Of Feast & Famine - New Thoughts

The simulation continues to suck.  But I've thought of some new ideas for the game....  I'm sure if the simulation helped with that or not.  Nonetheless, since I have new ideas for the game and I haven't yet gotten the simulation to work with the previous rules (much less the ones I just came up with).  I may have to abandon the simulation... at least for a while.

So here are the new ideas:
I'm going to give each player a pawn...  a different style pawn from the workers.  There are Eight specialties and Eight available colors from The Game Crafter, so that works out nicely.  Here's the color mappings: 

• Agriculture - Green
• Architecture - White
• Combat - Black
• Medicine - Blue
• Diplomacy - Purple
• Finance - Yellow
• Religion - Red
• Education (replaces the old specialty Planning) - Orange

Now when a player takes an action, they will place their pawn on the board.  There will be two new spots added to the board as well:  one for a school and one for a market. 

The school is really just giving a name to a game concept that was already in the game.  When ever you add new workers they had to wait a few seasons, but I didn't really explain why (because I didn't know yet!) .  But now I know;  They're at school learning the basics required to work.  Brand new workers take 4 seasons to teach.  Another subtle change here...  all workers have an implied ring for each discipline.  To add additional rings, you have to go back to school.  2 season to add the first ring.  3 seasons to add a second ring of the same type as the first ring.  Workers can no longer have a third ring (because there are implied ones for every worker).  I'll include fewer rings in the game too...  6 each instead of 9 each. 

The market is the way to make money.  Previously there was an awkward "add gold" action that didn't involve workers or a place on the board where it happened.  The market is that place now. You can place your pawn there and bring as many workers as you like and you earn one gold per pawn/worker.  I just had a thought right now, as I was typing.  Maybe there should be a 5th discipline for finance (yellow).  And your pawn counts as one too.  And another thought...  maybe your pawn always counts as one worker.  I'm not sure if it works in the barracks especially since orange and purple don't show up on the dice.  Anyway...  there are some things to think about there.

Many of the specialties have changed too (in fact some may have just changed in the last few minutes!).

• Agriculture -Counts as 3 rings on the farm
• Architecture -Counts as 3 rings on the castle
• Combat - Can re-roll one die.
• Medicine - Counts as 3 rings on the Hospital
  
• Diplomacy - Can exchange a Tribute card for another one from the deck.  This is similar to the old planning specialty (that was too powerful), except that it's limited to Tribute cards and it now eats up a player action to do.
• Finance - Counts as 3 rings on the market.
• Religion - Can use workers in Poverty to generate gold...  this doesn't remove them from poverty; one gold per worker (yellow rings don't matter).  This is like a less powerful market except that you don't have to remove them from poverty which costs gold.
• Education - Can teach workers in 1 fewer seasons than normal.

I think that may be it.  At any rate, I'm almost out of lunch break, so I'll have to end here anyway!