CAPITALISM BOARD GAME?

[SergiArias]

Hi!!
I'm a big fan of this game since long time ago, and recently I've been trying some board games to play between friends.

I became hooked quickly and I thought, which is the closest board game to capitalism? And there is no game close enough.

So, having a so well designed mechanics and gameplay, wouldn't it be very reasonable to build one? Also, it's very easy to innovate and make things different in the world of board gaming. For example, I would add an app to do all the calculations as well as a luck/dice alternative.

Why it would be a good product? Of course I don't have all the insights of the industry, but first, building interactions with the other players when you can see them in the eyes makes you stronger in negotiation, and the reality of the game trains you better. Also, board games are not practically affected by piracy and they are a very loyal-consumer niche. And, of course, being able to play with friends you can offer it as a learning tool to all MBA's wannabes.

It would be an awesome project to build!

[counting]

It is a very interesting proposal, and the cost is nearly zero when you can just layout the images of boards, cards, and rules books, even money bills using photoshop and print them out. Probably don't even need to be linked to Capitalism titles, when you can come up with something original your own. However for the purpose of discussing within the scope, let's stay with the Capitalism game theme. Besides, it's a good exercise to find out what's the true spirit of Capitalism series.

There are many resource and property management board games we can borrow basic principles and guidelines from. However for commerce and economy "simulation", that would be a whole new problem. There are classroom economic exercises sort of similar to board games, and students need to cooperate in order to learn the basic concept of economics. However, usually it requires quite a lot of participants (dozens to like 40 or 50) for it to work, if we can somehow extrapolate some elements into default game mechanics (like bankers, and kings, landlords, and basic production "farmers"), then the role of merchants as entrepreneurs are very close to the core of Capitalism game theme, where you need to hire labors, deal with cost, and gain a profit margin. This way the number of players could be reduced to several instead of dozens. Also, we need to reduce the academic part of it, so not all participants need to have economic knowledge to follow through. And of course it would need a "goal" for it to function like a board game with proper ending instead of like a perpetuate sandbox. Also one giant problem need to deal with is the financial statement integration, it's not an easy task to prepare precise sheets by hands. Not even plausible with apps, since the job before accounting is bookkeeping where the task is just tedious work of organizing transaction records into pages of "entries" to be processed, there is no fun in it, and very time consuming. Unless we are able to reduce the complexity to a minimum where the number can be done inside player's head or by hand quickly, however over-simplify would significantly limit what kind of businesses to have.

What's your thought about the core concepts about Capitalism series, what elements do you think is the most important?

[SergiArias]

Thanks for your answer! I have yet to read the exercises you sent me, they look pretty interesting!

Well, what I like about capitalism that can translate into a board game is, basically, the theme. In capitalism you can start as an entrepreneur and can become the leader of an industry. In most board games, you already start as a leader, or the themes are too geek or unreal. Being the theme so realistic is easy to get on the role.

Then, the factory and farm building can be done with cards that you exchange to build, out of your owned resources, and I think it would be one of the most interesting part. The real problem that I see is the demand-offer calculation, the price fixing of products, the stock market, and the profits earned from all your investments. Here is where innovation has to come to help.

Without deep analysis, what I would do is to design an oversimplified game to start with (and to integrate the technology adverse consumers), but also add the possibility to translate all the calculations to an app to make it closer to the game. How? this is the challenge. I'm thinking of using qr codes to point the board locations to the app where it can "read" all the data through a photo or video. Or directly build some electronic devices where you set product prices pushing a button and it gets reflected directly in the app. It wouldn't be so expensive, I think, as you can do the buttons through paperboard/plastic and some cables. The problem would be to send the data to the app... wifi? bluetooth?

The most expensive part of the project would be the testing and adjusting the design, even implementing it in the computer to make simulations to see the interaction, time spent, black spots... But I guess in that matter the Capitalism team is already expert!

About the capitalism brand, I would stick to it, as it is very well positioned in the internet about business education, so using the same name would be a guarantee that the game is well designed (out of the thousands that get out each year).

