been collecting during the game) be pre-determined, printed on a scoring card, so you have some direction when you are choosing which cities to connect, and that motivation isn't wrapped up in your ability to recognize and spell words. Scott suggests that this is equivalent to not actually spelling words with City Tiles, and instead it's like saying "make a network that connects this, that, and the other city." This is, in a sense, true - and in fact could also be represented that way, although my actual mechanic would be like having a set of different possible network connections to make. However, doing it with letters on City Tiles goes along with the theme of the game and the wordbuilding mechanic. There are a few other reasons I think it's a little different as well, but they're specific and not important to the overarching question.

Scott has thus far preferred a system where players spell whatever word(s) they want/can with their City Tiles, and get rewarded for them... basically you get points for making a 3 letter word, a 4 letter word, a 5 letter word, etc. In matter of fact, I really like the idea, for a word game. For this game however, an original design goal (for me) was that it not be a word game at all. There are plenty of word games, and building words for the sake of building words is a well established genre - the thing I thought would be interesting was to make a game that a player who hates that genre could play with a player that loves that genre.

I think both scoring systems could work very well, and they both have some very interesting things going for them - I think they both give the player motivation to connect various cities over other cities, and I think they both reward doing a "good job" of connecting cities. However, the fundamental question remains - is this a word game, or a connection game?

I'll have to see what Scott thinks of my version of the ruleset he wrote. I'm interested to see what kind of implications the difference between word game and connection game will have, because in the end both scoring systems aren't all that dissimilar. I think the key is where the tension is when it comes down to the decision as to where you want to place track - what cities do you want to connect. Should this be based on your skill at word building, or your skill at analyzing the relative positions of City Tiles and which you need for your scoring card?

I maintain that using word building as a mechanic in a connection game is the more interesting way to go, because you don't see a lot of games like that. On the other hand there are plenty of word games out there.

Conjunction Junction (what's your function?)

Last month I posted about the possibility of using word building as a mechanic in a game that's not necessarily a word game. I've given it some thought and discussed it with a few members of BGDF, and now I've got an outline of a game which I think might not be bad at all. It's a connection game, with a light railroad theme, using word building as a way to lay track. The object of the game is to collect city tiles, which have letters on them in order to spell certain predefined (potentially thematic) words. The working title (thanks to Darkehorse from BGDF) is Conjunction Junction, which is not technically accurate, as we're not using conjunctions to make sentences, but it's got a nice ring to it, and really evokes both words and trains :)

The bullet list of important points in this game is...

• People who are good at word building should be able to excel at this game.
  
• People who are NOT good at word building but who are good at connection (or perhaps economic) games should also be able to excel at this game.
  
• There needs to be a point to building words, rather than word building for the sake of word building.

The basic structure of the game is relatively simple. Imagine a hex grid, with certain hexes indicated as cities. This is not unlike Railroad Tycoon or Age of Steam. In fact, let's just go ahead and imagine the Railroad Tycoon board. Now imagine the pile of hex tiles from RRT, only with letters on them. Also imagine the New City tiles from RRT, only more of them, and they have letters on them too. We'll call the lettered track tiles "letter tiles" and the New City tiles "City tiles". The City tiles are stacked on the cities, All the S's on one city, all the F's on another, etc.

Over the course of the game, players lay track to connect cities, collecting the City Tiles from those cities. In the end these City tiles are used to spell words on a card, and the winner is the player that spells the most, or the biggest, word on the card. Something like that.

Along the edge of the board there are a number of bins. The bottom one is empty, and the rest have pairs of randomly drawn letter tiles in them. On your turn you may choose to either get tiles or use tiles. If you get tiles then you pay money - you put $1 in the empty bin and take whatever is in the next bin for free... Or you put $1 on that bin as well (with the 2 letters), and take the contents of the third bin. When you take a bin, you get everything in it - the 2 letters and any money that happens to be with them, then the contents of each bin above that one slide down. You can actually take the first bin and just get money (nothing slides down in that case, there are never letters in that first bin).

If you choose to use tiles then you either place letter tiles on the board to spell a word and get paid $1 per letter you place, or lay generic track (from an off-board supply, like in Railroad Tycoon) at the cost of $1 per tile you place. In either case, you must place tiles from one city to another, and then you take a City tile off of either of the 2 connected cities.

That's the basic structure of the game. I've been having a steady stream of thoughts about the specifics...

It would be interesting if there were incentives to build off your network as opposed to willy-nilly all over the board. One idea is that you could have multiple networks, but building gets more expensive if you do. The advantage to building onto your existing network in that case is cost. Perhaps the standard cost to use tiles is ($1/network - $1), so no extra cost if you just have 1 network, $1 extra if you have two networks, etc.

I think there might also be a warehousing cost, like $1 to save tiles after building... and/or whenever you get tiles you pay $1 if you already have any.

I just need to be sure that taking cash and paying for track isn't strictly better than building words, and I also don't want it to be strictly worse. One of my design goals for the game is that a word builder and a non word builder should both be able to play and be competitive.

