Game: Veld Railroads

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CortexBomb — 2006-10-25T20:25:26+00:00

"Cover" for Veld

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slowcorner — 2006-10-05T17:59:10+00:00

Round 3-ish. CMRC was neutered early. Big Blue and Natal would later hogtie Johannesburg to geld the ZAZM as well.

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slowcorner — 2006-10-05T12:54:54+00:00

Late game of Veld Railroads (with Michael and Sean) in all its mighty Winsome glory! The game actually comes packaged in a wrinkly paper bag with grease spots. OK, not really.

Thread: Session Report

Gola — 2004-11-30T20:05:22+00:00

On Saturday the 27th we had our long-awaited follow-up Veld Railroads game. My fellow players were, clockwise from my left, Chris, Marty McMartin, Eric Poolman and Joe Lee. This was my third play and everyone else's second, though Joe and Chris's initial play was over a year ago.

I had done a fair amount of thinking about the game since last month's trip to the Veld (see http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/60243 ), and, while I was curious to see if an anti-CMRC strategy would work, I was more interested in winning the game with the least amount of fuss and bother possible, so I decided to focus on getting myself on the Cape Midland Railway Company board of directors. Overall it seemed like the safer bet than to attempt to bolt one of the other lines to Johannesburg and shut red out of the central hub, as there was no guarantee that another player would join an antiestablishment crusade, and moreover if I was unable to blockade red from Jo'burg due to some bad timing I would have sunk a lot of my precious starting capital into a white elephant.

Obviously, the most favorable situation for me would be one in which not too many people would have the exact same plan as I did, and luckily this did turn out to be the case in Saturday's game. Listed below are the buyers and approximate purchase prices for the initial shares of each of the five lines (excluding the ZASM, which opens mid-game).

CdFM (black): Eric, low twenties
CSAR (green): Chris, mid-twenties
NRC (brown): Eric again, low or mid-twenties
CTR&D (blue): Joe Lee, 20
CMRC (red): Martin, 40

You'll note that I ended up with none of the IPOs, though this was something that I had foreseen as a possibility and was not overly concerned about; I knew that I would most likely be able to offer stock on my first turn, and considering everyone else's expenditures I saw that I might be able to get the second red stock for less than 40, thus putting me in a better position than Martin. Only one person had enough money to bid up the red stock to the point where I wouldn't have the advantage, and that was Joe Lee. Would he interfere? Naturally, yes. He bid the share up to the mid-thirties but then dropped out, thank God.

The result of this chain of events, however, was that Joe was now the player with the most money, and on his next turn he offered up the third red stock and was able to get it for even cheaper than I did. Nuts! It all highlights one of the interesting aspects of the early game, though, which is that you must invest money to get ahead of the curve but you must also hold enough cash in reserve so that you can bid up subsequently offered shares in your train lines so that no latecomers get a free ride.

Elsewhere on the board, Eric Poolman was trying to execute the Stick It to the Man strategy that I had eschewed via the Caminhos de Ferro Mocambique, and he offered up a second black share in the hopes that someone would join him in sending the CdFM to Johannesburg to lock out the red menace. Chris answered the call, but his contribution to the cause was not particularly generous; he bought the stock on the cheap and left the company somewhat underfunded for its purposes. To make matters worse, Chris didn't spend his turns building black track but instead chose to focus his attention on his own company, the Central South African Railway. Unfortunately for Chris, the green line was cut off from the greater part of the board when Martin steered the red line on a nasty detour through Bethlehem and into Tweeling. Singe!

Meanwhile, Chris's outlay of funds meant that I once again had the most money at the table, and so I put the fourth red stock up for auction and was able to snag it for around the same price that Joe had paid. I still had to worry about the final share, however; if Joe offered it up and was able to buy it, he would be in the lead, no question--he would have two red stocks and one blue, and he had already built up the blue line to be a good earner, even if it now had nowhere to go. Fortunately for me, a crisis situation had developed by the time his turn rolled around again, which was that black was almost at the gates of Johannesburg. Joe chose to pay dividends, ending the second action track and opening the border between the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic so that I could spend my turn jacking red into Jo'burg. Naturally, I did so, and this also had the happy consequence of allowing me to gain a little on Joe funds-wise, as my two red shares paid out more than his one red and one blue. Our bank accounts were soon put to the test: on his next turn Joe offered up the final red share. Up and up the price went, until finally Joe's well ran dry at $36. I took the stock for $37--all that I had.

