Designer DAILY Diary: Castles of Mad King Ludwig I

Mansions of Suburbia
A building game for 2-5 players

Updated Rules: May 4, 2013

MoS is a tile laying building game in which each player is trying to build the most opulent, large, and over-the-top mansion possible. Players are contractors, looking for the best deals on rooms.

Contents:
160 Room tiles of all shapes and sizes
50 Hallway/Stairway tiles
32 Shape cards
1 Contract Board
$XX in money
Start Player token
20 End Game Goals
10 Player Challenges

Setup:
Each player receives one Foyer and $30 (thousand) in cash. Place the Foyer in front of each player. Randomly determine a Start Player.

Place the Contract Board in the middle of the table, and place the hallways/stairs on their spaces there.

First Round:
The start player draws cards equal to the number of people playing, and places a building tile of the sizes drawn on the Contract Board at whatever prices he chooses.

Each player (including the Start Player), starting from the player to your left of the Start Player chooses one of the rooms or a hallway/Stairs and pays you for it. If they pass, they receive $5 and you receive nothing. When it comes to your turn, you pay the bank for the tile/upgrade you choose. If you pass, you receive $5 from the bank. Unselected tiles get $1 placed on them. Then the start player moves to the person on the left.

Subsequent Rounds:
The start player draws cards equal to the number of people playing or the number of empty spaces on the contract board, whatever is less, and places a building tile of the sizes drawn on the Contract Board at whatever prices he chooses. If there are buildings on any of those spaces, he may move them to a different price before placing.

Placing Rooms:
When it is your turn to take a room, you have the following choices:
• Buy a room and place it.
• Buy a Hallway/stairs and place it.
• Pass.

If you buy a room or hallway/stairs, you must place it in your mansion using the following rules: A door from the new room must align with another door of a room already in your mansion that can be traced back to the Foyer. New tiles may never overlap each other. You may align doorways to walls, as long as you follow rule #1 above.

Game end
The game is over immediately after the round in which the last room has been purchased. Players determine the value of their Mansion plus any cash on hand. The player with the highest overall value wins!

For the nerds out there: Money Flow at the Macro Level
When you're playing a game that has various resources, you might be aware of how the resource amounts change during the game. In Castles of Mad King Ludwig, you really have two resources: Money and Rooms. Money (indicated here in $, though technically in the game it is German Marks) appears to be in constant flux, with three out of four turns (in a four-player game) resulting in cash outflow, and the turn when you're a Master Builder resulting in inflow (though not always). There are some exceptions to this, such as if you decide to forgo purchasing a room and instead take $5, or when you complete an outdoor room and bank an extra $10 that turn. As a player, you have to budget correctly during your outflow turns so that you have money on the third of those turns to be able to purchase a room, with the assumption that on your inflow turn you'll make up the difference.

As a game designer, I have to look at both the player's money flow experience as well as the overall game's money flow. The overall game money flow is more important initially because it will impact the players' money flows directly. What I need to know is how much money is in the game each turn. There are quite a few variables, but all of them are fairly manageable and reasonable assumptions based on averages can be made.

First off, there is (in a four-player game) exactly $60 available. At the end of turn 1, there will $60 - whatever the Master Builder pays for his room (since his money goes to the bank). The average spent by the Master Builder is not necessarily the average price of the seven available rooms ($15+$10+$8+$6+$4+$2+$1, or $46, divided by seven spaces is $6.57). Instead, the average skews up slightly, with an average of $16 given to the Master builder, for an average of $30/4, or $7.50. But the Master Builder spends more than this, averaging about $9 for purchases on their turn (partially because buying expensive rooms on your turn as Master Builder is better strategically than giving that higher price to a competitor). So an average of $9 leaves the game each turn, which means at the end of turn 1 there is $51 left (on average...of course that actually amount is impossible on the first turn, as only one room can be bought and $9 isn't an option). But there's also the addition of money that is placed on unbuilt rooms, which typically on the first turn will be $3 ($1 on each of the three unbuilt rooms). So the money at the end of turn #1 is $54, down $6 from the opening amount of $60.

If that's all the game did with money, the cash would slowly siphon out of the game until at the end of turn 10 there would be no money left in the game (which would be bad). However, two other things bring money back into the game: completing Outdoor rooms (at $10 each) and players who skip building in order to get $5. There are eleven Outdoor rooms available, and assuming a typical game where each player builds twelve regular (not hallway/stairs) rooms (for a total of 48 rooms out of the available 75 built), seven of those outdoor rooms will be built each game, for a total of $70 put into the game. An average game has 14.5 turns, which means ($6*14.5) $87 is taken out during the course of the game, but $70 is put back in, for a net loss of $17 during the game, resulting in $43 between all the players.

Of course, players always have the option to take $5 on their turn instead of buying/placing a room, so each time they do that it adds $5 back into the money pool. Players average one "skip" turn like this every two games, or .5 per player per game, or two skip turns for all players each game, resulting in an additional $10 each game...or so it would seem. However, a skip turn brings $6 into the game, not $5, because each player, in skipping her turn, leaves another un-purchased tile which receives $1. So now we're at $12 for skipped turns, which is added to the $43 above for a total of $55, still $5 short of the $60 players started with.

There's one other variable at work here: the purchase of stairs or hallways instead of a regular room; each one of these purchased results in an additional $1 entering the game, and wouldn't you know it, but an average of five stairs/hallways are purchased each game (more enter the game via the Corridor reward when the Foyer or a set of stairs is completed, so this number might seem low at first). Add that $5 to the $55 and you end up with...$60.

Real world conditions will quite often jump in the way and make each game's total cash available by the players less or more than this amount, and as you might expect, an abundance of cash in the Master Builder's hands will often result in more money leaving the game. But this is auto-correcting, just like the money that stacks up on various rooms throughout the game. (Keep in mind that the $60 includes any money sitting on rooms under the contract board.)