Making Fiddle of Gold: Initial Ideas

Alright, so I will be starting off with the basic question – 'why?'. Why is Fiddle of Gold what it is?

Fiddle of Gold

Now I will speak honestly, here – Fiddle of Gold started as a thought experiment. How could one take the best parts of a economic stock trading game, (most notably the 18xx series of train games), and convert that gameplay into something more pure, more based around the economic politics and the intrigue with less energy invested into this economy that our companies are all in the business of.

For those unfamiliar with this variety of game, I will give a brief introduction. In an 18xx game, you invest in Train Companies, specific ones. With largest investment in a company, you gain control of it and make decisions using the money that everyone has invested into the company. These decisions can be good for the company (expanding the lines and so on), or bad for the company (paying out dividends to stock holders rather than trying to run a business), but generally they run somewhere in-between. The goal here is to make the most money out of these companies that many people might have a stake in. A company will likely be good if it has many investors, because they are giving it the money to be good, and have likely invested because it seems like a safe bet. A company will also usually try to be good if it only has one investor, because they will be making all of the profit. In this way there are many shades of 'alliance' you could describe happening and these leads to some very interesting gameplay. The specific nature of any of these systems can vary quite a bit depending upon the game, but this is a sort of general outline (and why we care).

An 18xx Game Courtesy of their Wiki

So in taking these train games, S first started with some sort of Fairy game concept that was always a bit unclear to me. The core economy of it never seemed to work out, but it did make clear that a natural extension of this sort of concept was a sort of 'Demon Deal', as companies you invested in were often screwed over by you and still had to obey. This meant the whole concept made an easy transition into a sort of supernatural demons owning you sort of theme, which would sow the seeds for later ideas.

To make the economy work out I had a few proto-games sort of drafted.

The truly first version was a bit of a mess, and focused upon city-building. The economy how how a city developed and so on seemed to be sufficiently interesting and simpler than building train networks. At its core though it didn't necessarily hook into the competition aspects well enough that drive the genre forward and was a bit of a flop of an idea.

This quickly transitioned into a sort of warring nations game, where leaders of the nations would be tempted by players (demons), much like the game Imperial. Country based mechanics could be slimmed down, leading to some pretty basic area-control mechanics. Area control felt like a natural extension of a 'simple' competing companies economy, as the easiest way to change an economy in competition was to just take or lose territory that gave points.

The final idea I came up with was a sort of competitive music game. As a simple thought experiment for how to make the simplest possible theme based off the territory expansion of war, I decided that musicians fighting each-other for popularity seemed decent. Now, in my head this idea seemed silly, as I pretty much exclusively imagined pop musicians competing against each-other, all of which were bad at music and basically pawns. The theme, in my eyes, just didn't make much sense, as I had only been trying to take the very minimal excuses that would technically work, to succeed at the initial design goal -have the lightest possible economic game for competing 'companies' that you can hold shares in.

S was wise enough (or at least distanced enough from my thoughts), to see that this theme was actually spot on if you tapped into broader conventions that already existed in the whole of music. I created a simple Territory map, and a simple ruleset for expansion, and the very first stages of Fiddle of Gold were born.

The Original Map prototype had more zones, and expected to have 3 time periods, but this made the game take too long.

-K

Fiddle of Gold's Origins as a Reaction to 18xx Games

The earliest notes I can find on the game that would eventually become Fiddle of Gold date back to February of 2015.

I had been playing 18xx games for a couple of years at that point and was quite enamored with them. For awhile all other games felt lacking in comparison. I loved 18xx games' separation between the players and the companies. I liked how your interests may or may not be aligned with the companies you controlled, or your fellow shareholders. I loved thinking about the various ways to extract value from this company you controlled, but the company was not you. The game makes you pivot your choices based on your fellow players portfolio exposure. Raking in dividends felt good. Pulling all the value out of something and leaving husk for someone else to deal with felt great.