We were at this point not quite a third of the way through the game, but my one extra dollar had allowed me to take a significant lead. If I only kept pace with the table, there was no question who would be finishing first. The competition still had some fight in them, though; when the yellow line came into being, Martin and the others jumped in with both feet and turned it into the #2 company. The plucky Zuid Afrikaannsche Spoorweg Maatskappy ended up monopolizing all five connections into a developed Pretoria and then pulled off both regional builds. Wow! Meanwhile, Chris's patient monomania for developing the green line had quietly turned it into a strong earner as well and so he was slowly building a financial empire of his own.

Luckily for me, by the time that the yellow and green lines had ripened into fat and juicy railroads I had plenty of cash to throw around, and so I could bid on/bid up any shares that went up for auction. Oddly enough, I never ended up acquiring any of these stocks, though I certainly made sure that no one got a bargain; at the height of yellow-mania a share sold for over $50.

The final holdings, payouts and scores:

Chris: 1 black, 2 green, 1 blue, 1 yellow
Martin: 1 black, 1 red, 2 yellow
Eric: 1 black, 2 green, 1 brown, 1 blue
Joe Lee: 1 blue, 2 red, 2 yellow
Joe G.: 3 red

CdFM (black): 21 income plus 40 value* divided by three shares equals $21 per share
CSAR (green): 49 income plus 45 value divided by four shares equals $24 per share
NRC (brown): 26 income plus 25 value divided by one share equals $51 per share
CTR&D (blue): 42 income plus 50 value divided by three shares equals $31 per share
CMRC (red): 82 income plus 90 value divided by five shares equals $35 per share
ZASM (yellow): 54 income plus 140 value divided by five shares equals $39 per share
*value is $5 per track link plus regional track builds

Chris: $255
Martin: $228
Eric: $184
Joe Lee: $222
Joe G.: $273

On seeing the results--particularly the fact that I had won the game with only three shares compared to some people's five--I declared that the red line simply could not be beaten, but Eric reminded me that black had very nearly shut red out of Johannesburg. He was right, of course, and it's also noteworthy that Chris came in second without having even one share of the CMRC.

The game took about three hours, though it should be noted that we were playing quite slowly in the beginning.

For a flimsy, abstract map, some colored bits of paper and a handful of crayons, Veld Railroads is one hell of a gut-wrenching game. It is very much on a par with the typical Warfrog releases in terms of meatiness and intensity, and the complex interconnectedness of the players through a fluid economic system is entirely in keeping with the best of Martin Wallace's designs. Nonetheless, there are some slight flaws in the game, I think. The aforementioned superiority of the red line is certainly a tricky aspect. Yes, it's an auction game, and so players can try to make sure that no one gets a share too cheaply, but it must be noted that the higher the price of the share, the better funded the company, and therefore the more valuable that very same share. The other trickiness in this situation is that the red line is auctioned last, and so players must decide whether they're for or against the company before they see what side of the fence everyone else is on. For instance, in a five-player game you might decide to fight the power and sink half your cash into black only to watch three other players do the same thing in three different lines and the last player take the red with no fuss. Who, in this hypothetical situation, is going to abandon their investment to join someone else's line to try and beat the big guy?

In the final end, I don't think that the red line imbalance is a game-breaker, but there is yet a slightly more troublesome issue present, which is that there is a critical juncture a quarter of the way through the game that can conceivably either make a person's fortune or catapult him into the crapper. This game-crux is the city of Johannesburg, as the railroad that reaches the city first has the advantage of possibly blocking other train lines from entering. This is potentially a big deal because the city can be developed eight times, making each link add ten to a connecting line's income. In our game the city was only developed twice, but red was able to shut out both blue and brown, filling up five of eight connections in the process and adding a total of twenty to its income. Anyway, the point is this: in a two-hour-plus game, nobody wants to get a kick in knickers on round two and then have to be a good sport during rounds three through eight.

Despite these issues, everyone seemed to like Veld Railroads quite a lot, and I think everyone said they were interested in playing it again. I have to admit that I'm curious too; I'd love to try out a different strategy and watch how the group think develops. Overall I think it rates a 7: it contains an excellent underlying system for a meaty economic game, but the instantiation of that system has elements which can simply be too hard on victims of weird groupthink.

One last thing that's worth mentioning regarding the game is that you really need a good bookkeeper. In our case that person was Marty McMartin, and much of the detail I was able to provide in this session report is thanks to his dutiful notating. Maybe he'll write his own report of the game so that we can have a kind of Rashomon-type deal going on. No doubt he'll tell you how I fell ass-backwards into every good thing that happened to me, and he'll probably go into some whole spiel about grape jelly stains on my shirt or mismatched socks. Just ignore that stuff.

