First pass of a rough set of rules

So I think maybe the battle bag idea may complete the picture for me. Driving to my latest BGDW meeting I thought up these distinct areas of the game that would compose a single round of play:

Production Phase
Produce raw materials (5 colors of small cubes)
Produce high tech products (increasing the supply of them and lowering the potential value)

Market Phase
Add cubes to the market bag (If you have a better name please let me know)
Remove cubes from the market bag. This represents the demand for the high-tech products and therefore increases the potential value of some stocks.

Then players can buy or sell stock moving the actual value closer to the potential value.


PRODUCTION PHASE

Use your company influence to produce/collect raw materials (5 colors of small wooden cubes). Players will decide which factories will produce which materials and or take some from the docks.

Convert the raw materials into High Tech products. Still two thoughts on this:
1 - All the companies in the game (that you can buy stock for and potentially own) produce different flavors of temporal modules (time machines). This is appealing because this part of the game is cleaner. You don’t have to have separate rules / games for each product.

2 - There are 3 or more different types of devices and 2 or more companies that build each type. Here you can have more fun using different sci-fi high things throughout the game giving to different strategies and you still have the ability for two players to both go for the same type of toy and yet have controlling interest in different companies.

With either plan each company would be a certain color and the products would be large wooden cubes.

Creating the larger cubes would increase the supply of those particular types. Players will generate new products in secret and then reveal to see which have the most supply (go down the most in price) and which have the least (go up in price)


MARKET PHASE

Players will add product to the “Market Bag”. Once all have done so, someone will pull out some amount (10?) to show which companies are in demand currently. Their potential values will go up.

Then players can buy and or sell stock. Each stock trade will move the actual price closer to the actual.

There will be other reasons for the players to own stock other than just buying low and selling high. One thought is the highest stock owners sit on the board of that company and therefore have influence over their docks during the production phase.


All the while players will be able to break the rules using up some of the high-tech gizmos they have built previously. Like speed up or slowdown time with the a Temporal module.

Now I wonder how does the game end?

I think I can now hobble something together and start playing the different parts to see how they work.

Battle bag used for supply and demand?

Just a quick thought I had the other day while my 3rd grade son was learning about ratios for is math homework:

In a recent GDS (MERFOLK ZOMBIES) I thought up a battle system where the players took all their pieces at a location. Put them into a bag and drew out the ones that lived. Thinking that the more outnumbered you were the greater the odds you would have of being left in the bag and therefore dyeing.

Recently I thought about applying this bag to my Time Smugglers game.

Throughout the game players can add colored cubes or remove them. Either action will change the color ratio of the cubes still in the bag. I want to use the remaining ratio(s) to help determine the supply and demand functions for the game. If I can develop this more maybe it’s the center of the game that I have been waiting for.

I have to think about it more.