At Home with John and Debbie

We popped around to MC’s to play a board game with MC, Gary and Paul.

The game chosen turned out to be “Traders of Genoa“. In this, players take turns to control the five-hop route of a trader through the streets and buildings of the board. Other players bargain and bid in an attempt to influence the controlling player’s choice of route, so that they can visit the buildings they need to fulfill money-earning goals such as delivering messages, acquiring good for trade, and selling those goods.

If I played this kind of game to win, I’d be frequently disappointed. In fact one of the main pleasures I get from “German style” board games is in observing the clever self-balancing nature of the games’ carefully designed economies — Puerto Rico is full of that kind of thing.

Power Grid has a terrific example, where fuel is represented as “barrel” pieces on a row indicating increasing prices. When you buy a barrel, you take it from the cheap end of the line, and pay the price on its square, so as more people buy the same kind of fuel, the price of that fuel increases. Also, the stock is replenished at a preset rate, so demand for a certain kind of fuel can push up prices spanning many turns. (Note that by defining those preset replenishment rates to suit, the game designers can make the game fit whatever political message about energy policy they’d like to promote).

I didn’t see any such elegant mechanisms in Traders of Genoa, so I didn’t derive that particular pleasure from this game. I suspect that the balance and in-game market forces are supposed to be created through the bargaining aspect of the game. Just like in a real economy, for this to work effectively, everyone must understand the rules and the implications of their bargaining. Since we were all new to the game, and only really working out the rules as we went along, we were all making and accepting silly offers early on. Perhaps if we play again with the benefit of some experience, I’ll have an eureka moment and spot the elegant core of the game.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 25th, 2005 at 11:10 and is filed under Board games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.