A useful feature for teaching new players the rules and for quickly scanning your boards for income is to highlight any income and bonus spaces the player has fully surrounded on their home boards, islands, and buildings.
My friends and I just played our first game after watching a rules explanation, and we somehow all missed the fact that a bonus space needs to be surrounded in all eight directions, not just the four cardinal directions. Most of us figured it out after a few rounds (the hard way), but I ended up missing at least ten bonus tiles due to my misunderstanding this rule.
Just as new tiles placed on the board are highlighted in green or red, bonus spaces and the active income spaces could be permanently highlighted, outlined, or marked with a symbol denoting that you have activated these spaces (plus a tooltip when hovering).
This feature would improve the visibility of income and bonuses when the boards are cluttered.
My friends and I just played our first game after watching a rules explanation, and we somehow all missed the fact that a bonus space needs to be surrounded in all eight directions, not just the four cardinal directions. Most of us figured it out after a few rounds (the hard way), but I ended up missing at least ten bonus tiles due to my misunderstanding this rule.
Just as new tiles placed on the board are highlighted in green or red, bonus spaces and the active income spaces could be permanently highlighted, outlined, or marked with a symbol denoting that you have activated these spaces (plus a tooltip when hovering).
This feature would improve the visibility of income and bonuses when the boards are cluttered.