"Two-tiered guilds" model

I think this would be perfectly fine, but I’m afraid it would result in a rather well-trodden path with respect to where the tension in the game would come from. In that sense, I was aiming more, I think, at forcing players to decide where in the “food chain” to place themselves. The point of emphasis you suggest would really lead to a narrative flow that would go like “Early in the game, I cash in resources for money, but late in the game, I cash in resources for VPs”, which again is perfectly fine but maybe too familiar.

The key in making an economy of the sort I’m advocating seems to be that different things must have different value to different people. From this, one begins to see the wisdom of secret contracts. If you know perfectly how much a widget is worth to me, you can make me really pay for it; secret contracts cloud that somewhat. But I still like “broadcasted” contracts better. Clearly, then, the source of tension would have to come from supply-demand tension.

What I think I have in mind is something whereby perhaps there are two levels of “contracts” -- for the “high tier” goods, there are contracts that promise a certain payout. In contrast, for the “low tier” goods, there is some sort of market economy with fluctuating demand and with competition between the players.

Frankly, I don't know if I see the apprentice/journeyman/master thing working here, but I do see the Guild thing working here- perhaps each player represents a particular guild, which means they've got a specific ability (variable player powers) and perhaps they earn VPs when their guild is used for stuff.

Yes, there’s definitely a question of representation here -- are players guild members, guild owners, factory owners, whatever? Certainly something that will have to be defined at some point. I agree that, to me, I’m already ready to leave the Apprentice construct behind for now, and only add it if the mechanics demand it; currently, it seems like it would be force-fitting it in to this particular system.

This might be a nice way to have several different guilds and to not force a player to adopt one or two guilds and stick with them the whole game. (Because that would be more appropriate for an “advancement” game, but not necessarily so for a “market” game, which I think this is becoming.) Maybe we could incorporate the “advancement” concept by modifying role selection to be that you can hang on to your role card between turns, in which case it becomes more powerful, but you must give it up at some point if you hope to diversify. (Maybe the role cards would be two-sided, with one side saying “Apprentice” and one side saying “Master”)

I don't think I see this as a role selection game, but maybe it's worth at least thinking about it...

I also quite like David’s market model, however there’s an additional level here that must be accomodated, namely, how do players interact with each other with respect to the intermediate level goods.

Yes, this is definitely not meant to be a simple reworking of your game, but a completely new game from whole cloth. (although, it obviously owes a tremendous debt to your game)

I still haven't managed to play Alhambra, but a game about exchange rates sounds like it could be interesting, but I agree, adding resource production could complicate things a lot.

But of course, my model has three tiers as well; it's just that the lowest tier, raw materials, comes from the game system rather than from the players. And this creates, I claim, a fundamental difference between our two models. In mine, the "low tier" guilds can get their resources from the game; the "high tier" guilds must get them from low tier guilds. And, crucially, the high tier guilds aren't just "advanced versions" of the low tier guilds, but unique entities. Drop the guilds for simplicity and think of them as factories; a "paper mill" might be a low-tier facility, and a "printer" might be a high-tier facility. The point of interest in the game becomes which type of business you'll run -- one where your supply problems are easy but demand is lower, or one where supply chain issues will be troublesome but demand is high? It focuses in on a very specific (and I think, interesting) economic question.

I like your economic model very much, although I might modify it for this game to be an "all at once" deal where the amount sold by all players fixes the price (if only to avoid the "price setting" complexity that Fanaka is experiencing in Fad Factory). e.g., if I am the only seller, the price is X, but if two of us sell, the price is X-1, etc, or something like this.

I also like the idea of the merchant being a "middleman", and I think a mechanic like that could work here; as I mentioned, I think the way to pull it off is to have delivery of goods have a non-zero cost for people other than the merchant, so the merchant can turn a little profit on acting as an intermediary. (For example, maybe there's demand for Books; so rather than letting the book-producers compete for that market, the merchant could go around buying up all the books, then parcel them out in a way in which only he benefits. Just a silly example, but I do think there's possibly a role for a merchant mechanic here...)

