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Manufacturing Game Profit Tracking

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Alumidon
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Joined: 11/07/2012

Hello everyone. This is my first post on the forum. I've been working on a few games in parrallel, all at varying points in their progression. One game I've been working on in the for the past five months or so is a game about manufacturing widgets. In this game player balance when to invest in machinery, how to run those machines, how to ship the products, when to hire employees, and how much to sell those products for (with a blind bid against other players). Players balance these descisions against increasing demand and a lowering market prices.

The issue i'm running into is how players keep track of their profits (money). Currently, a turn takes about 20 seconds but it takes a player about another 35 seconds to add up how much money they spent. This makes the game much less fun. I've tried having tokens with a money value on them (red or green depending on if you have lost or made money) and players discard them (or take them in the case the player has less than $0) as each part of the turn is played. However, I find that because there are so many things that cost money each turn that it becomes equally not fun. I had the thought of attempting track progess in a way other than money but am not sure what the best way to do that might be. The thought I had is to add a sort of progress track and try to simplify the transactions. For example shipping costs by rail are currently $1 per unit where shipping by air is $3 per unit. These would simply turn into moving up or down 1 to 3 spaces on a progress track regardless of the number of units. This would also encourage players to take more risks and attempt to produce units faster to reduce shipping costs. My fear is that something like this will take away from the realism and turn players away.

Does anyone have any thoughts on better ways to do things? I realize it may be difficult to help without a better understanding of the game but thank you nontheless. The end solution may be to simplify the game more than I would like but I'm exploring my options.

~Alum

McTeddy
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Joined: 11/19/2012
My first thought would

My first thought would actually be to use play money. It's natural for a player to spend money and to receive it in return for success. Even if the game uses lots of transferring... most humans will find it easy to handle.

My second is that I'd have a money tracking board. These boards would have 3 or 4 lines of numbers (labeled 1-10). Each of these lines represents the ones, the tens, the hundreds, and possibly the thousands. You can use one small counter for each digit. If money can go negative, you could have a "+ or -" line on the far left.

The second idea is less natural to a player, but it definitely serves the purpose of keeping track of and counting money without the added parts.

Orangebeard
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Joined: 10/13/2011
Spread Costs

Hi Alum,

It sounds like there are a lot of decisions to be made in 20 seconds; could the decisions be broken out into phases in which each player completes the phase before anyone begins the next phase?

For example;
Phase 1 - Investment (hiring, new machines)
Phase 2 - Production (purchase of raw materials, wages)
Phase 3 - Transport (how many widgets to market? cost to ship?)
Phase 4 - Sales (establish price and units sold)

This would hopefully spread out the handling of costs over several turns so each individual player only makes 1 or 2 transactions every phase rather than 6 or more each turn.

Alumidon
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Joined: 11/07/2012
Re: Spread Costs

Thanks for in input Orangebeard,

I think spreading the costs out and segmenting the play into phases could be the way to go. Each player takes a turn choose what investments they would make, followed by each player producing / shipping units etc. The reason I am currently using different colored tokens instead of play money is because I would like players to be able to have negative money, representing an investment. Additionally, a money tracker may may be good for things like fixed costs. Since these are going to occure every turn and change less than other costs, it could be used as a reference and a time saver. Thanks again for the great feedback.

PenteVPM
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Joined: 09/07/2012
Recurring vs. one time costs

I don't know if this fits into your design, but it sounds like you have certain recurring costs (i.e. maintenance) and certain one time costs (i.e. investments). Would it be too complex to track separately what your recurring costs are and what your liquid assets (cash) are?

I'm envisioning two trackers: one that tells how much money your recurring costs are per turn (this would propably always be negative) and another that tells how much cash you have at any given time. You cash would be reduced each turn by the number shown on the first tracker. Now, investments could have two values: one telling the one time procurement cost in cash, and the other telling the recurring maintenance cost. Examples:

Machinery -10/-1 (you need 10 cash to buy machinery - after this, it costs 1 cash per turn to maintain the machinery)
Employees 0/-1 (you don't need cash to hire employees, but it costs 1 cash per turn to pay the wages)
Bank Loan +10/-1 (you get 10 cash, but you must pay the interest (as long as you have the loan))

In this model, you could have negative maintenance costs, but not negative cash.

truekid games
truekid games's picture
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Joined: 10/29/2008
My first thought was using a

My first thought was using a track, with a marker for your start and end points.

A second idea that other games have used (like Brass) would be to have a specific "spent" box or mat, where you put all the dollars you spend in a given turn (and empty the box at the end of the turn).

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