Expert Variants

Optional draft setup, decade restrictions and two additional actions.

Setup

Choose any or all Expert options. For the expanded Development supply, place one Entrepreneur, one fewer Engineer than players and one fewer Patent than players in a shared supply; return excess Engineer and Patent cards. Shuffle the remaining Development cards without player-count limits, adding four per player to the regular supply. Keep no more than players minus one cards of each type in the display; flip or replace cards until the limit is met. Different Patron types are different types for this limit. Return the rest to the box.

Use restriction tokens on player boards: a development level cannot be marked until its indicated decade. Trade Office (Shipping), Workshop (Machine), Patent (Distribution) and Engineer (Quality) can suspend their indicated restriction while the card is held. Restore the restriction when the card is discarded; do not move development markers backward.

For chosen starts, draft one factory in player order, a second factory in reverse order, then one board development or Development card in reverse order. Keep the Shipping card in reserve so players start without ships. Each player starts with £50 and chooses how many £10 shares to buy. These options add about 30 minutes.

Extra Production

As an action, choose any number of factories and produce with the factory alone, with the factory and first worker, or with the factory and both workers. Store all output in that factory’s warehouses; goods that do not fit are lost. Normal production rules apply, but pay only the fixed costs, wages and machine maintenance for factories and cards used. Development cards such as Extra Shift or Inventor have their own Expert action effects; follow their card text.

Early Shipping

As an action, ship goods from one or more factories’ warehouses using available ships. Apply the normal shipping rules: remove shipped goods, earn each good’s factory income, and add a Shipping token per ship used. Return an emptied warehouse to reserve. See Gameplay for how shipping affects final share value.