-Jeff

Depends on how you’re looking at it. I just want to avoid the situation where we must consider a huge tree of possible ramifications of each change in a given mechanic to accomodate all of the possible ways that it could play out for each of the different systems we’ve concocted.

I agree, it’s hard if not impossible to look at a mechanic in isolation. But I do think that in this case, it’s possible to talk about the mathematical model of demand (without plugging in actual numbers, of course), and that doing so will help make decisions about how actions in the game are actually taken. I think so, anyway.

I think Contracts have to be fully public. (perhaps there could be a way to get private contracts). There does have to be some level of secret information somewhere, but I don’t think the contracts should be it.

I could see it going either way -- “Vinci/PR”-style where the longer contracts go, they become more attractive; or “me”-style; I had a mechanic for a different game where at any time, there are 4 slots for “contracts”, numbered 1-4, with the numbers representing the value of the contract (although in this case it could represent a bonus). Each turn that the contracts remain unfulfilled, they slide to the left, into less valuable slots. (Of course, the slots could be numbered in a non-linear way; maybe they initially become more valuable, then wane in value).

Or here’s a cool idea: there could be 4 lines on the contract card, each representing a payout per item. And then the slot that the card is in tells you which line to read from to determine the payout of the item should the contract be fulfilled. So, some items could retain their payout quite well over time, whereas others could diminish with time.

Actually, this might be a better mechanic for the supply side of things than the demand; might be a nice way to simulate “spoilage” or something like that; a nail, for example, might retain a high payout for 3 turns, after which it rusts and becomes almost worthless; a pie might drop off in value after only one turn; a board might drop only slightly for 4 turns; etc. Not sure if it fits in this game or not. Maybe it does; maybe instead of “this is the item I want to sell”, you could produce one item each turn, putting it in “Slot 4”, and sliding the others to the left. Of course, it changes the whole demand model because it sets the payout value intrinsic to the item itself rather than in the demand of the market. Can these be reconciled?

Perhaps you could have a payout that’s a combo of the two; then there’s a somewhat nice asymmetry in that people with older pies and newer pies can both try to sell to the market, but the newer pies would pay out better (or maybe would sell first, or whatever). There’s definitely something in this idea...

I don’t disagree that it’s too much to ask players to lock in early on; I’m more using it as a conceptual device to explain my thoughts on the demand, rather than as a point I insist on. My vision for the game is more that players are placing “production facilities”, and can place whatever factories they want -- some could be high-tier, some could be low-tier. Maybe you start with one or two and can add more as the game goes on.

Now, I understand you're thinking of this in the context of players buying and selling goods in the way you described (one of each per turn). This sounds kinda like Settlers of Catan, with one player only allowed to build Settlements and Cities and another player only allowed to build Roads and Dev cards, if you see what I mean.

Maybe; but it might have to be bounded in some way. Not sure what yet.

I looked at WA briefly; it looked a little more complicated than what I’m proposing.

I was envisioning the Contract cards for low-tier goods as a way of having fluctuating payout for goods from turn to turn, as a way to motivate what goods you want to sell.

Not a bad thought; but I do worry that David is right; that the Merchant becomes just an analogue of the Captain; forcing a player to “join the Merchant guild” on a long term basis (or even having an NPC merchant) might prevent “PR lookalike syndrome”...

Well, the market would want to buy different kinds of items. But let’s say one of the items the market wants to buy is “chairs”. The idea is that anyone who wants to sell chairs can do so, but you can’t sell infinitely many chairs to the market; if you try to sell 20 chairs, you’ll get a low payout per chair.

Yeah, it’s rather similar to “Res Publica”, which is really a deal-making set collection game. Each turn you say either what you want to receive, or what you want to give in a trade, then others can make deals with you for that kind of card. It works pretty well as a way of restricted deal making, and I like it for that here.

-Jeff

A better way of expressing this would be to say that I am advocating direct player ownership of production facilities, as opposed to the players “utilizing” production facilities. In that sense, I would say that I haven’t yet made the turn mechanic precise for my game, whereas yours appears to demand some sort of “role selection” system (in which you choose which facilities you'll use on a given turn).

