CAPITALISM BOARD GAME?

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Martin Wallace's Automobile is a lot closer to our vision of supply an demand mechnism, let's use his board as an example and see if we can borrow some idea from it. http://www.gamersalliance.com/F09/automobile.htm


The general idea in Automobile is simple, using the combined drawing "cards" with demand "numbers" face down placing on the $200, $150, $100, $100, $70 area and we get a total demand quantity. In the beginning of the term, let's say 5 players, drawing 10, 5, 2, 3, 5, and place them on different slots (multiple cards can be in the same slot), and (10, 5) are placed in $150, (3, 5) are in bronze $100, and (2) in $70, then we get a total demand "curve". After certain production turns, each players gain certain amount of cars (high, middle, low ends) to sell and they will compete in the middle 3 "showrooms" for sales spot, determine by rolls, orders, and auctions to distribute salesmen and compete the total demand number determined from the 1st step.

My initial idea is quite similar to the above process, but I further divided the "products" into finer 10 classes, and 10 stages of "demand" prices. And instead of the combined drawing cards number to determine demand quantity, I fix the demand quantity of each stage in demand, and allow the price to float. (unlike the Automobile, price is fixed). Let's say we start by producing "frozen chickens" on farms to sell in supermarkets. And 10 stages of demand are :

Stage 0: demand quantity - 100, willingness to pay at $11
Stage 1: demand quantity - 200, willingness to pay at $10
Stage 2: demand quantity - 300, willingness to pay at $9
Stage 3: demand quantity - 400, willingness to pay at $8
Stage 4: demand quantity - 500, willingness to pay at $7
Stage 5: demand quantity - 600, willingness to pay at $6
Stage 6: demand quantity - 800, willingness to pay at $5
Stage 7: demand quantity - 1000, willingness to pay at $4
Stage 8: demand quantity - 2000, willingness to pay at $2
Stage 9: demand quantity - 4000, willingness to pay at $1
(If you notice, and draw a diagram with quantity and price, you will get a demand curve, just like you would see in microeconomics textbook, and different product classes can have different shape of demand curve)

demand curve.jpg (17.69 KiB) Viewed 953 times

And we just draw one card by the host and determine the current demand quantity. Assume we use the same "joined" showroom mechanism like Automobile, where each players have multiple "shelves" to sell frozen chickens in a giant supermarket "board area". And if current stage of demand drawn is stage 8, demand quantity 2,000, willingness to buy at $2 max. If say players A, and B both produce 1000 "frozen chicken this round, than they will have no problem splitting the demand, and both get a revenue of $2*1000=$2000. This will likely hold true, when A and B combined production is less than the current demand (This is similar to where there are unclaimed white market share in Capitalism, players and AIs often don't need to go toe to toe on price). The interesting thing happened, when next term if the stage 6 is drawn, the demand quantity now is just 800, and $5 price, but both A and B are still both produce 1000 units of frozen chickens, unless one of them give up, otherwise it will likely going into competition (like in Capitalism price war), and an auction phase can begin (or they can still choose to split $5*400 and let the rest 600 frozen chickens from A and B go to waste. It doesn't need to split in exact half, any ratio in between is possible, 300-500, 200-600, etc. Certain "boosting" mechanism can be used to determine who get higher portion, this is probably where quality and advertisement mechanism can cut in). If say we use Sealed Auction mechanism, then A and B both place a "bid price" token range from $5,$4,$3,$2,$1, face down, then the one with lowest price win the whole batch. Obviously this strategy will be risky, since if winning a bid at $3 and above will gain more than splitting in half, but one player can also bid on $2 or $1 and disregard the potential gain, just to screw the other player. (If we use a Dutch Auction mechanism, the price can come from $1 and rise till $5, who call the first will win the bid. If we use the English Auction mechanism, the price start from $5 and each player free to place a bid price till it reaches $1. Within a fixed number of auction turns, the lowest bidder will win the batch).

Of course, this process can also be simplified, if we can come up with a VASSAL demo and try different mechanics. I've been trying to device a demo in the past couple of days, hopefully we can find a time to test the mechanism and see how playable the mechanic really is.

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I've thought a way to incorporate shop locations, traffic index (customer density), advertisement, and demand quantity. I was thinking about what if we actually place meeples as customers on a grid board?

As we know Capitalism game starts from generating map with huge amount of tiles, and each tile has a default traffic index value (calculated by land value). If you picturize the traffic with actual citizens wondering around, you would get a picture where customers are concentrated in high traffic index tile, and sparse in low index area. If a store placing an advertisement, it's essentially equal to more customers gathered in the store tile. So, why not actually mimic the Capitalism game mechanism and place a small board say 7x7 blank grids with 49 out of a deck of cards, consisted of 0 to 9 numbers several cards each. The setup of the board is just shuffle cards, place 49 of them face down on the 7x7 grids, and flip back. Each grid tile will represent the default "customer density" value. And we simply place equal amount of "customer meeples" to that grid's card number. (The best thing about this mechanism is that every game the "map" is randomly generated and no 2 games would be alike)

When the setup is complete, players can claim a grid tile like you buy lands and build stores in real Capitalism game, the higher the number the more expensive you need to pay (but you should get higher customers). If a player place advertisement in his/her store, by certain mechanics (I have figure the detail rules yet), you would draw customer meeples from other grid tile (best from unclaimed and neighboring grid tiles). If every customer meeple in previous term are satisfied, they will stay in the grid tile, otherwise unsatisfied customers will "leave" current store tile to other tiles that already have stores on them (representing competing stores. If no other stores existed, perhaps just keep the board as the same, or roll a dice to move them or something).

And the cards from previous post, representing different level of demand quantity and willingness to pay price, will be replaced as demand quantity per customer meeple. The randomness of drawing different level of demand quantity per customer sort of representing the up and down of daily purchase, some days are good, some are bad. And if the cards are random enough, it would show tendency of a string of bad luck and a string of good luck like a recession or boom period naturally (true random will show this kind of characteristic without additional mechanism). The total amount of customers will have a total amount of purchasing expense as well. And we could actually calculate the GDP from customer meeples consumption plus players' investment expenses. The only thing I am not too sure about this, is how to represent factories and productions, and quality of goods affecting customers' willingness to pay more. (And of course, would it be too tedious if all done by hands?)