Work continues on the latest prototype for the game.  I managed to cut out some markers, put some boards together and scavange some parts from other places to put together a reasonable representation of the final product.  I also cleaned up the rules some more and formally moved them off of Google Docs and put them in a local OpenOffice document for fancier formatting and extra pictures.

The latest changes involved cleaning up a lot of the two-player rules.  I also playtested the latest version of the board and added bonuses for connecting to the western cities of Chicago and St. Louis which will need to be labeled on the final product.  I needed to add something to push rails west.  I also reduced build costs since the number of regions on a board is going to be anywhere from 14 or so on up and the restrictions I had before were based on smaller maps.  Another map-related tweak involves building farms for VP since their income stinks and industries typically aren't purchased as much as I was hoping to do.

Other changes involved easing the automatic loss condition of bankruptcy (you now have to shell out loans to stop the free fall) and adding a VP ladder for how well you win.  

All these things need tested.  I'm not sure how I feel about the VP awards.  I feel like they are a little over the top, but the game was more about resource hoarding than it was about building and I felt like other avenues were needed to win. 

I also need to really bang on the two-player version of the game as I feel it is borderline over-powered.  I minimized some of the power from the Priority Player by allowing players to pick distribution of capital on the Economy Phase which is a nice touch.  My fear is a player could run a railroad into the ground and poison it for the majority of the game.  The reinvestment phase helps a little to recover capital, but I still added rules to make the Priority Player responsible to bail out the company which is all well and good, but odds are the guy that trashed the company on Turn 1 might not have priority later in the game.  It needs testing and tweaking.  I do like that it opens up further ways to win (direct screwage versus portfolio management), but I'm not sure if the stakes are off kilter.  I also had to remove the VP rewards for farms and connections since players never really "own" a railroad.  

I'm hoping to test heavily over the next few weeks before opening up to further blind playtesting.  If I can get the major kinks out, I'm thinking of doing a limited print run if I can price components well enough - but I am undecided at the moment.  The game has to be easier to put together than Bindle Rails was.  I feel like I want to have multiple maps published only for the produced version of the game, but that is yet more playtesting which sounds a lot like work.

Edit:  Prototype Image