As I mentioned in IM, I don’t favor the idea of both open and closed contracts, and in this game, I don’t favor the idea of closed contracts period -- or at least, not yet. The whole question is why closed contracts are needed in the first place. The best reason I can think of is to make deal making somewhat resistant to exact calculation, to give the game an “aha!” factor. But there are other ways to achieve this kind of secrecy element. One way was the “I’m buying this/I’m selling that” model; so you have a sense for what the other players are capable of producing/selling, and what the potential payouts the market can accomodate, and then it’s just a question of whether you succeed in outmaneuvering everyone to corner the market in the commodities you want to sell.

Perhaps; but it also presupposes that there’s some reason that every contract needs to be filled in some interest of fairness or completeness or whatever; why couldn't a contract just evaporate if it's not filled?

I think more interesting, potentially, is the idea I mentioned where the goods themselves decrease in value as time goes on -- a “spoilage” effect. I don’t know if it works here, but there could be an interesting game built around it. Maybe just a simple card game or something. Maybe the “San Juan” to this game’s “Puerto Rico”!

Yes, this is the exact detail that I’ve been sweeping under the rug thus far -- if each player chooses to run a couple of production facilities, what do you do about the facilities that aren’t currently placed on the board, but that players would depend on to supply components to, or buy components from, their own facilities? I haven't attempted to answer this yet.

I think that to a certain extent, you can let the market take care of this. Particularly if we used the “PR” approach of contracts increasing in value with time -- a contract that keeps getting more valuable will be strong incentive for a player to start a production facility to fill that contract. The bigger concern I have is the risk of opening a 2nd-tier factory without a corresponding 1st-tier facility providing its component materials; could that player buy “from the game”? If not, then it seems like it might be all too common for players to start the game by building 1st tier facilities and then work up to 2nd tier facilities. This might not be a bad thing. Conversely, it could just be that each player starts with >0 1st tier facilities and >0 2nd tier facilities. Perhaps, also, the total number of kinds of facilities needs to be restricted: maybe just 3 types of 1st tier and 3 types of 2nd tier; maybe we could go up to 4 of each type, but not much more than that.

Yes, that’s what I had in mind.

This is pretty much what I was advocating as well for the low-tier goods (in which the numbers on the contract cards would relate to the total number of goods sold by all players) and similar for the high-tier goods (except now the number relates to the number of goods being sold by any one player). The difference is, I think, that the market in Scurra’s game is relatively static -- it is determined by the track. Perfectly valid way to do things. But with the contract cards, you can have some variation in the value of different goods from turn to turn in a way that could drive trading and deal-making in an interesting way. Perhaps there could be a deck of “contract” cards that are not good-specific at all, and each turn, next to a board icon for each kind of sellable good, is placed a contract card, which card details the payouts depending on how many total goods are sold.

Or, if you had the potential to sell several different goods, but were restricted in how many you could sell.

That’s fine. I guess I don’t have a sense yet for what role, if any, the merchant should play in the game, and whether it should be “permanent”, like a factory/guild/whatever, or if it could change hands each turn. To me, the key to making a merchant meaningful is having multiple locations. In that sense, maybe a different contract card could be revealed in each town. Then, you still want to sell your chairs, if you have them, but the costs associated with traveling might encourage you to want to commission a merchant (or maybe, if you’re going to travel to sell your wares, it decreases the number of actions you can take/goods you can sell/whatever.)

Yes, this is what I’m advocating.

Yes, it’s not fleshed out. There could very well be a board; as I’ve mentioned, I envision the board consisting of several “towns”, with the merchant ability being powerful because of his ability to travel in between towns. But the board isn’t strictly necessary, it’s true.

I don’t think there’s any reason “my” version couldn’t incorporate such a positional aspect. I’m just advocating a higher level of ownership than you are. I agree with David, I don’t think it would work as well to have the revolve around having access to all the different facilities on the board; rather, I’m more interested in something where you have some facilities under your supervision, and you have to maximize the profit of *those* facilities specifically.

Again, this presupposes that I only have one tier 2 facility and that you only have one tier 1 facility. Maybe we both have one of each, and striking a deal with me this time will grease the wheels next time. I don't know yet. I don't claim that I've fully fleshed out a scheme in which deals are properly motivated. My only claim is that you can probably rely on the market economy to solve many of these sorts of problems (just like in real life) -- but perhaps not all. It's those cases that the market doesn't take care of that you need rules to legislate.