Thread: Re:Session Report

Gola — 2004-10-29T11:56:11+00:00

I agree completely, particularly with the notion that the first red stock needs to be bidded up to least half the amount of the players' starting money.

The only comment I have is that the blue line isn't really in a position to compete with red in the early game unless the players who buy the first shares of red and green are grossly incompetent. Red should cruise through Bloemfontein in its first turn, and then the closed border essentially jails blue in the periphery of the map until the fourth turn. By the time blue is let loose it's more likely that other trains will be hemming it in rather than the reverse.

Thread: Re:Session Report

azegzao — 2004-10-28T18:17:29+00:00

I was wondering myself about the same questions: how important is CMRC/Red? I feel the steamroller I was lucky enough to find myself riding was born from a number of happy coincedences:

1) Stock was undervalued. Not surprising in the first play of an auction game. So people kept money in hand, the equivalent of the cash-under-the-mattress savings plan. I can imagine a situation where, if everyone is cash poor from earlier stock purchases, one player can get stock cheap... where stock prices dip momentarily in the early turns as people run out of cash reserves. But I felt like we were never even close to that, because no one was paying very much for stock, meaning purchasing stock did not take you out of later auctions, meaning no one ever got a bargain, meaning holding onto money didn't pay off.
2) Since other people were putting up red stock for auction, the red coffers were consistently flush with cash, and I could build track freely (as compared to having to use my own action to offers shares).
3) I could buy the red stock. I suspect anything short of half one's starting cash is a good price for red stock. Since I was paying less than that, I could just keep buying whenever someone put it up.
4) Neither green nor blue (red's neighbors) managed to mount an effective assault on red. Even though I owned a share of green, I felt very threatened by it: I felt if someone else bought in they could, depending on turn order, turn green north to intercept and block red. There was at least one turn in which I could easily visualize my investment in red going up in smoke. (When you got the green share, Joe, I was relieved: I was worried someone after you, who would then be able to use their turn building green track, would get it.)
5) Cooperation was slow to get going among my rivals.

I think some of these may have come out of experience with Wallace's Age of Steam, where 1) spending all your cash early is fatal, and 2) you almost never cooperate (in that game, ship over someone else's line). Veld Railroads seems like great play would be more about you and I make decent money on the red line, while Martin and I make decent money on the black line, so I make decent money twice and each of you only make it once.

I'm obviously looking forward to the next play.

Thread: Session Report

Gola — 2004-10-18T15:31:20+00:00

This was my second playing of Martin Wallace's Veld Railroads, the latest game in Winsome's "Prairie Railroad" series (not to be confused with the "Early Railways" series, of which the well-known Age of Steam is the beloved stepchild). The other players were Rodger, Josh, Eric Poolman and Marty McMartin.

Veld Railroads takes place in central South Africa during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time the interior of the country was peopled by Dutch farmers (the Boers) and the Zulus, while England and Portugal had their colonies along the coast. Nobody cared much about the flatlands in the interior and the unfashionable people who lived there until gold and diamonds were discovered in the vicinity, and then of course the area was viewed with a certain degree of fascination by its neighbors. Railroads quickly moved in towards the center of the country, and eventually the British decided that perhaps their own administration of the region might be best for all involved. The Boers disagreed, there were harsh words, and unfortunately some shooting and other bad behavior took place. Many bullets later the English talked the farmers into giving up their perverse insistence on self-rule and some semblance of order was thankfully restored.

You might now be asking "will any of that information help me to play the game well?" The answer is no. The game of Veld Railroads is all about buying stocks, building up businesses, and of course gratefully accepting returns on investments. The game begins with five rail lines at the periphery of the map, four British and one Portuguese, and each railroad has five shares and a small amount of money in its treasury. One share of each of the railroads is auctioned off to the players to start the game, and the money from the auctions goes into the treasuries of the railroads. These are the only funds that the companies have at their disposal and so, unlike other auction games where you probably want to get an item for the least amount of money possible, you're actually funding the business enterprises and so can't be too much of a cheapskate.

After the initial auctions, it is the players' job to guide their respective businesses to profit and success by building track to Johannesburg and such scenic locations as Naboomspruit and Plaston. The connections between junctions and termini are pre-marked on the map with dotted lines, and when players choose to lay down rails the dotted lines are colored in with the railroad's respective crayon. Lines drawn must extend existing track and once a route has been filled in no other railroad may build there. The other main restriction is that only those who are majority shareholders in a railroad--those who have the most stock or are tied for most stock--may dictate where track is constructed. Minority shareholders can still choose to have track built, but the decision of where and how much goes to the director of the company.