Anyway, I know I missed many variables as it usually happens with new projects, but I still feel the "emotional" part of the product would work very well regardless of the more/less perfect implementation.

[SergiArias]

This what we need to make it happen!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/86 ... everywhere

[counting]

Actually I've wanted to go low tech, instead of high tech (if going high tech, using NFC interface might be another option, its quicker and just required a chip to activate, unlike Bluetooth, and more accurate and easy to use than QR-code scan). The extra steps involving high tech calculation wouldn't be that easy to do, and affect the flow of the game significantly. The core idea of table top board game is supposed to be about rules and easy access to everyone. Apps involved will complicated things a lot (compatibility issue, crashing issue, debug, someone hack the apps, etc, etc). Using build-in devices to the board is an interesting idea, I believe some table games in the past actually did that, but IIRC not sold very well, since the cost rises up significantly, make it less accessible (The hardware of the Arduino board alone with the function we need, probably will be at the cost of $10 to $20 or even more, unless we can mass produce it). In any case, it would be a less ideal plan using high tech device IMO. Let's stick to the low tech solution first, and see if we can pull it off (I don't rule out embedded devices yet, just make them backup options if all others have failed). After all, the classroom exercise I mentioned doesn't require any high tech devices, and human have been doing commerce without computers for thousands of years.

In my mind, the spirit of Capitalism is not about production chain, it's a feature but not the core, otherwise it would be no different than any other production-chain oriented games. The main theme in Capitalism is the microeconomics and macroeconomics behaviors' interactions. Players run corporations via microeconomics behaviors and affects the overall environments. Players can observe the result in macroeconomics scale, and the feedback from macro level affect players' decisions at micro scale again forming a cycle. Put it plainly, the micro behaviors are how players taking hold market shares of products by competing/cooperating with others. The macro behaviors and effects are both internal and external, from the financial status of the corporations to the whole market's economic statistics and economy status. Obviously the former is easier to simulate with just hands, but the latter might require some help to integrate information. But the important thing is that macro phenomena is just an emerging property come from the combined micro activities of all players/customers, if we build the micro-base right, macro-level mechanism should not be an issue at all, we don't really need to have GDP or any other indexes to progress a board game, and people have the natural ability to understand commerce. Financial statements are more of a tool to verified what people' instincts tell them (This part is like what I said might need high tech help, but not always necessary. Players can play the real Capitalism game without once looking at financial reports and survive well. All they need to know are how much cash they have, and it's rising or falling, albeit less efficient than reading financial statements).

As for the rules and mechanics, I actually come up with a plan to make market mechanism quite intuitive with low tech options (this requires some microeconomics knowledge, if you have questions about them, feel free to ask). Market is all about supply and demand, and before reaching equilibrium in the long term, the process is base on a more fundamental once - the bidding process, where customers offer bids to sellers' price tag. In the game, it's exactly what players are doing tweaking the product price. Let's look at demand side first. As general demand curve tells us, the lower the price the willingness to buy increases. Customers buy 10 products when price is $100, but buy 100 products when price is $20. Obviously as a seller, when players can only provide 10 products, they wouldn't want to set the price to $20 but up to $100. However, when players can produce 100 products, it's better to set price at $20 (notice!, although 10x$100=$1000 < 100x$20=$2000, doesn't mean profit is less, cost needs to be taken into consideration, like when unit cost is $10 or $15, you can do the math and see which one is more profitable). And that brings us to the core of the customer demand cards. Since it's unnecessarily for very fine division, from $0.01 to $99.99 in price, we can just set a range say $10 to $100 of 10 stages $10 interval, using just 10 cards to represent customer's intention to buy certain amount of goods at that price. Say we have 10 products, 100 cards will be sufficed. On the front of the card it would detail the quantity which "customers" will buy with different type of goods (their elasticity differs). In term, player's action will be to match this "drawn" demand cards. If it's a match, players gain the selling revenue with money bills listed on the card, and sell(lose) the tokens representing products (and recycle them to be used again, so we don't need infinite tokens). This process can be like any other board games when each term a general set of cards from a common stack drawn out in the public, and players call the cards when they see fit. This would simulate the buyer demand behaviors pretty well, when enough cards are drawn out each term. And unlike AI in game, human can do much complicated negotiation. If multiple players call the same card of demand, they can either agree to split the revenue in ratio they agreed upon (cooperate), or with finite bidding process like 3 rounds, and in the end the lowest price caller (in $10 stages of course), wins the bid and take the reduce revenue from the lowered bidding price (competitive). This is similar to price war in Capitalism game. Or one party can simply forfeit this round and wait for a better revenue and the next chance.