Careful, I never said this; there could be multiple instances of a given type of tier 2 facility. (or tier one facilities).

I don't have the negotiation system conceptualized yet, but again, this is part of the reason I advocated the "I'm selling X/I'm buying Y" construct, as it helps to answer these questions somewhat.

I assume this will be what I consider a "cash acquisition" game; cash is the currency and the VP commodity. Because there will be a heavy amount of deal making, it shouldn't have a serious runaway leader problem like many such games.

No, this is important -- you can either make, say, "paper", which you can sell to the system, or "lumber", which you can sell to me. So the low tier players are deciding whether they're going to make a consumer good or a good that they'll sell to other players. That said, it's quite possible that this consumer good idea won't work, and low-tier players will only be able to produce goods for the high-tier facilities. You may be right.

Yes, there could be more than one mill. I think that we may have to restrict a single player's ability to create a "matched set" of tier 1 and tier 2 factories; perhaps simply by forbidding you from placing more than one facility in a town. Thus, to "sell to yourself", you'll still need to pay "shipping costs", which may incentivize you either using the merchant or buying from a local supplier.

But it's not exactly the same; you could not own the facility but gain ownership of the item the facility produces for you. It's possible you're lumping the facilities in as "resources". While technically accurate, I think it's unhelpful to use that kind of language; let's consider "resources" to be things that can be expressed as little wooden cubes -- items that are bought and sold, and combined to produce "goods". Means of production, be they "guilds" or whatever, should be considered to be a separate entity.

It's a different game from what I have in mind. And I bet there might already be a game like this out there, although perhaps not. I think it would work, but it's not the game I have in mind.

I have heard, though I don't know if it's true, that expert Settlers players are pretty good card counters, so they pretty much know what everyone is holding at any one time. It's not the information that adds secrecy -- it's the difficulty of forecasting the actions of others when many options are available but only a few can be chosen. Again, gravitating to my "buying this/selling that" model, if we can each only sell one thing, and selling has a variable payout depending on how many total items are sold, then knowing what resources you have available to sell doesn't necessarily make the calculation of what you're actually going to sell easy. I don't think the game needs uncertainty with respect to what players have or what possible payouts are -- there is plenty of uncertainty that comes from the dual-problem of (a) I can only sell 1 item and (b) I don't know exactly which items you'll choose to sell, since we all choose that simultaneously.

See above. It's not a "secrecy" effect so much as a "resistant to 100% accurate calculation" effect.

Your concerns are quite valid, but again, keep in mind that I'm advocating a fairly limited number of kinds of facilities -- possibly as few as 3 or 4 in each tier. I don't deny that the potential problem of nonexistant facilities. I do think that it's solvable. What if, for example, there are 4 types of tier 1 facilities, and 4 types of tier 2 facilities, and at the start of the game, each player gets dealt one facility of each type. (And during the game, you can add more facilities). That would be the beginning of a solution to this dilemma, perhaps.

Hmm... I guess that may be true... that boils down to not knowing what your opponents have. You know what they have but you don't know which they're bringing to market.

Yes, exactly! You're seeing it now...

What do you mean by "hidden ownership of resources"? Are you advocating "public information that becomes hidden", a la shares in Acquire? I don't mind elements like this in games, but I do try to avoid them unless necessary in designing. I think that the murkiness of "what will he choose to sell" could be more satisfying than "what is he likely to produce, based on how well I can remember what he's holding"?

...skipping most of the "merchant" issues for now...

Again, there could be more than one player making chairs. Perhaps it's a "Fad Factory" situation where you make more chairs than you can sell, but you hold onto them hoping to sell them again later. This is another case where the "spoilage" effect could be really interesting. But I continue to suspect that will have to go in a different game.

I don't rule this out; in my head, I see a board with 4 (or so) towns, each of which produces one kind of raw material and each of which has spaces for 4-5 production facilities. (and each of which will get a demand card each turn, maybe) So, if you don't have your mill in a town that supplies wood, you'll need to pay to "import" it. This is where the "merchant" could come in; one of his abilities could be to more cheaply supply you with wood for your mill than if you had to pay "shipping costs". Maybe...

