New Game Uploaded: Hotel Magnate

["mschoessow" <mikeschoessow@...>]

With all the discussion on Pawnoply happening lately, I thought this 
might be a good time to upload a Monopoly-inspired game of my own 
from last year to the Rules In Progress folder in the files section. 
The game is called Hotel Magnate, and from a reading of the 
Pawnoploy rules, the games are very different, which is interesting 
because both are obviously somewhat similar to Monopoly. 

[that's one of the neat things about game design in my opinion, and 
is probably why design partnerships are often successful---the whole 
is more than the sum of the parts with two people contributing]

My goal with Hotel Magnate was to adapt the basic idea of Monopoly 
to the piecepack, while retaining the good (in my opinion) aspects 
of Monopoly, and also addressing the common criticisms of the game. 

Hotel Magnate utilizes a unique (as far as I know) mechanic for 
interjecting some control into the dice roll for pawn movement. The 
board is seven tiles on a side with the corner tiles and the center 
tiles of each board side being gridded, but with the remaining 
sixteen tiles being suited. The gridded tiles are each two lanes 
wide, and in the case of the corner tiles, each has a 1-space long 
inner lane, and a 3-space long outer lane. This allows players to 
affect which tiles they land on after passing through a corner, 
depending on which lane they take.

I had planned to include even more control by allowing players to 
forgo the die roll at the beginning of a turn for a fixed move of 
one space at a set cost to the player, or alternatively, allow 
players to pay for a second roll to the replace their first if they 
didn't like the first. For now, I have decided that this would 
probably give players TOO much control, and allow them to avoid 
landing on other players hotels too often. However, I would be very 
interested to hear other peoples opinions if thye feel inclined to 
read through the rules.

Hotel Magnate supports more auctions and more frequent trading and 
deal-making than Monopoly does, and this is really the heart of the 
game. The other major difference is that money is much tighter in 
Hotel Magnate than in Monopoly. The piecepack coins are used for the 
money and there aren't that many of them for this purpose, 
especially with four players! I had to come up with a system that 
kept the money circulating and not setting in the bank, and this has 
been the biggest challenge so far, but I think I have something that 
will work, either as is, or with a bit more tweaking. This money 
shortage issue was one of those things that caused me to think of 
ideas that would otherwise probably would not have occured to me. 

Play-testing has been very minimal thus far, with all the players 
being played by me, just to test out the basic balance, etc. 

Just a day ago, I went through the rules again and improved the 
organization compared to an earlier draft, so I think it's organized 
well enough now that it should be pretty easy reading as rules sets 
go.

All comments and constructive criticisms are welcome (OK, even UN-
constructive criticism might be useful).

-Mike Schoessow