Then we will need to consider the supply side. Obviously it's been done by many board games before, where players are giving a subsidies of "product tokens" depend on the cards or properties they owned. We can have factories card where players need to purchase with money bills and pay overhead and salaries each term, and in term it will give players certain amount goods tokens depend on which product it is attached to (like we can use puzzle pieces to combine product with factory into a whole "manufacturing card", I bet you've seen this concept in many board games). And the product part of the card will tell players how many upstream materials are needed to producce certain amount of goods, and multiple with the factory card capacity, give total amount goods produced and material consumed in one term (for simplification, we can limit the factory capacity to just 3 levels, with 4 to 2 to 1 capacity ratio like different factory sizes in Capitalism game, and easy to get a handful of grab several time without needing calculation). If the production materials isn't enough, it will go under-produce, if we stick to 1-1 ingredient to product ratio, it would be fairly easy to exchange (In fact this process could be simplified entirely if we don't want to have upstream and downstream and let all players play at the retail level). On top of the production result, we will have a limit to players "warehouse size" where players can only store so many goods tokens without selling, and prevent hording to a degree. Players can still "exert" certain resources by hording and create shortage artificially, but not to the point completely shut down the board game. (This is easy to implement by setting the limit of warehouse proportionally smaller than the actual total token number depend on how many players). As for which products and what their ingredients are, that would be interesting to design with simple tweaking of existing Capitalism game products. I suggested we choose different elasticity goods (in game term different price concern products, where some have sharp drops of purchasing when price rise up and can't consume more when they are cheap, like necessities; where some of then price can go up and down regardless of quantity, like luxuries; and mostly in between with different curves)

What's next will be scoring and end-of-game-goal. Obviously we can follow the Capitalism game's scoring mechanism, and fixed the game length to a certain amount of terms, and see who get the highest score in the end. Or we can simply liquidate everyone's company in the end and see who have the most assets. As for the the stock market side of the game, it could be done by hands, since stock shares is a very ancient idea hundreds of years old, and people sometimes still get "physical stock shares" nowadays. We can start with everyone have 10 pieces(lots) of stock (1000 shares a piece/lot perhaps) in their color, and 30 pieces of that color out in the open (hold in public shareholders), and it will have a stock price tag attach to player's company name, with stages similar to product price of limited stages and boundaries (say from base price $10 to $100 by 1000 shares, of $10 interval) . Players can buy back, buy others, or issue new ones as they like, and the price tag will go up and down, like in real life without any artificial boost. If they are held by the public it follows the pattern starts with base price and slowly rise up with the amount deduced, like each public share have a default price in the back of the card in sequence from top to bottom (this is purely for public anonymous shareholder behavior simulation purpose), but when it reaches players' hands, they would rely on the price tag attach to the company's name. How many funds you get when issuing new shares depends on current price tag as well. If they are held by other players, it would be like in real life, players call and offer price to each other (albeit in real you need a broker, but not necessary when there are just few players and corporations), and it will be a game theory scenario where one players have to "read" other minds, cooperate or screw each other, making hostile takeover part of the game. If players' companies are taken over, they essentially lose control as presidents but only act as executives, and they can only spend their own personal money freely instead of corporation money/resources, since players work for their parent company's president now (we can even have board meeting terms like in real life AGM. For a setup like 1 month a term, total 10 years of 120 terms, thus giving 12 AGMs, where information can be integrated and accounted in AGM, and pay dividend as well, probably a fixed 20% payout ratio is sufficient, or decided by the board's vote). Players can resign and quite and hand over their control completely. But there's still a slim chance to buy their companies back, or working with other players to force "their bosses" out of majority, or secretly make their bosses lose profit, even try to make their bosses lose their companies instead (pretty much it's how things happened in real life). The only problem involved here is probably the money bills required for the stock market games. Too large of the face value, it's difficult for players to do the math and get change. Too small of the face value the physical amount of bills will be too much. However, we can probably have a low tech debit solution where the number are written down first than actually change hand like bar tab (or at least one player in the game need to have good math skill). IMO, The stock mechanism is more of a bonus, if we don't want that part of corporation mechanism over-complicates the whole game, it can be skipped and doesn't affect the core "manufacturing and market" mechanism.