That's fine, but I have to say that I agree with David, that a game where any player can use any production facility is going to end up being very much like Puerto Rico in scope and feel. No doubt a game in "my" model will end up being like some other game, though I haven't figured out what yet. But I adamantly prefer a model where players own their own facilities. Should we agree to disagree and work on separate games then compare notes and see how similar ideas sparked two different games?

(It's possible I could be persuaded to a model where players are guild members and have access to multiple facilities *within that guild*. But a game where any player can use any facility probably only makes sense thematically if you push it all the way to the players simply being merchants, transporting goods to sites where they can be combined. And for reasons I've already mentioned, this idea, while valid, holds less appeal for me.)

-J

I disagree; the economic model is the system around which the deal-making system will be erected. What I’m saying is that I’m not committed to any particular model of interaction between players. That such a model can be realized, I’m very confident.

Perhaps; it certainly seems to be the case here, though it’s hard to say whether it’s a generally true statement. The key point of disagreement seems to be the sources of tension that we feel the game should emphasize.

But again, this is a bridge that can be crossed when it’s actually reached.

This really isn’t that difficult. Presumably, you simply can’t afford to build every production facility you might happen to want, so you have to make choices about which you’ll actually build. Given the choice of dealing with me for wood or investing in a Mill of your own, it may not be trivial at all.

Or rather, that’s the way you’ve chosen to see it; to me, the system isn’t by any means fleshed out enough to be able to say “something’s wrong” here. "Odd - sounding"? "You can only build one facility per town" is really not that troublesome; it's just a rule. It's like the rule in Carcassonne that "you can only place meeples on the tile you just placed." Every game depends on certain restrictions like this in order to work.

Again, I keep trying to talk about the economic model, and you come up with all these “yeah, buts” and I try to give examples of ways these could be resolved and you come up with “yeah, buts” for those. I’m afraid this conversation is becoming less helpful from my perspective. Not only are we not finding common ground, but we’re starting to denigrate each other’s ideas. I think it may be high time to part ways on this one.

Not hopefully -- you know what is in demand, contract-wise, before you choose what to sell. And yes, it’s key that you don’t have just one kind of facility.

Then, in that case, you probably wouldn’t sell Lumber. But again, in the example I suggested below, the game will start with every kind of facility in existence.

Because it’s not a 2-player game. In many games, making a deal that helps one other player in addition to yourself is a valid move if by making the deal you come out ahead of the other players who aren't involved in the deal. Let’s say, e.g, that “paper” has a low potential payout -- maybe $2 per unit, whereas there’s a very lucrative “chairs” contract that would give you $12 per chair, and for which you need "lumber" from me. So perhaps I can deal with you for, say, $4 per unit of lumber. I’m $2 ahead of where I’d be if I sold paper, and even if you come out slightly ahead in the deal (which depends on what you paid for the other components of the chair, etc), I come out ahead of other players.

You could level the same kind of complaint about any deal-making game. The key is that deals are made with an eye towards helping you relative to the non-involved players, and hopefully coming out close to even with the other involved players. I see no reason to think this kind of motivation for decisions couldn’t happen here.

My point is more that it’s usually not good to prop up a superfluous subsystem by adding additional subsystems. Adding rules and restrictions, on the other hand, are present in all games, because they’re essential to the game working. The rule in Carcassonne that forbids me from placing a farmer in a field that you own is an extra rule that’s essential to the working of the farmer mechanic. There are always going to need to be restrictions to make the game work. I don’t see why “you can only own one facility” per town or the like could possibly be construed as unnecessary or unreasonable.

And incidentally, I find the rhetorical device of trying to diminish a position by using one’s own words against one in this way to be irritating. Better, I think, to an assail an argument directly than to attempt to neutralize it by appealing to some contradiction with some prior statement by the speaker in a completely different conversation and context. It’s “gotcha!” argumentation; possibly valid, but more the purview of someone who wants to argue than someone who wants to reason.

