Ancient Water, Revamped and Refined

hey all,

I've gone through and done a bit of play testing for my Ancient Water game. As you can see from the picture, I've replaced the water slips and crop slips with colored glass beads. These pieces get moved around a lot, and the paper slips were just too hard to count quickly and move around smoothly, so they are gone. Also, I made some new smaller boxes that fit the size of the river much better.

Mechanically, here are the current rules.

1. Setup
• The board starts with the empty boxes on the river.
• The player roles two six-sided dice to determine how much water goes in the top most box.
• The player then decides how to distribute their population. The player starts with four people who they may distribute however they want. (This is for single player play. For two player or multiplayer, different colored pieces will be needed for each player. Plus an extra roll of the dice to figure out which player goes first, second, third, etc. Only one player may occupy a region at a time.)
2. Each turn, there are seven actions that take place.
1. Boxes are cycled down one, and the bottom most box is placed at the top. Roll dice to determine how much water goes in the top river box.
2. If the player has four people in one area, the player may build an irrigation project. The next level of irrigation requires six people, and the final level nine people.
3. Both six-sided dice are rolled to see if any one dies. If the total is a 3 or 4, someone dies.
4. The player may decide to move their population around, but must have at least one person in an area in order to collect water and grow crops.
5. Water is collected from the river box adjacent to the player's area. Without irrigation, only one unit of water may be collected, but each level of irrigation adds one to this:
1. Level 1: two units of water
2. Level 2: three units of water
3. Level 3: four units of water
6. Every two units of water collected may be converted in one crop. The people can survive two turns without crops, but if they do not have any crops after two complete turns, they will die.
7. Lastly, every two units of crops can be converted into one person. It requires one crop to maintain between one to four people, so if the population increases to five, two crops must be saved.

That's it. I've been thinking of creating a short story, something like "You are the chief of the _____ people and it is your job to help them stay alive..." just to motivate the action. There are still no endgame conditions, but if the population reaches zero, of course the game is over. I still need to see about how long it takes to reach a population of ten, but I think being the first player to reach ten or 15 should be the winner.