Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Port Follians Rejoice!
By MF DowMan (of the Noble House of Trinculo)

As the year draws to a close, all of us associated with The Motley Fool are excited about the scheduled changes due in the America Online forum---new architecture to make the forum easier to navigate, new content to add to our growing stable of information sources, new year-to-date portfolio totals to "ohh" and "ahh" over.

But prominent among the changes coming with the new year is a complete restructuring of our Medieval Investing game, Port Folly. The first year was successful, but we learned a lot about how we could improve the game in recent months, and when the new game begins on January 1, the game will be much more fun, much more interactive, much more Foolish.

Here are some of the highlights of the new game. Print this out and stash it away so you guarantee you're in on the new format right from the beginning.

The current game ends on the last trading day of 1995 and the new game begins with the first trading day of 1996. But the biggest calendar change is that the game has been shortened to three months. We'll run four consecutive games each year. That will allow any new readers to our area to get into a game reasonably quickly instead of having to watch the game that's already in progress go on and on.

In the old game, if a Noble was in last place at the end of a month, he lost his head. (We need more women nobles!) But since the Village Idiot did so poorly, gross negligence on the part of the nobility still wasn't enough to get us our fill of gore around the Port. So, the Duke has decreed that things are getting tough around here. From now on, there will be no monthly beheadings, but at the end of each 3-month game, EVERY noble who loses to the S&P 500 Index will also lose his or her head. Mass beheadings!

That's where the fun comes in for you. The profession categories will still be in place from the old Port Folly set-up, but in the new game, the top players from the various professions will take over as nobles in the new game after Madame Guillotine eliminates the slackers at the end of each quarter. You might be the next noble of Launce or Trinculo!

The other major revision concerns player involvement. In the old game, you could only sign up with a house and watch from the sidelines. Your only real involvement was to remember to sign up for a new house at least once a month. NO MORE!

Now, there are two ways you can play. First is the current set-up where you sign up with a certain house and you get credit for whatever return that house's portfolio achieves. (One difference here, however, is that you no longer have to keep signing up. Once you sign up with a house, you stay in it until you change your allegiance, which you can do weekly.)

The second way to play, however, allows you to choose your own portfolio of ten stocks from among the 80 stocks included in the nobles' portfolios. If you like one of Touchstone's stocks, five of Costard's, two from the House of Commons, and two from Feste, you can choose those ten and compete with your own portfolio. And like the nobles, you will update your selections monthly. Another change allows nobles (and players) to close any or all of their stock positions during the month. (New positions, however, cannot be opened.)

And finally, there will be two new features to make the game easier and more enjoyable to follow. We're adding a mid-day update on the Port Folly stocks to supplement the day's closing report, and Port Folly's own newspaper---The Town Crier---will be incorporated into the new front screen for Port Folly, bringing the news, features, classifieds, and Port Gossip much closer to your fingertips.