And as you probably know about me, I don’t like working on a project for which there’s a close analogue already on the market. It’s just a matter of personal preference.

Come on -- poker is a completely different animal. In Settlers, you see what commodities people have drawn -- there’s no secret card drawing like in Poker. Furthermore, you can get some indication based on the kinds of deals people are attempting to make what they are holding.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t see any place for a “hidden resource” mechanic in this game. If resources are supposed to be on cards that are then taken into the hand and then become “hidden”, I’m afraid I just can’t support that idea at all. To me, it’s a shallow source of uncertainty, for reasons I’ve already explained.

But the crux of what makes playing German games interesting is that people don’t always behave in a predictable fashion. And again, I claim there isn’t an element of “should”-ness, if the contracts are graded by number sold. So I can see, if you have 10 paper, that you might *want* to try to fill the paper contract, but you may not choose to do so because of Bill’s stack of 6 paper that could saturate the market and cut your payoff; you may do something else instead. If you have two equivalent tier one facilities, it might not be obvious at all which you'd try to emphasize.

(b) is what I worry about more, that it might be an “I think that he thinks that I think” situation.

It’s certainly possible. But again, the contract payouts are variable and depend on what players choose to sell. So it matters a lot what others choose to do as to what payouts you might be able to get. This might cause you to want to do something “unpredictable”.

Ok, I see that now. I don’t like it. Is that an impasse?

I don’t follow this; are “production” actions being done secretly? If not, then I knew at one point what you were holding (either by having drawn them or by producing them); it’s just a question of whether I can remember.

Yes, this is certainly a possibility.

It’s like PR, to me, in the sense that all players have access to all of the different kinds of resources and production facilities at any time (in principle, anyway). In PR, it works thematically because you are managing all aspects of a plantation’s operation. In this game, it doesn’t work thematically, because no one can on one day be a miller, then a carpenter, then a printer. That’s why I said that it probably needs to be pushed all the way to a model where a player is a “merchant”, to save thematic integrity. But my concern there is that it becomes a fairly standard pick-up-and-deliver game.

Again, the crux of the tension I’m hoping for this game to create is the deal-making tension between producers of two different kinds of goods -- those that come from raw materials, and those that come from intermediate products. You’re talking about tension coming from having to navigate an economy that consists of two kinds of facilities. But in your model, the interaction between owners of different kinds of facilities is either non-existant, or else a complete afterthought -- you yourself can utilize any facility on the board. Whereas in my model, each player controls only a finite corner of the market, and must interact with the other players to negotiate and navigate the economy. In that sense, I see the game as being more of a deal-making game, and you see it as more of a pick-up-and-deliver game. I think both could be fine games. I don’t see much hope for reconciling them, since they’re quite different points of emphasis.

I’ll try to whip something up.

I mean that there might be multiple mills in different towns, and you, as a member of the mill guild, can use any of them -- but you can’t use the “carpentry” facility, as you could in your model. It would be basically the same as David’s game, but with a different guild structure and economic model.

I mean that the point of the game is no longer to try to make favorable deals with owners of other production facilities who either supply or purchase goods that you’re interested in buying or selling. Instead, it would be an excercise in manipulating the state of the board to your greatest pesonal advantage. Not saying the game would be “simplistic”, but rather, that it lacks the key element that inspired me to come up with this economic model in the first place.

Fair enough. Let’s call it quits, then, rather than trying to make two fundamentally unlike ideas fit together.

I haven't been thinking about this one very actively, so I'll have to read this thread again myself, but here are some thoughts I have about how I think the game could/should work; some of this may contradict some of what I've said before.

Two-tiered guilds There are two kinds of guilds/production facilities/whatever. The "low-level" facilities convert raw materials, which are acquired from the game, into mid-level materials, which are required as inputs for the "high-tier" facilities. The "high-tier" facilities take the mid-level resources, supplied by low-tier facilities, and convert them into sellable products, which are bought by the game system.

This, I think, is the very crux of this game design, and always has been. In that sense, I no longer think that low-tier guilds should be able to produce sellable products. The whole decision making tension relates to whether you want to interact with the other players on the supply side or the demand side. (or both, if you have multiple production facilities, as you probably will).