In addition to building track, the are three other options open to the players. First, they may develop the various cities, junctions and railheads that pepper the map and so increase the income of any trains that pass through. Second, they can put stock up for auction, either unowned stock or stock from their own holdings, the auctions being simple last-man-standing affairs. Third, they can force an early payment of dividends (there are eight rounds in the game, and at the end of each of these rounds dividends are paid to shareholders).

There are a ton of other details I am leaving out for the sake of brevity, but suffice it to say that there is a lot of historical stuff built into the system and so a lot of factors that players have to take into consideration. One important thing that is worth mentioning at length, however, is the fact that the map is such that not all the train lines necessarily have equal prospects; the Cape Midland Railway Company, a.k.a. the red line, has an advantage over the other railroads in that its most direct route to Johannesburg passes through more valuable connections than the direct routes of the other trains; the competing companies must make the uncomfortable choice between staking out valuable territory and taking a shot at jacking into Jo'burg before someone gets there first and starts blocking inroads. What makes this situation even more tricky is that the initial stock of the CMRC is always auctioned off last, which means that you have to choose whether you're going to take one of the B lines before you get to see how much competition there is for the A line.

In our game it was Eric who won the auction for the first red stock, as well as the first stock of red's closest neighbor, green. Martin bought into the black line, located at the opposite end of the board, Josh invested in the central brown line, and Rodger bought into the peripheral blue line. I ended up with nothing; I had saved my money to bid on the red line, but when the time came I thought that the price that Eric was willing to pay was too high and so I bailed out.

The cash-flush red line did indeed dominate early and made its predictable sprint towards Johannesburg. Rodger soon realized the true lameness of the blue line and joined Martin in black; Martin and Rodger then cooperated to bang down an iron highway towards Johannesburg, and, much to my surprise, they made the trip before red could get there. With contact from the outside world, a new railroad sprang into being from the city (the yellow line, one of the little historical details I mentioned above) and, under Martin's direction, it started blocking off as many connections into Johannesburg as it could. This did not keep red from being able to plug in, however, but in time blue, green and brown were all shut out completely.

While all this was savvy game-playing going on I was floundering in deep error, timidity and thickheadedness. On my first turn I put up for auction and bought a share in the green line, but I did this because I had thought that Josh was the owner of the first share and that together we could compete with Eric. Only afterwards did I realize that my business partner was none other than Eric himself. Undaunted, I tried to weasel into the red line and put up a share of that stock for auction, but the bidding was fierce, I got cold feet, and the stock went to Martin. "Well, people must be running out of money now," I thought, and so over the next couple of rounds I put more red stocks up on the auction block, but the prices only went higher, and Eric ended up with all of them. It seemed ridiculous--at that price he'll only break even, I thought--but I was wrong. Way wrong. Thanks to my stubborn undervaluing of the stocks, I ended the game with hardly any holdings and not much worthwhile to do for myself.

When the eighth round ended, the final payout was thus:

yellow: 31 income + 30 value / 1 share = $61 per share
red: 92 income + 140 value / 5 shares = $47 per share
black: 76 income + 100 value / 5 shares = $38 per share
green: 50 income + 50 value / 4 shares = $25 per share
brown: 48 income + 50 value / 4 shares = $25 per share
blue: 16 income + 30 value / 3 shares = $16 per share

My memory of the various players' portfolios isn't perfect, but it was something like this:

Rodger: two blue, three black
Josh: two brown, maybe a blue
Eric: four red, one brown, one green, maybe a blue and/or a black
Martin: one black, one red, one green, one brown, one yellow

Despite the respectable showing of Rodger's black line, the fortune-kissed red line was a raging fury that could not be stayed. Eric played an outstanding game and the scores prove it: Poolman 481, Rodger 271, Martin 238, Josh 225, Joe 139 (what an idiot).

The group's reaction to the game seemed very positive, but I have some nagging questions in my mind. Can you compete with the CMRC? I mean, can you stay out of red entirely and still have a chance at winning? Also, do the early decisions, some of which must be made blindly, carry too much weight? I've done a lot of thinking about the problem and have come to some tentative conclusions, but I'd like to play the game again before making a decision.

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puppi — 2004-09-07T22:23:18+00:00

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puppi — 2004-09-07T22:23:18+00:00

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Gola — 2003-09-09T12:07:56+00:00