Vexation
Vexation Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Material
18 colored tracks (3 per player's color).
Game Set Up
The game is set up as usual. Every player additionally takes the three tracks of his color.
Changes in Game Play
Instead of using black tracks shared by all players, a player can choose to use his own colored tracks 3 times in each game round. These tracks are built according to the usual rules of the game. The connections built with colored tracks can only be used by the respective owner. If another player wants to use parts of the network only accessible through tracks of a different color, he has to build connections to go "around" those colored tracks.
At an intersection of the grid a maximum of two colored tracks is allowed (black doesn't count as a colored track for this purpose, only players colors do). Colored tracks cannot be replaced by black tracks.
Example
Rosa has incorporated 2 red railroad tracks in her connection to Bilbao (see image in the original document). Gilbert wants to go to Brest. However, he cannot just branch off in Paris since Paris can be only reached via red tracks. For this reason, he branches off north of Paris (black dotted connections in the image in the original document) and, all in all, has to place five tracks to reach Brest.
He also would like to make the access to Paris even more difficult for other players, by placing an additional yellow track to Paris (see image in the original document). However, he is not allowed to do that, since there are already 2 colored tracks (red in this example) at the Paris junction.
Note: the example's diagrams are not reproduced here; the text above describes them as the original document does.
Variant by Tom Lehmann
Every player starts with 2 colored tracks of his color for the first game round. At the beginning of each of the following rounds, each player keeps the colored tracks he didn't use in the previous round and gets 1 additional colored track of his color, to a maximum of 3 at any time.
This leads to everyone having at least 1 colored track per round to spend and to create interesting decisions as to whether to spend any of your colored tracks during the first round (if you don't, you'll have 3 for the second round) and when to spend 2 or more in a round (as that cuts into future blocking moves).