Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Quick RR thought

The significance of the Largest Network is an idea that I think drives a lot of interesting stuff in Reading Railroad - you get more tiles faster if you build all over the board, not next to your existing network. So rewarding a player for their largest network is a perfect balance for that, but how to reward it?

The original/current rule is that you can't use more City tiles in the endgame than you have cities in your largest network. This is a great idea, and will likely remain to the final version of the game. I've been pondering other potential rewards instead or in addition to that, such as...

* Earn 1vp per city in your largest network
* When building words during the game, you can only use as many resource letters as you have City tiles in your largest network.

That last one just occurred to me - might it give players incentive to build 1 bigger network, so they can make bigger words and earn more Coin? Would it only effect the 'wordsmith' who will be able to make bigger words? Is it important to force the wordsmith to build a big network?

The reason it occurred to me was because I was thinking about the possibility of a player ignoring City tiles altogether and simply going all-out for Coins. That player would want to get some city tiles in order to increase their Tile income and make bigger words, but after a while they might just ignore the board altogether, which is kind of boring. Maybe that's only bad if it proves to be a winning strategy...

Anyway, it was just an idea. I don't think I'll monkey with that particular mechanic until several other things are worked out.

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