I also loved how the game asks you questions about risk. Will all these 2 trains pay for themselves before they rust? Is the company I'm investing in safe or toxic? Is it profitable enough now? For how long? Should I burn it down myself before someone else does while I'm still in it? There is a delightful sort of tension here, which I had not truly experienced before in my fairly long gaming career.

That said there were things about the genre I did not like.

First, the run-time was longer than I would like, especially with new or methodical players. I play games to make interesting choices; the longer between real choices, the worse the experience. I love heavy games, but the long run times they tend to have are a price of entry for me rather than an enjoyable part of the game. It seemed to me that 18xx games had a lot of fiddly parts that didn't really add meaningful choices, but took me a lot of time to deal with. I really disliked how much time is spent making change with the bank (when you buy stocks, sell stocks, buy trains, place tokens, pay dividends, in some games literally every track placement). Route calculation is another time sink, as is digging for the track tile you want. All of this is getting in the way of what I think of as the heart of the game: figuring out what company you should invest in and what you should do with it.

This bookkeeping is a particular issue with new players, however it is not limited to them. I play with an experienced group; we use auxiliary spreadsheets, poker chips, and other commonly advocated methods to speed up play. Still, accounting steals too much time from actual gameplay. The very desire for a spreadsheet to help track things and keep the game moving is a real design issue.

On a more controversial note I also really don't like track placement. This is an especially subjective opinion, but here are my issues with it, in increasing order of subjectivity.

First, understanding the basics of how routes work and how tiles upgrade are meaningful hurdles to new players. It takes new players multiple plays to understand these concepts at an intuitive level, in my experience. Until they do play crawls to a halt. This turns some players off the genre altogether, including players who are otherwise fine with heavy econ games.

Second, even with experienced players you have to internalize the specific tile manifest for each game to play at a high level. There is enough else going on that you likely won't notice that we are running out of tile 23 (as opposed to its mirror tile 24) unless you just sort of know to look out for that. I want to win or lose as a result of the decisions being made, rather than someone failing to notice board state. It feels a bit to me like having to memorize and internalize the contents of the deck in Twilight Struggle, chess openings, or bidding conventions. Some folks find this journey of discovery rewarding, but to me its just work, required reading to get to the "real" game. Work worth doing for some games, but work nonetheless.

Finally I just don't find route building satisfying.

A partial view of the tile manifest from one of my top 5 favorite 18xx games, 1862, as posted by its creator Mike Hutton on BGG. This game features an unusually simple set of track tiles which is one of a few reasons why I like it so much. You can tell this by looking at the brown tiles if you know what to look for. Hopefully this helps to illustrate the point I'm trying to make here.

So what is Fiddle of Gold then? It started as a design exercise in trying to include all the things I loved in 18xx and leave the rest out. It is an attempt to create a smoother running game that still gives me those feelings of tension and greed that I had only found in 18xx.

In Fiddle of Gold, players must decide if they will take on the risk of being the patron of an artist. Patrons risk losing their shares in fiddle contests, but also generate the most wealth. Understanding what other players are invested in and if they want to take an artist's career in the same direction as you is quite important. Depending on the game state it might be better to build talented artists who will be profitable in the long run, or to make sure artists retire as quickly as possible, or just to cash out. Successful play requires pivoting as the game develops.

There is no company money, no track, and shares are acquired without touching the bank directly.

Fiddle of Gold cares about a different kind of "tracks"

Playtime is roughly 3 hours including teach, assuming one player who knows the rules is teaching 3 totally new players who play at an average speed. 18xx rules knowledge is not expected. Experienced players can play the game much faster than this.
Fiddle of Gold is, at least from my perspective, a reaction to 18xx games. I could go on longer here, but I think its best to wrap up this post for now. Hopefully this has given at least some insight into what motivated me to work on this project and what has guided my (if not necessarily K's) design choices along the way.



- S