In working on the WarGear Teutonica board, which is still in development, I was very motivated to find a solution to a common problem. The Set-up section of the Designer does not allow designers to create "Allocated Capitals," which are essential for player elimination to work when Abandon is OFF (most boards), and there are off-board territories (necessary for many factory-driven designs). The requested "Token Territories" designer feature would also solve this problem, but Tom has indicated that it is a very difficult and time consuming feature to add. In any case, here's my workaround. It seems to be working on a version of WT I'm currently working on .

Artifacts:

Factories only execute at the beginning of a player's turn, so there are some delaying artifacts in the first round that felt needed to be dealt with.

Player 1's units materialize on the map immediately, but all the other player's on-board territories are still neutral. Similarly, at the beginning of the 2nd player's turn, his units materialize on the board, etc.. If those players decide to attack any neutrals, those territories will be recaptured by the still active off-board territories in subsequent turns of round 1 ..and they would NOT be happy.

Though this is not a big deal if they read the description and are aware of the issue, I have a workaround. Start all of the on-board territories with a large number of neutrals to discourage players from attacking on round 1. As those territories are converted to player territories, their numbers are reduced to the standard allocation decided by the designer.

Correction: I'm talking about artificially creating UN-allocated capitals.

I have thought about doing something similar.

An issue with " Start all of the on-board territories with a large number of neutrals to discourage players from attacking on round 1" could be that Player 2 could attack player 1 on round 1, Player 3 could attack 2 and 1 and so on. Unless the board design made that a non-issue due to borders, etc. But still I don't think players should be taking turns without knowing where the capitals will be.

My general plan was that on the first round each territory would get 1 unit, and no one would get bonuses. So everyone would just have to click through their turn the first time. Then on the1st players 2nd turn there would be a factory triggered to place units on all the territories.

Amidon37 wrote:I have thought about doing something similar.

An issue with " Start all of the on-board territories with a large number of neutrals to discourage players from attacking on round 1" could be that Player 2 could attack player 1 on round 1, Player 3 could attack 2 and 1 and so on. Unless the board design made that a non-issue due to borders, etc. But still I don't think players should be taking turns without knowing where the capitals will be.

My general plan was that on the first round each territory would get 1 unit, and no one would get bonuses. So everyone would just have to click through their turn the first time. Then on the1st players 2nd turn there would be a factory triggered to place units on all the territories.

I ended up getting the same result doing the opposite. I had the neutral territories populate with a large number (13) of armies to discourage attack. Then on the next round, the off-board takes 10 off of them before neutralizing itself.