I was also thinking that you could maybe 'sell' tiles for $1 apiece, because what if you take 2 tiles, only need 1, and are stuck with the other... Do you have to warehouse it every turn until you can use it? Do you have to discard it? Are you allowed to sell it for $1? Maybe selling for $1 is fair.

Tough to use letters could have a coin pictured on them, meaning you get an extra $ for using that letter.

I think there needs to be a connection bonus or else $2/tile for building a word, or you're basically losing money. You'll get tiles for an average of probably about $1 per tile, so if you place them for $1/tile then you're not making progress... but maybe that's ok.

Discussing this game in the chat, Nando had the following to say:
10/01/2008 15:29:08 ‹Nando› freaking. complicated.
10/01/2008 15:29:17 ‹Nando› for a word game anyway

It's not really a word game. Word games are about making words for the sake of making words. This is a connection game with word building as the main mechanic :)

Of course, since I started writing this post, Doho123 has come up with a very interesting alternate format for the game, which has a lot of good things in it (though I don't know if I'm entirely sold yet). Curse you Scott! :)

Red Colony

I've decided that until a better name comes along, the Mars thing will be called Red Colony.

I had had some ideas, lots of different ideas actually, about how different parts of the game might work. Then I was reminded of this blog post my friend Scott made back in July, and I realized that what I really ought to do is take the base concept of what I wanted to try (managing your income stream) and make the simplest game possible out of that. So after a little thought along those lines on my way to lunch, here's what I came up with:

Players should get 1 Ship action and 1 Pawn action each turn:
Ship actions are...
(a) Get a cube (number limited by total capacity of ship, and type limited by ship configuration)
(b) Move the ship from Earth to Mars or vice versa. Clearly you can't get a cube if the ship is at Mars, and I think the idea is that you can't change the configuration unless your pawn is at Earth.
Pawn actions are...
(a) Move to any explored tile connected to your 'base'
(b) Move to and explore any tile adjacent to an explored tile connected to your base
(c) Build a Building on an explored tile (probably have to connect back to your base)
(d) Update ship configuration (must be on Earth to do this)
(e) possibly Get a cube (if at Earth)
(f) Move people around (in the case that buildings require people to operate)

You can bring your pawn to Earth with you if it's at your base when the ship goes from Mars to Earth, and of course you can bring your pawn with you when the ship goes from Earth to Mars (and I imagine you would always do the latter, not necessarily the former)

Another option might be to allow players to simply do any 2 of those each turn, so if you wanted to you could get 2 cubes, at the expense of not exploring or building that turn... I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

Random game design thoughts - stream of conscience style.

So I had this great idea for a game... it had to do with delivering pizza and breaking traffic laws. I mean, who doesn't love pizza? And who doesn't love breaking traffic laws? Actually, every time I think about the game I get excited because I feel like the mechanics should work really well and that game would be fun. I even got about 1/2 way through a prototype when I hit a snag because I decided I was inept at creating a map board for the game.

This could be because I have a grandiose scheme to have a really novel board, with holes cut at the intersections (traffic lights) and a rotating color wheel below the board - so the lights will change over time, impacting the available routes. The game is intended to be about route planning and pressing your luck. The route planning comes from the changing traffic lights, and the pressing your luck comes from breaking traffic laws - which make you more and more likely to get busted.

Anyway, in the time since I started prototyping that one (the rules are ready to test, though they could maybe use some more player interaction), I have gone through the process of writing, prototyping, and testing several other games, as well as prototyping and playing games by other people. Here's a quick rundown:

Terra Prime
An idea I originally got from a friend, which I turned into a decently working prototype. It's about exploring space, colonizing planets, harvesting resources, and protecting the colonies from hostile aliens. Sounds like a lot, but it's like a 90 minute game, involves a nifty economic model, and a chart of upgrades for your spaceship.

I was very fond of this one, but lately I'm bummed because there's one part that's just not working for me. I can't seem to fix it, so I haven't even played this one in a long time.

Kilauea
A relatively simple game about fictional ancient Hawaiian tribes, who made sacrifices to the volcano goddess Pele in hopes she would not send fiery lava toward their village. Points are acquired by spreading out your tribesmen (which of course makes them more susceptible to lava flows), controlling the lava flow (by making the biggest sacrifice in a round), and collecting Fertile tokens (left when lava flows cool and go away). Novel movement mechanic borrowed from Mancala. I originally played this on a simple 9x9 square board. I thought perhaps hexes would be better, so I made a nice big board with big hexes... then realized I hadn't really increased the number of hexes or the distance from the mouth of the volcano to the edge of the board. Since then I've found a nice pic of the big island to use, and superimposed a hex grid - but I'm thinking I'll go back to a square grid... the game seemed better that way.

Homesteaders - by Alex Rockwell.
The king of Puerto Rico strategy articles, and Caylus 2p analysis, has come up with a game of his own. I played it when I met him last summer, came home, and made my own copy so I could play it some more. It's a sort of cross between Caylus and Vegas Showdown. You auction off the right to build a certain type of building, and there are lots of buildings per type. The buildings give you various abilities or incomes, which you use to build other buildings or otherwise translate into points. I have been testing it out and offering my comments through many changes, and will have a copy with me at BGG.con...

