Yesterday we had our second test of a few modifications to the game rules. The following modifications were tested:
–No concealed biddings between Major Joint owners during Voting. Main owners of the targeted company and surrounding companies get two votes each, and Major Joint owners get one vote each. The change makes the Voting go a bit quicker. It also makes it possible to make more informed decisions when handing Bribes to other players.
–No negative revenue. All negative revenue are changed to ‘zero revenue’ – the affected companies simply earn zero, no matter how few or how many Investments or Connections the company has. This makes the calculations a bit easier and speeds up the Revenue Quarter.
–New system for deciding turn-order. A concealed bidding determines the turn-order in the beginning of each year, as before. But the highest bidder chooses one of several ‘turn tokens’ instead of simply becoming starting player. There are as many turn tokens as there are players. Each tokens has a number, from 1 to 5 if it is a five player game. The turn order during the year will go in the order that the numbers indicate. If she/he chooses ‘turn token nr 1’ she/he will indeed be the staring player during this year. But the player may choose any number, and thereby decides freely what number in the turn-order she/he wishes to be. The second highest bidder chooses afterwards, then the third highest and so on. All players pay the bids to the bank. In case of equal bids, the order for those players are decided in a random manner (e.g. with rock-paper-scissors or maybe we could include some clever randomizer with the game).
More details about these changes will come later. When we have tweaked these rule modifications we will start testing some additional changes as well, including the so called ‘Bonus cards’. We would like to have some external testers for later testing. We have already got some people interested in helping us with that, but more testers are welcome – just post a comment or send us an email at info@dystopolis.se if you would like to test the game further on.