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To me, a share-holding game must have three features: a mechanism for players to acquire shares of different companies, a mechanism for players to affect the values of these shares, and a mechanism for players to gain money or victory points for their shares. Essential to these three features are companies, players, a bank, and rules of cash flow between these three parties. There are many different ways these features and elements can be combined.
In Chicago Express, for example, players gain money for their shares during a dividend payout fixed at the end of every round. In Imperial, players gain money for their shares when the company (country) takes a specific action to pay out (Investor phase), and the company (not the bank) pays the player.
In Chicago Express, players acquire shares and affect the values of these shares by taking different and separate actions in a round. In Imperial, share acquisition happens immediately after dividend payout in the Investor phase. Value manipulation involves a series of complicated moves.
In Modern Art, which is a share-holding game in disguise, share acquisition and value manipulation happen together, i.e., whenever a painting is sold, someone acquires the painting and the value of that artist's paintings is affected.
Usually, companies pay money to the bank to increase the value of their shares, but in Airlines Europe the player pays money to the bank to build routes for a company.
The possibilities are endless. There were many ideas I wanted to explore, but I settled on three to focus on in my first train game.
First, I wanted to introduce a snowball effect by having the bank pay both the players and the company during a company's dividend payout. In many train games, if a company is doing well, it doesn't directly stand to gain from it other than possibly encouraging players to invest more money into the company when bidding for its shares. In Iberian Rails, a company is directly rewarded during payout, because the bank also pays the company for the number of cities to which it is connected, so a company that starts the game by doing well, gets more cash for its first payout, which gives it more capital to build tracks, which increases its second payout even more, etc.
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Testing the concepts on another game's map (Stephensons Rocket)
I wanted to create this snowball effect not as an exercise for players to optimize the "snowballing growth" of their companies, but to give them a choice: to snowball or not to snowball at all. In order to maximize the snowball effect, a player needs to push their company to the maximum number of connections before triggering the company's next payout. However, this requires time because spending money to build tracks can take multiple turns. On the other hand, triggering "premature" payouts has benefits as well since they can be used to get an early and timely infusion of cash to the controlling player, such that they are able to buy valuable shares that other companies are about to put up for sale. These payouts could also be used to trigger a share auction of that company while other players are still low on cash. This brings us to the second idea I wanted to explore.
I wanted to combine dividend payout and share auction of a company into the same action. In Iberian Rails, shares are "pre-diluted". The total value of a company depends on the number of cities to which it is connected. The value of each share is the total value of the company divided by the number of shares that company has, including both sold and unsold shares. This means that companies with fewer shares issue "bigger shares". When you buy a share from a company with three shares, you are essentially gaining a third of that company's income. When you buy a share from a company with five shares, you get only a fifth of that company's income.
This effect is similar to the mechanisms in Chicago Express and American Rails in which companies with fewer shares have an inherent advantage. Companies with fewer shares have a similar advantage in Iberian Rails, but they also have a significant disadvantage: the number of shares limits the number of potential payouts because during the game a company pays out only when it sells a share. By combining share auction with dividend payout, I turned the share count of a company into a double-edged sword, with potentially positive and negative effects. Companies with more shares are slower to pay back to their investors, but have more potential for long term growth.
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Galicia Express
Side Note: Originally, the action was payout for a company, followed by an auction for one of that company's shares. This resulted in controlling players oftentimes holding onto control of their companies because they can use the money just paid out to win the auction for the share, so we changed the share auction to happen before payout.
Finally, for my last idea I took a page from Modern Art, which is special not only in that it doesn't feel like a share-holding game, but also in that the companies (artists) never hold any money. Instead, the player responsible for selling a particular share (painting) earns the money. This creates a separate incentive for players to grow a company, i.e., not as a shareholder, but as a potential share auctioneer. I wanted to incorporate this option into Iberian Rails, so we allowed players to auction shares in two ways: open auction or closed auction. In an open auction, the winning bid is paid to the company, as is typical in a train game. In a closed auction, however, the winning bid is paid to the player controlling the company!
The Characters
The characters didn't make their way into the design until a year into its development. Initially we experimented with a musical-chair type auction (a là Amun Re, Vegas Showdown, Cyclades, Evo) for ability cards at the start of each round. The ability cards are mostly one-time use effects. For example, a Ghost card allows a player to build without paying the occupation fee for one turn, then the card is discarded.
But these seemed to accomplish less with more fiddly rules, so we reduced the ability cards to characters. This not only allowed us to keep the same special abilities available every round, but to incorporate different actions for each character. Originally, a player could choose between holding an open auction, holding a closed auction, or building tracks at a standard cost (10, 20, 40, 60, 90) for their action. Now, the characters limit what a player can do. Some characters cannot do closed auctions, some characters cannot do open auctions, different characters build tracks at different costs, etc.
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Banker, Ghost, and Hotelier
Instead of an auction which took too long, not to mention that the game itself already has enough auctions, we wanted a shorter mechanism for character selection that was still challenging to the players. Through a stroke of luck, the character row mechanism came to me as an epiphany.