Soldiers and Builders - by John Heder.
No, not Napoleon Dynamite... his cousin. No, really, I know a guy named John Heder (hederj on BGG), and he's related to the Napoleon Dynamite guy (who's name is also John Heder, in case you have been living under a rock and wonder what the hell I'm on about). So my friend John found some 6 sided dice with colors on the faces (like in Carolus Magnus) at a store, and he was dieing to make a game that used them. So he did. It's relatively abstract, and has to do with placing dudes on the colored spaces on a grid. You determine where you can play by rolling 1 Region die and 1 Color die. I tried it out, and it was amusing at first, but quickly got old as there wasn't really enough to do, or enough control or player choice for my liking. So... I fixed it. I modified a few things in order to inject some options for players. I took a hint or two from Reiner Kinizia's new Genesis, where you roll 2 dice and play on both colors that come up or just 1 wild. I merged that into the game by having the player roll 1d4 for region and 2d6 color dice, and for each color die you either make a play, or discard it to change either the region die or the other color die. We (John and I) also implemented tower powers (towers result when you make a square of dudes, like a monument in T&E) in order to incentivize building towers. Scoring is based on towers (better if in groups), majority of guys in each region, majority of towers in each region, and destroyed towers (oh yeah, you can do that too). It's alright, but I would love to give it a theme. It kinda reminds me of that computer simulation thingy called "Life."

Odysseus: Winds of Fate
Another friend of mine from the Board Game Designers Forum asked me to help him out with an idea he had. It sounded really good to me, so we discussed it for a while. And as usual, I forked off with my own route on it while he went a different way. Well, it made so much sense to me, that about 2 days later I had a prototype ready to test. My friend (Nando) said that my version is closer to his original vision than his version is. Irrespective of that, I'm excited about this one because of 2 reasons... it's got a cool scoring mechanism in which you get points in 2 different varieties during the game, and the one that matters depends on how the game ends. Players have a little control over which type of points they get, and a little control over which way the game ends. The other thing I like about my implementation is that while there are numbers on cards that you play (via a mechanic not entirely unlike Taj Mahal), the numbers don't really matter for getting points - just the number of cards. The numbers (and suit of the cards) matter as to which points you get, and which game end condition gets furthered, but you can't get screwed out of points by a bad draw. The number of cards you have is (almost) completely within your control.

I also like the theme a lot... there aren't a lot of games out there with the Odyssey as a theme. In this one, players play the Sisters of Fate, who observe Odysseus on his voyage from Troy to Ithaca, not entirely interested if he makes it home safe or not... but they decide to sort of bet on it.

Dynasty: The Spread of Culture in Ancient China
This one will probably be my next "Hot and Fresh" (that's the pizza game, by the way) in that it's a great idea, 1/2 prototyped, that I'll probably never get around to finishing. It's based on yet another friend's idea... he asked me to help him with a game idea about China, which was to be some epic thing with wargame elements and everything. I took what we talked about, or the parts that interested me anyway, and made a Eurogame out of it. It's so simple yet seems like it would be so good. My friend didn't like that I posted it though, but said he wouldn't care as long as I changed the theme... maybe to something about India. Until I figure that out I was going to keep working on the mechanics anyway, which are ready to test, I just need to figure out some tech advances... here's the gist of it:

Each player represents a culture in ancient China. You start by establishing little villages in various regions on the map, which allow you access to resources. You don't actually GET resources, like cubes or anything, you just have access to them or you don't. Then you can buy technological advances or whatever, which better your civilization. If you can't afford one, you can ask an opponent to help you. They get points for doing so... Basically, as you get these advances, and especially as you "trade" with other civs, you get markers to fill up your Cultural Development chart. When you fill up the first part of the chart, you become advanced to the point that one of your villages becomes a city, granting you abilities and access to higher level resources. Later in the game you can found more cities and take over other players' villages and cities, but each time you assimilate another players culture, you get their chits on your board. As soon as a player has filled up their board, they become the first Emperor of China and the game ends. At this point you see who the winner is by revealing all the chits on everybody's boards... the newly crowned Emperor may not be the winner (though they get a bonus to scoring) - they may be Emperor, but they're empire is infused with another player's culture. The player who's culture is the best represented is the real winner.

Well, that's all the designs I can think of offhand. I also proto'ed a solitaire civ game made by another BGDF friend... it's pretty cool - made to be played solo (obviously), like on an airplane or something. All you need is a pad of paper, the rules (with list of Advances), and a small deck of Event cards (16 cards). Scott even made a 'deluxe' version with printable tiles for those that want the tabletop experience :) If you're interested in this game you can look up PocketCiv on Doho123's blog MeepleSpeak .

I suppose that's enough blah blah blah from me... leave a comment if you read this, let me know what you think of the game ideas.

Thanks!