The final question is the banking and city simulation. Personally I would like a player dedicated to facilitate the function of bank, and act like a game master to control the macro behavior. However it would require someone with adequate financial and economic knowledge to pull them off. Might be a bit difficult to find someone as good as GM every time. We might need to set default rules in a booklet for general behavior of banks and financial institutes. It can be reduced to purely provide loans with a fixed interest rate, and simply a vault regardless other macroeconomic activities, but it would make a less interesting and dynamic environment. Other things left out are the advertising and real estate mechanics, however I think they are easier to add when the base board game mechanics are well-defined. Even only existed as additions to bring extra income and create more diversify game play (or reserved for later advanced version, since pricing with brand will be more difficult to calculate than pure bidding process, and customers are only simulated card drawing without any "intelligence", and we ignored the quality of product for simplicity sake in the mechanism I described above)

What do you think about this mechanics? Or is there any detail I left out? Any rule or concept left unclear?

[SergiArias]

Wow!! It's quite impressive your mechanics display! I see you are quite into it!

I've been reading carefully what you proposed, and although I didn't understand everything (due to language barrier to some specific words from my part, mainly), I understand the offer/demand of each product as a "global" average. Because to me, in the game, I think the demand of each product varies depending of the distance of the consumers to the buying place and also their "awareness", modelled with the advertising. Maybe that can be solved with a "bonus" card that increases or decreases demand depending on the area that you buy. For example, if you buy supermarket around area -4, when you sell all the products obeying to offer and demand you have to pay 4$ extra and thus, loose money.

I also agree that we cannot model all the game, so I would approach the problem using layers. Stock market is a layer we can add after, but first, the product manufacturing and product selling has to be solved. The scope of the project is also a must, as it can grow exponentially as we discover hidden variables through the process. First thing is to define the scope and all the layers in an abstract way and then decide which one to put our efforts first to develop.

Also, the low-tech version is a must. First, low tech, and then, if it works, I think high tech would be an option for a future expansion. I agree that to create the project and develop it there's not such haste to innovate through technology.

The goals should be random in my opinion, or maybe just create some sort of sheet so the players can contribute new challenges to the community (as capitalism lab apparently does). Having played eurogames I find that winning always on the same conditions make the game more boring.

About the high skilled player, I don't quite like it, it's like the high tech human substitute I guess, but anyway I think this part can be thought with more creativity.

Just a couple of days ago we bought a board game that simulates some of the mechanics of the financial sheets in a very simplistic but effective way (the game is brass http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28720/brass), when I play three or four times I will add it to the brainstorming.

