AoS - Michigan, initial concept

Even though I, at one point, intended Montreal to be my only Age of Steam expansion, I realized after it was complete that I had a lot of discarded ideas that were good enough to re-use, or re-implement in a future map.

AoS - Michigan started as a stock version of Age of Steam. I am a huge fan of the Prairie Railroads series from Winsome / Wallace, and I have been mentally toying with ways of using stocks and company control in Age of Steam forever.

While I still haven't had much success with the stock thing, one thing that did start to develop was a physical map of Michigan.

Now that Montreal is complete, I have started to think a bit about working on Michigan some more, but with different mechanics than the original concept.

The other night I was jotting down preliminary ideas, and these are all random things that I will likely try in the expansion:

* Strong Unions.
Expenses increase as the game goes on because of high health care costs.

* Trucking
(Rethemed Stroll...i.e.: ability to move a good up to 4 hexes without delivering it)

* Track based Urb...modified for simplicity.
Idea: second player into a town can opt to Urbanize it, if they want. No Urb role in auction.

* Ferry lines to Green Bay from Ludington, to Chicago from Upper Peninsula

* Some sort of dying city theme? I.e.: destruction of cities as the game progresses to reflect real world economic downturn? After a certain round the cities with only 1 good on them lose that good? Perhaps a glut causes problems instead? If too many goods are present, then the city is destroyed?

* Related, some sort of production mechanic, maybe similar to Australian Railways but with tighter control. i.e.: factories in the city are producing goods each round...a dictated growth scheme of some sort.


I think the key mechanical concept and theme is Decay. Michigan will start out rich, but I want the board to decay as the game goes, and perhaps even force players to try and lose the least amount of money rather than make the most by the end of the game. This will be facilitated by having expenses increase as the game goes (which is thematically reflective of the high health care costs that exist in the present because of the retired workers) and heavy goods paucity, likely mechanically forced.

I'm still not sure whether the map will be designed for the 3 or 4 player scale yet.