I didn't know it at the time because Terra Mystica hadn't come out yet, but the character row mechanism would turn out to be similar to Terra Mystica's mechanism for selecting bonus tiles, in that a player holds onto their character from the previous round until it is their turn to choose a new character, thereby preventing anyone choosing before them from selecting the character in their hand.
The difference lies in that in Terra Mystica, the bonus tiles don't have an inherent order. The selection order is determined by the order in which players pass for the round. In Iberian Rails, however, the characters have an inherent order determined during set-up. The selection order depends on the characters themselves, so characters have inherent "relative positions" with respect to each other based on their position in the character row.
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Character row
Balance
With the core concepts down, we still had a lot of testing and balancing to do. Here are examples of what we did to balance the game.
Characters
We created many characters and had to spend a lot of time testing and balancing them. When people think of balance, they usually think of making the characters equally powerful. Obviously this is a big part in our development, but we also tried to balance the degree of specificity of the characters. On one hand, we don't want the characters to be too general and multi-purpose. If all characters were "jacks of all trades", the exercise of choosing characters would be somewhat superfluous. On the other hand, we don't want the characters to be too specific. If the characters are useful only in super specific circumstances, then the gameplay would be too constrained/scripted.
So we tried to make the characters general enough to be useful in a number of situations, but specific enough to be meaningfully different from each other in a simple way. While some characters are more specific than others (e.g., the Bureaucrat), and some characters are more general purpose (e.g., Auctioneer, Inspector), we feel like we did a good job overall at balancing the degree of specificity of the characters.
Map
The map is slightly abstracted to efficiently create a compacted emergent gameplay. We also tried to balance the map for the different companies. Now, some companies are stronger than others, which is okay because an auction game is self-balancing. However, we feel pretty good about the spread of strength across the companies. For example, the weakest company is way stronger than Austria in Imperial and probably slightly stronger than Germany. (Yes, I understand that the purpose of Austria in Imperial is not its own strength for growth.)
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Early map, which was too big in size
Company Turn Order
Unlike in Imperial and even more so than in Chicago Express, companies in Iberian Rails are characterized by their numbers of shares. A company with three shares has a very different purpose than a company with six shares. When balancing the companies, we factored in not just the above-mentioned map, but also the share number and their turn order in a round.
For example, Gaudi Ruell has only three shares, so it is a weak company in terms of long-term growth. However, it does have one upside — potential infusion of cash early in the game. (Companies with fewer shares pay back more quickly.) To complement that, Gaudi Ruell is first in turn order so that investors can get their cash from Gaudi Ruell in time to invest in other companies that might also be selling shares in the same round. Moreover, the geography of Gaudi Ruell's starting location also makes it viable as a 3-share, early growth company.
Long-Term vs Short-Term Strategies
There are two general ways to win a shareholding game. I call the first way the constructive strategy: Build up value in a company and make a killing profit from there. I call the second way the opportunistic strategy: Cash out at every opportunity without caring for the long-term prospects of one’s companies.
We tried to balance the effectiveness of these two strategies. Iberian Rails has elements that facilitate the opportunistic strategy (the closed auction, the Mafioso, the Hotelier, etc.) and elements that aid the constructive strategy (the open auction, the Engineer, the Bureaucrat, etc.). These elements, in conjunction with the rates in the payout table, are all adjusted to balance the two approaches of earning value from one's shares.
Be it holding an open auction versus a closed auction or connecting a railway to new cities versus to your own hotels, the better options depend on the situation and how you use it.
Hotel
This is very specific. Early on in development, the Hotelier allowed a player to place one hotel. However, we tried different rates for connecting to a hotel, and it was very difficult to balance. A certain rate would make hotels too weak, and a slightly bigger rate would make them too strong. In the end, we went with a lower number but with two hotels. Timing-wise and spatially, the income from hotels is much more balanced this way.
Testing at the final stages of development
Advice for First-Time Players
Now that Iberian Rails is finally finished, we hope players can enjoy it. Here are three general tips for beginners:
• Gaudi Ruell should be an early game investment. You need to get returns on your GR investment quickly and divert that money into other companies. In three hundred games, we have seen a player win by riding GR until the end of the game once.
• Speaking of early investments, it takes a couple of games to know how much to bid. You don't want to blow all your money on a share and railroad company only to let other players leech off of your investment by getting another share from the same company for way less. On the other hand, players get return on their investment much faster in Iberian Rails than they do in some other train games (e.g., American Rails), so you need to invest in something or you'll get left behind once those returns start coming in for other players. For reference, winning scores are usually between 500 and 1500 pesetas.
• Lastly, picking roles is a big part of the game, and the character row mechanism can be very restrictive. Not being able to pick a specific character in a particular round may derail your plan for the entire game. Pay attention to the order of the character row so that you can "navigate" it successfully.
Tony Chen
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