Selling How will players sell to one another? A promising solution to this comes from the "caravan" idea I had for SoT. How it would work here would be that the caravan's path would be laid out by some algorithm, then , as it traversed its path, you could place items for sale on the caravan, or buy items from the caravan. Perhaps you can also place orders for raw materials in some way or other. The caravan, I think, is very promising as a mechanic for indirect deal-making, which I think could be attractive in that it could prevent the long times associated with deal-making. I'm curious to see how the mechanic will work in Sands; I think it could work well here, also.

Presumably, decisions about what to produce are made in between the revealing of the caravan's route and the actual movement. So, if you know the caravan will pass through towns that contain both yours and Joe's mills, and end up in the town contain Frank's "carpenter", you have to decide whether you want to produce lumber in the hopes to sell to Frank, or paper to sell to a printer somewhere else (or perhaps each factory can only produce one kind of good, period, and you must choose which will actually produce...)

Contracts I think that the only contracts should be for the "high-tier" products. I think that contracts should probably be town-specific. Beyond that, I'm no longer sure how they should work, or rather, I'm not committed to any particular model of how they should work.

As I said, I'm not sure how these change the previous vision of the game I was advocating, but I think they lean towards an overall simplification of the system, and hopefully, an emphasization (?) of the guild model, which will be the centerpiece of the game.

-Jeff

Right, clearly, the game hangs on the players interacting. At this point, whether that should be cultivated by restrictions in what facilities they can build, or in how many facilities can produce per turn, seems like it's still an open question, and should probably remain so for now.

Sure, I think it could be fine. I'm mainly trying to avoid the "complete free-for-all" model, of games like Chinatown (which I like, but just not what this game should be); instead, I'm envisioning something restricted, like Bohnanza (not that we need to use Bohnanza's deal-making model, just that it should be restricted).

If using a caravan model, rather than an open marketplace where everyone just brings what they want to the market for other people to buy, then the spatial relationships become really important. This could be good if the economic model isn't enough for a game on it's own, but perhaps it's too much otherwise...

In other words, do we need a caravan mechanic? Or would an open market do?

I'm not sure; I think the caravan only makes sense in a game where the spatial elements of the different towns are important for some reason. Perhaps, for example, there's a region where lumber is plentiful, but which is connected less to the other towns, therefore it will be visited less by the caravans. This kind of stuff. Mainly, the caravan gives an easy way to answer the question "what am I selling?" But whether it also needs to "travel", is TBD.

Right, this was my thinking.

No, I meant "emphasization" -- the act of putting emphasis on something. Is there a noun that captures this? I can't think of one.

Yes, this could be an equally valid way to go. The reason I advocated the model I did was primarily symmetry -- the game system sells 3 goods (Wood, Pigment, Wool) and buys 3 (Furniture, Books, Cloth). I think it also has the advantage of streamlining the decision process. Say you're a miller: you only have two "target" end products in mind -- Books, or Furniture. Which path will be more lucrative for you to pursue this turn? Once you've decided, you produce accordingly. Whereas, if each good you produce could potentially go to two different end products, this might make the decisions more complex without making them more interesting. It remains to be seen...

Hey, this reads a little like a subtle "cease and desist" order! One thing I can say is that I know nothing about Elvencraft, so any similarities between this and your game are 100% coincidental.

I think that what should make this one easier to handle is that, in my mind at least, we're going to start with a fully symmetric resource tree. As opposed to something like Settlers, e.g., which is asymmetric; Wood+Brick -> Road, but there aren't a dozen other equivalent two-resource combos that lead to a product. Of course, it could be that some asymmetry is needed to spice the game up a bit, but the advantage of this model is that the asymmetry need not come from the resource tree; it could come from the supply side (one raw material is more plentiful, eg) or from the demand side (one high tier good is more lucrative, eg).

But yeah, coming up with "real world" stuff is hard. I have no idea what the correct name for a "dyer" is. The resource tree I came up with would likely only survive the playtesting stage; presumably the ad wizards would come up with something more compelling were this to ever get to the point where plausibility was going to be important!

-Jeff