I like the concept of the map, with the city squares expanded in the corners, but if I remade it I'd only have a rail connection between St Felix and Kannahaw (Kannahaw and Chase City are already connected by steamboat, which I should have marked by a dashed, dark-blue line); Bunton would have had only road connections. I'd have formally marked the boundaries of what back in days of the old west was called "indian territory", so it didn't look as if it was only one square — it actually extends along a roughly 45-degree angle to include the Minosa Desert and the Sacred Mountain (which is the settlers' name for it; I should have put the native name underneath in parentheses).
The ranches are only one square, but this is set before before barbed wire came out so that's not a problem. Only the whole, though, it was good for a prototype, although it was through gritted teeth that I put the dot after the "St" in "St Felix" (Americans would put it, but I'm not American and make a distinction between contractions such as Saint=>St and abbreviations such as Street=> St.).
Although the map was serviceable, the game itself wasn't. Here's the premise from the rules:
"You start off as a good guy (white hat). The cards you pick up have two halves: one for white hats, one for black hats. You can switch from white hat to black hat whenever you like, but only switch from black hat back to white hat under certain circumstances."
The problem was, as you might have guessed, game balance. White hats had an advantage when there were no black hats, but once one player went black hat they had an advantage. It caused a cascade and everyone ended up black hat with no white hats to leech off. I'd foreseen this, and had tried to put in countermeasures (a bounty system) so that the more players turned black hat the more advantageous it was to remain a white hat, so that eventually an equilibrium would be reached. Unfortunately, "eventually" was too long and the black hats would win before then. Also, the rules got bogged down in transport mechanics for groups, cargo, individuals and equipment that if this had been a computer game wouldn't have been a problem but it it wasn't so it was.
I revisted the game in 2009 to see if I could fix it. I concluded that doing so would involve either an unholy mess or the removal of the hat-flipping mechanic that was the game's central point of interest.
Looking back at this, what surprises me the most is that I must have had a colour printer in 2002.