I finally had some time to get away and spend some time with my latest design, expansion #2 for Bindle Rails.  The premise behind the game was to expand the L&N in 1830 all the way to 1900 by acquisition and route building.  The feel for the game was suppoesd to be like Expansion #1- Imperial Mexican Railways, except with competitors.  VP are earned by connecting to different cities and purchasing competitors.  If you have 10 VP after eight turns, you win.. 

The map was easy enough to create.  I enlisted Hex Draw again to put together a swath of 1860 territory running for Louisville to Mobile, Memphis to Atlanta.  I also threw on a couple of prominent competitors to the map.  I touched things up in Inkscape, created a separate tracking spreadsheet in OpenOffice, and I was off to the races.

The idea seemed simple enough, but things seemed to fall apart. 

I initially wanted to use coal mines dropped as white cubes in the Smoky Mountains to reward the use of Engines, but it seemed hokey.  Fetching engines in the coal mines as a reward proved to be problematic and more of a pain in the butt to keep track of than it was worth.  There goes that idea.  Out go the coal mines - for now.  I could go ahead and leave them as a 1 VP reward for building to them, particularly if one is inclined to buy the Tennessee Central.

I wanted to reward extra long routes by using white cubes.  Turns out I was dipping into the cubes a lot earlier (turn 4 versus almost all the way through the game in IMR) so that ballooned up things artificially.

The competitor round seemed somewhat rigged, but that's because the odds of each competitor coming up are even.  It also didn't happen often enough.  So, move the competitors up by $2 each time they are drawn - but I'm still stuck with competitors that move too predictably upward.  I then let the larger competitors start a little higher.  This helped, but still didn't offset the company values rising up predictably.  I could resort to the Event Cards and reintroduce them from the original, but the wording on the cards is overly specific and generally trended the markets down because there were VP rewards for higher company stock values for everyone.  So that isn't going to work unless I redo cards - which goes against the idea of doing an expansion. There was also the problem of buying a competitor as soon as they were founded.  I moved the time frame to 1870 before allowing the buyout of a company, but the values were too inflated by that time to make this realistically possible.

I went ahead and played under these modified rules and the game was better, however, play became predictable in terms of setting up routes, trying to build through Nashville, Birmingham and then to Atlanta on my own.  I would usually get the T&C and build to Knoxville and that would be an easy 11 VP.  So I either have to move the VP goal up some (hokey) or need to come up with other things.  But what?

My one lament with the original Bindle Rails was that it was too specific with some of the cards.  Fortunately I used different cube colors for the corners, but the Event portion of the cards probably should have been moved to a different deck.  I guess that's one of the big problems with multi-use cards for this type of game - they seem like you could use them elsewhere, however, if you need to use them for a similar purpose, you are painted in.  If you print it out, that's one thing, however, at $6+ per deck for whoever bought the game, it's not right to keep adding on cards to the system for something that should just "work" right off the bat.

One other area where I hosed myself was on the Goal Cards, which worked really well for the Northeastern US but don't work anywhere else.  I have never really liked the Manager cards, but they do fill a void in the original game.   The Technology Mat is also geared tips heavily to the original Bindle and doesn't adapt as well to the other games I have in mind.

So do I create a new game with new mats and create a new system?  Do I drop the expansion completely?  Do I work on some other ideas instead?

Choices, choices, choices...

For now, L&N will continue to go through the paces.  I think I will add some way to introduce varying goals to the game, probably via chart and roll (ugh).  I may add a limited tech tree to this expansion (smaller than the original version of Bindle Rails which fit comfortably on one page).  I think varying the goals of building to certain destinations, buying certain companies, forcing different company values and tinkering with the win condition will go a long way to making this particular iteration more enjoyable.  

I am somewhat surprised that this iteration is taking longer than #1:IMR took.   IMR, in retrospect, came together in roughly a week of thought and maybe a half dozen plays.  It was an easier beast, however, I lucked out on the balancing act of BPs, VPs and some of the other mechanisms in the game.  

Onward and upward.