[counting]

Let's examine one factor at a time, and see the demand side first. In real Capitalism game mechanics, the "environment factor" of customers demand is determined not by surrounding "population" but an abstract index called "traffic index", determined by land value. Land value are determined with default value plus surrounding facilities and residences addon. However the traffic index affect mostly the initial purchasing, the demand (quantity requested in a period of time) is also determined by "inherent factors" with 3 components - "product quality", "product price", and "product brand". Each product has different combination of "awareness" toward these 3 factors, same product even has different combination in different cities. Some product has very high awareness about price, like food, customers are more sensitive to price change (the rating changes a lot when price changes, a slight raise of price will drop rating significantly, profit margin usually low. Similar to real life where people rarely purchase tissues at $100, and might purchase a lot when the price is very low for reserve). Other product less sensitive to price, like jewelries, has low correlation between price and rating (players can raise the price a lot and the rating doesn't get affected much, profit margin can be quite high. Similar to real life where people buy gold rings regardless of the high price, and still wouldn't buy more if they are extremely cheap). This sensitivity about certain factor is what we called elasticity of certain factor in economics. (In above examples, it's the price elasticity toward purchasing quantity, i.e. demand). Also in real life, we could have different shape of elasticity, like a meal, when the price is high people wouldn't want to buy at all, but cook themselves, and when the price is low, you won't buy more either since people's stomach is limited and food goes bad quickly.

But the core of supply and demand equilibrium are not about these factors (they are variables), but the process of bidding/auction (Let's assume players gain products with a fixed number every term, the supply side can be discussed later). You must have seen movies with scenes of auctions, where people raise price tags in turns from a minimum base price. This is also true in real life in most wholesales market and in contract bidding where multiple parties compete for limit amount of commodities (but unlike in movies which mostly use open English auction, a lot of time Dutch auction or Sealed/Blind auction are used). For simplicity reason, I choose the English auction as the default bidding type, and disregard brand, quality and traffic all together (we can add these factors later), focusing only on elasticity of price first, since it's fundamental and the core to reach equilibrium. To do so, since we have multiple players but just "one" aggregated customer needed to be simulated by mechanics (we can also add more cities later, just cut to the core first and assume everyone traded in a giant auction house like on a game table instead of individual retail stores), players are actually bidding "money" with their "products" (in economics you need to know, money can be treated as goods just like any other commodities). Here, bidding toward "lower price" is essentially the same as bidding with higher "product-to-price ratio" (swapping product and money, you get a "price of money in unit of goods", since "price" is just a ratio to provide signal in exchange). This is like a limited-round English auction where the "customers" offer a "commodity" - "cash with a upper limit" representing it's willingness to pay at max, and players providing goods as bidding chips to win the auction. As normal English auction is favorable toward the host, this is actually more favorable toward customers since they can get cheaper price when there's a competition (like in real life). It essentially make gaining profit as a player a lot harder. And this process is exactly what happen in Capitalism game where players "compete" with AIs, essentially bidding to get revenue from customers, using product rating elasticity instead of pure price. Also instead of using computers to simulate many times extremely quick to get a market share pie chart, hands-on board game mechanic only does it one auction at a time with "customers" act like a joined pool.

The interesting thing is, we don't need to use English auction as default, but other types as well, I'll list two. Dutch Auction often favor the bidders. In the board game, it would be favorable toward players, hence make gaining profit easier, and closer to customer's willingness to pay cap. That way, we will need to make rules like starting from the bottom price ($10 in my pseudo mechanics), and everyone called a higher price no more than cap, and the lowest price win the bid. Since players would like to make more money, however still win the bid, the result is likely to agree upon not close to the bottom, but close to the cap. And the process likely just takes few terms regardless, since it's a mind game from the beginning, and the one who makes the first move usually can back down others, unlike discount price war we normally see in Capitalism game (or auction price war in English auction). Another type of auction normally see in real life big government contracts is Sealed Auction, usually with just one round. Used here, it would work like players put a price tag face down, all submit to the center and flip the price to see who have the lowest price and win the bid (in real life it's rarely a tie due to price range is huge, but if it's a tie, a second round an so on can continue till the winner is generated), if tied players split the auction evenly. IMO, sealed are less favorable than English, since sealed could end up with result can't split evenly ($10 x 1000 quantity split in 3 ways), but dutch or English can both be used in auction stage. The overall term regarding market retail will start from calling cards, and then asking called players like to cooperate and split the money or not. If they don't what to cooperate (or cooperate in groups like real life cartels vs cartels), then we go into "price war" auction stage with fixed rounds. Similar to the Capitalism build-in mechanism and provide many possibilities in strategy.

