Wooden Shoes & Iron Monsters

yes, no, maybe so. That sums up this game for me. There's a bunch of interesting stuff... but the time to play my first game was too long (which is an odd statement for me). Will take another play or three to have a real opinion, but... there are other games that deserve those plays more.

Each of these Winsome designs feels like another puzzle to figure out. That effects my rating. May go up (won't go down), if I grasp the puzzle on this one.

This is not an obvious or transparent game. Quite opaque in fact. Lots of emergent and relatively short-lived alliances, but unlike Wabash Cannonball and Pampas Railways, the cost for breaking a partnership is MUCH higher than the value of preserving it. This produces an odd tension with very disjoint Nash equilibria.

There is some fiddliness with income/bonus calculation each turn, but it is easily solved. Solution: Have each director keep track of his company's base income and new track bonus income on the portion of the board before him as the turn goes along (as I play with a wet erase markers and a perspex sheet over the board this is easy to do). As a result the dividends/disbursement phase is a rapid process of payouts against that sum.

The basic share/payment/dilution/turn_order pattern is delightful. Really really delightful. The layering of share values and dividends into the grouping companies is also particularly sweet. This is a clear progenitor of Wabash Cannonball (along with Pampas Railroads): bigger, hairier, nastier, and filled with knives.

Two false starts and one full game later. Wowzers. The share auction is odd. The game is remarkably good too. Probably not great, but very good. Notably perplexing. Great opportunity for hosage.

Update: One more play. My previous concerns about the share auction being broken are simply wrong. Concerns about solvability are also clearly false. It is much more subtle than it at first seemed. The control and determination of when the auctioning round will end and which player has how many shares is interesting and curious. The incentive balance there is very discontinuous/disjoint. The incentive gaps between players are quite surprisingly large and not at all obvious. More interestingly the cost for one player to bid a share's value up can be (and usually is) dramatically lower than the cost for another player to bid it up. This can make for a very strange and somewhat chicken-esque auction round once the players catch on. Similarly the possibility for a training player to come in and snipe against a previous player's large investment is very powerful.

For 3 players I strongly suspect that the first one and a half turns are programmatic. From there things start to diverge strongly. I think. Maybe.

In short this is not an obvious game. Oddly, much of the real decision and game-turning power is invested in the players with the last cash -- the player with the least cash. The more players use their cash to better their position, the more they also allow trailing players to tap into their investments and suck some juice off. Very curiously powerful with quite odd incentives. Among other things consolidation into a single company, or perhaps two, becomes very valuable.

I've won all my games so far, usually by a roughly 2:1 margin. Each time I've suffered through the early and mid-game and then suddenly converted in the endgame into a money making powerhouse. I still don't quite understand how, not at sufficient level to controllably do it again next time, but I'm starting to get an idea.

Update: Now at a solo play, two games with 3 players and one 4 player game. I've still won every game I've played, usually by roughly double the next player's score. This is annoying. I don't think I'm playing that well; I expect I'm simply making less grevious errors than the other players, and in particular am predicting the end-game and the resulting conversion of player-order importances and cash/bid implications better than my opponents. This may be a carry-over from my many plays of Wabash Cannonball.

Current view: This is a good but not great game. It appears to have a strong first player advantage which is hard but not impossible to break unless the remaining players emergently collude.

Initial rating is 8, probably 8.5. I might go up to as much 9. It may also drop half a point. Very unclear. I suspect that 8-8.5 will be the final resting place.

Update: No, the game is not solvable and the first player only has an advantage if the other players let them have an advantage. Reviewed: http://kanga.nu/~claw/blog/2008/05/17/corrupt-beneficence/early-experience-wooden-shoes-iron-monsters/

Update: Still unbeaten. I'm keeping this at an 8 (may drop to 7.5), not due to any great failing of the game as designed, but more simply because the added layers of chrome (NS, privates, polders etc) are distracting, mostly useless and the terrain vagaries of the board too frequently lead to unintentional/unwelcome side-effects in the later game. While I've not played it yet, I expect West Riding to score the 8.5 a the ne plus ultra of the series when I finally get it to the table.