What makes this doubly hard is that you’re competing with every other player for a central pool of resources and actions. Being denied access to a particular resource or action prevents you from completing the necessary improvements in time, which then blocks the development of other elements of your farm. For example, feeding your family with livestock is a very efficient way of generating food, but this strategy requires a cooking hearth, which in turn requires clay and a build action, and of course an assortment of animals (sheep/pigs/cows). Collecting livestock requires fencing in portions of your farm to hold them, which in turn requires wood, which in turn requires taking turns to collect the wood, which prevents you from developing other parts of your farm you’ll be scored on like tilling land and sowing grain/vegetables.

ble franchises were essentially a legal right to a local monopoly, which meant that cable system operators had limited competition once it established itself in a given locale.