What's your idea of incorporating product quality and brand, even traffic indexed into the demand and auction process? I'm less favorable toward the idea of using high tech embedded system inside to do the calculation in this core mechanism. High tech gears are better as assisting tools not the core mechanics, it might break down during transportation or faulty needing QC, and it's hard to tune after the release when players discovered loophole.

[counting]

The topic about goals and skilled players as GM, I like the idea of open-end scoring, but at least we need to come up with one (Like I suggested as total liquidated assets), and due to the nature of multiple assets existed (at least two types in our current mechanics, money bills and properties/inventories like factories and goods tokens), there are combinations of scoring with weight can be used as goals already. Although I can also think of another type of goals - an cooperation board game. Where the end goal is to count the "GDP" and see if the total output using expenditure approach meet a target GDP. Since interestingly the maximum GDP output with max efficiency usually required all players are producing at long term marginal cost, i.e. making no profit and very close to cost. If all players join together as a cartel and raise price to gain max profit, the result will actually hurt "customers" and failed miserably as a thriving market. Pocket too much profit and player would leave less money for customers to spend and result in a "recession" .

The game master idea comes from the exercise where you normally need a teacher to assist, and prevent the game going sideway. Like in normal RPG board game, the game master's job is not to participate but to provide balance and check and intelligence back story and mechanism generation where no rules can provide easily in high degree of freedom. (Or players might come up with loopholes and make the entire game point less). Since banking required some serious financial knowledge to run, and market mechanism might go off course if we don't provide detail enough rules to govern every possible strategies, sometimes it's a necessity to have GM. However just like I said, we can simplify it and let the rule to be simpler at it's core. Later if the game elements become too complicated and rules can not cover all possibilities, the GM role can be added for more flexible game play.

And I've seen people played Brass before, however never played it myself (I've played Age of Industry, quite similar and simpler). There are many resource managing type board games, some even have basic element of stock markets. They are all good template as references, however we still need to view our basic core concept of demand from customers using simulated mechanism, and manufacturing mechanism for supply to generate the foundation. And I don't think Brass provide a "financial sheet" mechanism per se, but more or a cash reserve indicator (not even cash flow sheets), more like the profit & lost chart you see in the bottom of Capitalism UI. Although it does use card mechanism to compete scare resource of space between players in a limited map. Similar mechanism happens in Capitalism where you have limit "high traffic index" spots to open retail stores. This mechanism could be a good reference if we wish to divide the market into cities and location based fashion instead of a unified pool. (Factories location is less of a problem and can be abstract, it's even true in core Capitalism mechanism most of the time since freight cost is negligible for most products, I haven't come up with a good idea to put freight cost in Capitalism theme board game yet). Perhaps the card drawing mechanism can be used to integrate tech development process, if we want to put tech and product quality element in. The downside of using a map based production system is that the resource management will be map depended, and could result in restricted game play strategies (better for board game sales though, since designers can sell maps with variations very easily, and easier to write rules)

[counting]

A fair warning ahead, the idea here is not concrete yet, and probably need macroeconomics knowledge to follow through.

I was thinking about banking mechanism the other day, and business cycle. In monetary theories, there are certain assumption and equation like MV=PQ, or P=kR/M, or MR(C)=NEP(C), etc. And it sort of make sense to bring this idea into a board game theme. It's possible to fixed a money total (probably like M0 in real life), given obviously there's a limit to how many "money bills" can be packed in game box, but still have a "flexible" monetary mechanism. The trouble starts with M1 and above. In Capitalism game with computer' help to calculate inflation, and no limit on number, it's easy to build "money supply and demand mechanism". But as monetary theories implied, in general, if an egg cost $1 and customer have $100 to spend at a given time, it is essentially equivalent to $10 an egg and $1000 to spend. Inflation might cost the real price go up, but the system remain at the same stable state. However in order to shift from one state to another, there will be "imbalance" before hand to reach next state. A company can sell an egg at $2 when customer have $100 to spend, at this point, money supply could slowly rise up to the level of $200, either by higher wages due to higher profit from corporations, or by customers borrowing more money from banks directly. However it could also go the other way, where the money supply is loosed in the first place (like QE policy in US), hence everyone has more to spend, and businesses see the opportunity and increase the product price in response (or because the cost of doing business increased, so corporations are forced to increase price)

