I have found my extra time spent tinkering with PocketCiv by Scott Slomiany.  It is a game that you can print out and play anywhere after you cut things out.  I used a white board and printed out the rules while I was camping earlier in the month and it worked out pretty good.  The one thing that discouraged me was the fact that it felt like there was a ton of bookkeeping.  Running a civilization can do that to a man I suppose, but nonetheless I was looking for a way to shoehorn the events onto cards.

It then crossed my mind to try and computerize the game.  Since it is a solitaire game, there's no AI (yay!) but on the other side of the coin, the rules for carrying out advances and turn processing are quite intricate (boo!).  All things considered, it would be a fun project to try and turn around.  I gave it a month to get moving on it and get something playable.

Amazingly, I'm nearly there.  The thing is, I tried first going at this project as I did with Abande by having everything on the board at the same time and just trying to manipulate the game in discrete stages.  However, after I got out of the movement phase and tried to apply events, things got complicated quickly.  I found myself fighting the fact that the way I wanted to model this thing was not appropriate.  Sigh...

After a few nights to puzzle, I decided I wanted something playable versus something that was all good looks - not that this game isn't good looking.  It feels dated with the Windows menus and the wizard-style way I decided to do events.  And there are still a few playability issues that I would like to address, but the good news is I've got about 90% of the core done.  All that remains are navigating tribes by sea, end of round scoring, ending the game because no one is left in the land (happens quite a lot, actually).

I intend to beta the game out to everyone out there who wants a crack at it.  The rules are complex enough that I'm sure I missed something, and there might be easier ways to play the game than what I am forcing through the current interface.  However, I'm quite happy with it so far and I'm looking forward to some feedback.

As a side note, I have been playing Scenario #1 from Scott's bundling.  The chatter on BGG was that the scenario typically took a modest 15-30 minutes to play out.  On testing in the computer game, I find it takes a lot less time (even if you are prone to analyze things).  Similar to when I played around with RBPlayer for Rail Baron which shortened the time to play the game by a factor of four.  Amazing.