Game including transport

Have you looked into the game Puerto Rico?

i am also thinking about this ..
please check this link this gives more helps you in your problem.
http://www.playhub.com/free-games/transport.html
Thanks

Hi,

I'm a big fan of The Settlers, the video game. I've been looking for board game mechanics similar to transportation in The Settlers with no luck. My conclusion is that you have to either remove transportation limits in terms of capacity and transport duration (that is, once you have a boat you can just move resources around from place to place just as if they were adjacent), OR make sure the player doesn't get an incentive from microoptimizing the transportation of resources and that this transportation doesn't get repetitive (I mean the player shouldn't have to transport the same combination of resources 10 times in a row). First approach might ruin your game mechanics, while the latter is very difficult to implement without a lot of overhead from the player's point of view. Another concept that I am currently trying to build upon in order to create The Settlers like feeling is using what I call "continuous production" where a "cube" is not a resource, but instead it is a stream of resources. The concept can be a bit confusing since I only saw it in only one game and even there it was a bit differently used. What it means? Say you take a "wood" from woodcutter and bring it to a sawmill, then you get a board which you transport via your ship to a different location where you need the board. This board now is not a simple board, but it means that you've established a line of production and transportation such that you keep getting boards in the new location every turn. I know it's really complicated when it comes to stockpiling; when you're producing one board per round and you need 2 boards to build a building but you only have one board resource token, so as you can see, the concept is still far from usable, but I'm working on it.

If you're thinking about designing a game similar to The Settlers (like I'm trying), even if you replace all different tools with a more generic "tool" resource, you still end up with many many resouce types (wood, board, stone, grain, food, flour, coal, iron, weapons etc). My idea was to use cubes of different color but man, there's a lot of colors!

Agreed, those don't make much sense.

Yes, it's like a trade route, but you should be able to change it every round if you want to (that may involve moving around lots of cubes, but hopefully you won't have to adjust the routes very often (this could solve the multiple destinations issue. I was thinking all buildings produce/process at same speed, but some can be upgraded to process more products at the same time, and other can produce 2 units out of 1 resource and so on. I got most aspects figured out but there are still some bad things that need fixing. The way I see it, it might not be the right approach for you. I tried Neuland (have you seen it?) and I liked it at first but then it got a bit repetitive. Half of the time you "produce one food", then you either "use food to produce wood" or "use food to mine".

For resources coming in pairs you can use say a cube and an octagon, I also thought about that. I ended up with about 16 resources in 10 colors, and about as many building types. I see two ways here: you either leave out some of them to the point where they are manageable (or to the point where you only end up with just "food" and "resources" and then probably "soldiers"), OR you keep everything and target your game to a very specific group of players. Either way, make sure your game doesn't lose its beauty ;)

If it's possible, you can also try a different approach not involving wooden pieces at all (I have seen this in a game somewhere): have buildings face up and when you use the good they produce you just flip them upside down to mark the building being used up. I don't know how well this could be fit in this game, but it might help.

For transportation you can use the idea in "Imperial" - each boat can transport one unit every turn. If many boats are involved then you could flip them on the side once used and restore them at round end.

Hope this helps.

I guess it depends on how many resource types and how many resources there are. If you manage to keep the numbers low then it wouldn't be such a big trouble for the players. If the number of resources is low then you can forget about trade routes and instead add a "produce and process" phase each turn. You could have a penalty of changing routes, like for example the changed routes don't operate for one turn, but this might not integrate well with the theme and could also make things move too slow.

I find Neuland a very nice game. Even though there's very little luck and it can get repetitive, it's a nice concept and we play it from time to time. I think it would get very slow in 4 players, but the concept is very good. It uses a transportation cost for moving around resources for large distance, and there's also the idea of time where you pay time to do actions. The more actions you do the more time passes and so the other players can do more actions too.

I was actually giving some rough numbers, there might be only 5... I got other resource types inspired from other games (like clay and brick). I occasionally play the game versions 2 and 3 (you should be able to find it on bestoldgames.net and use dosbox).

My thoughts the same with money and global fluctuating market. Leaving out military units could be a good idea if you're looking for an economic game. This will also greatly reduce player interaction so be careful not to end up with a multiplayer solitaire game.

No ideas. Also, different shape of same color can be a problem when pieces are far away from the player (say the player cares about what resources the other player has) because they are hard to distinguish especially in bad lighting conditions. Just something to keep in mind. You could use slightly different colors instead of same color (like red/orange, white/gray).

You can constrain production like you said. An upkeep cost is a good idea (I also use it in my design) so you have to pay each round for used ships/crew. Again, you can use the time system in Neuland so that if a ship takes 3 time you don't need to take 3 turns. Or, similar to Stronghold (if you played it), time is a resource and you spend time tokens to do actions (action point allowance system) but there are some downsides.

I understand you're going to have many little islands. I played the Anno video game series (Anno 1404 is the latest one) and there's even a board game called Anno 1503. I didn't play the board game but video game was very interesting for me. In a nutshell there are many islands and you can only grow/harvest certain resources on each of them. Player has to use ships to move things around, and so they use trade routes like "this ship moves iron from here to there, and salt from there back here). There usually is a main island which you try to develop by building a large city, and the other islands work like colonies. The video game gets very difficult towards the end when you have lots and lots of resource types and need to make sure you don't run out of a resource or your civil buildings will devolve and problems cascade. I think it's work checking it out if you haven't seen it already.

For another model of commodities, routes, and transports, I wonder whether any of Mayfair's Rail games (British Rails, EuroRails, India Rails, etc.) might provide you with some useful ideas -- or any other railroad game.

Also, if you're going to have commodities differentiated by color, you might consider adding shape to that as well, or some other means by which folks who are color-blind can differentiate them.