Since the summer school I was going to attend in summer was canceled a week ago, which effectively means I will be in my home city for the entire duration of holidays with little to do besides "work" and "working" on my thesis, I am making an interest check for a game (it is really more of a board game than a BoP) I had in mind for some time.
In short, it is a forumized version of Railroad Tycoon 2. I don't know how many people are familiar with this game so just a short summary of the game: it is a game about building railroads but unlike most railroad games, the game emphasizes the corporate side of things a lot. Bonds, stocks and a condition of the economy actually make sense, it is possible to do some insider trading and things like that. Basically, where most other games feel like your goal is to build a functional railroad network that distributes goods efficiently, Railroad Tycoon 2's mood is that everything is but a vehicle to make money. I have an impression that making this a forum game should not be overly difficult. Played on a hex map with most of things connected to trains and their cargo abstracted or scrapped, what needs to be done is basically just to have a system for building railroad tracks and infrastructure and a system for how the economy works.
The idea is to have players play wealthy industrialists with loads of money in the mid 19th century USA. Industrialists can be chairmen of companies, giving them some income based on how their stockholders view their performance, and can invest in companies' stocks which may make them richer (or poorer) as 1) as a company prospers, its stocks generally become more valuable; 2) a company may pay dividends which is essentially a portion of its profits distributed between its stockholders. The companies are controlled by players or are NPC - in any way, the point is that it is possible to invest money in any company, including those controlled by other players. The gameplay of course lies in controlling the companies but things are rather predictable there - build tracks, send trains on them, carry cargo from here to there and gather money for doing so. The real trick will be transforming money made by a company into money in a player's pocket.
As I stated before, it is hardly to be called BoP as players' actions are mostly to be those described in rules / game mechanics. That is - building tracks, stations, buying locomotives, setting up trains and their routes, buying and selling stocks, selling bonds and so on. If a non-anticipated actions are permitted at all (now I cannot imagine what these might be short of sabotages, meddling in politics and smear campaigns), they will have a very limited impact on the overall gameplay. There is a possibility of great roleplay but with a very limited impact on the actual game.
Looking for six or so players so the main question is: would anyone be interested in building the iron road across the United States?