The above discussion is important, because the money theory can lead to very interesting game play. Imagine that we implement a check system, where bank have to follow fraction reserve system. Say we give the whole game default $10,000 money bills. Say there are 5 players each given $1000 as starting capital, and the rest of $5,000 are in the hand of customers. Let's say in total all players spend $4000 from the start to start businesses, $2000 of them are salaries (that would give "customers" total $7000 to spend on buying products), $1000 on players hand, and $2000 back to the bank and "government system". If a business want to take out loans for more capital, it will be limited by the fractional reserve say 1/10, hence M1 money supply can increase to $20,000 and $2000 money bills in reserve in the bank. M1 created is in the form of checks, total money can be circulated increases. Hence inflation could lead to another balance point of $20000(M1)+$7000(M0)+$1000(M0) = $28000, almost 3 times as large as the original. This is interesting because players would have larger businesses, customers have more products to buy, GDP in the game increases. However, if players try to accumulate money on their hand, and not spend them, the economy will be in static. Thus we don't need infinite money bills to exist in the game, just the circulation speed increased to have a booming economy, or a recession, all depend on how players do with their "assets" at hand.

I believe this kind of macroeconomic idea has never been implemented in any board game, but could be very interesting if designed properly as cooperation games for players to cooperate and increase the economic output total as a goal, not just competitive games where players only think about abstract victory points. After all we all know the Capitalism in real world really did increase the welfare for customers in general (and with similar mechanism as well, although done improperly will lead to hyperinflation and cause another kind of suffering, which might be difficult to portray in a limited board game theme)

[SergiArias]

Hi!!

It's incredibly astonishing the level of detail you give to the project. Thanks for your brainstorming!! I'm actually learning economics just reading you hehe...
This is getting bigger as we are thinking about it. I've read carefully all of your ideas and they are brilliant. Although, playing with Martin Wallace's "Brass" which is seen as a very complex and difficult game in the community, I'm imagining the Capitalism one with all the interesting mechanics as 10 times more complex than Brass. If I'm correct, here the big challenge is to simplify. Normally the demand in this games is set randomly using cards. In our case we would have a demand "bar" for each product, and this demand would be set using an auction mechanism which although I can imagine in an abstract form I cannot imagine using cards and tokens.

As the most difficult spot is the demand of products, how can we build an auction system to know the demand for each product sold in each supermarket? Or is it easier to just build one supermarket per player to simplify? Or if we build more than one, do the same products have the same price?

I think this is the very first goal of the exercise. To build in Vassal a game where each player can build a supermarket at cost 0, and sell some products in each, to a Market who's behaviours are modelled by demand and supply bidding.

So, I'm player one, I build a supermarket in position X with a land cost of Y. I decide to sell bread and chicken in it and I put the respective tokens inside. I decide to sell the bread for 1$ and the chicken for 2$. How do I know how many chickens and bread/Revenue and profit I got when all turns complete?

I think that if we are able to come to an easy mechanic to do that without limiting the number of supermarkets built then we are solving the most difficult part of the game. Also, I wouldn't work with the quality, brand and traffic variables yet as they can be relatively easily implemented using bonus cards even accepting a very high error from what the real calculation would be.

Can you think of something? I'm thinking about this particular aspect this days...

About the M0, M1, banking model I don't think we have to overcomplicate it, or even model recessions unless we do the very simple "after 7 years there is a recession" mechanic for easiness sake, and it would only affect the consumers IMHO.

About Vassal, I will try to learn to design on it as it is very interesting, so that part I can manage... Then playing together we can see how it works and how we can even simplify more...