What do you want me to do, game?

What I mean by that, and I may be misusing the term, are games like Container or an 18xx game - I recently taught 2 of my friends to play Shikoku 1889.

What these games have in common is that they describe through various means a kind of economic structure. Shikoku 1889 deals in shares and the whole economic baggage that comes with that.

There’s a sense that I cannot describe that you get from reading a rulebook like this. You see mechanisms at play, almost a simulation of a stock market, but you’re left with a fundamental question. If the aim of the game is to make the most money, how do I actually do that? There isn’t a simple answer - do I become the president of a company, run it well, and profit from my smart decisions? Or do I invest a little in a lot of other companies, predicting how well companies will run and investing in the strongest but not actually running any myself? Or do I try to take control of 2 companies and pull shenanigans like having one company buy a train from my other company for 1 Yen?

Container manages the same feeling but with perhaps less machinery going on. In Container each player runs a company. They own factories and can make stuff, which is abstracted as containers of 5 different colours. After you make a container, you set its price and leave it at the factory to be bought up by another player. That player moves the goods to their harbour, and sets a price for another player to pick up the goods from the harbour and load them onto a ship. The ship will eventually dock at Container Island, where the players bid for the whole shipment, and whoever wins the auction will keep those containers on the island to score something at the end of the game.

You can see how there’s potential for profit and loss to be made at each step - you make stuff, it gets sold to someone, they sell it to someone else, they put it up for auction and someone buys it. The only ‘gamey’ part of the system is that at most steps you cannot buy your own stuff - you cannot pay yourself to move goods from the factory to your harbour, you cannot load your own ship at your harbour, and whilst you can win your own goods auction, rules about government subsidies come into effect which make it sound less of a good idea than allowing someone else to win.

In a way, economic games should be the easiest to understand - you win by having the most money at the end of the game. I think what makes them so special is that the money that you win with is the very same money that you use in all the other actions. The system is laid bare for all to see, but the potential for making profit comes from somehow exploiting the actions of other players - there’s no action built in to the game that is, all by itself, profitable.

Where that leaves you, as the first player to act the first time you ever play the game, is wondering - “What should I even try to do?” Could I play the game never creating a good, only ever buying other people’s produce to ship for profit? Or is the only way to win to be involved at all levels of the system?

What these games have in common is that there’s no clear linear set of steps towards a goal. Instead there’s a web of things you can do, but not so much clear direction on what you should try to achieve.

Let’s talk about Century³. The game is itself quite simple to understand - you start with some cards, one that makes some basic crystals of the lowest value, and one that upgrades the value of them. Each turn you can spend the crystals you have on creating a Golem, you can spend some crystals getting a card from the market which typically opens up ways of trading crystals for other crystals, or you can play one of the cards that you have. The resulting system sounds complex because there are more things going on to give names to, but there’s a sense of escalation built into it

In fact, you don’t ever need to purchase a card, you could theoretically spend the whole game only ever making yellow crystals, upgrading them, picking up, and staying in this 3-turn cycle forever until you can afford a Golem. And that is what I think makes the game simple to understand - you already have an engine that turns actions into crystals and crystals into Golems, your real decisions are on how and when to upgrade the efficiency of that engine versus when to just let it run.

What simplifies Century is the straight line nature of the strategy. I am here (with some crystals and some cards) and I want to get there (to buy a Golem) so how do I do that?

It’s Cards → Crystals → Golems in a linear sense versus Money → Money → Money → Money in all directions. More moving parts, but they tell a story and leave it obvious which step you are on.

I had the pleasure of playing a fresh prototype game with Nat this week² and something about the very first turn struck me as interesting. You see, in this game at the moment there are two kinds of currency. Let’s call it basic and fancy currency for now. There are spots on the board that require the fancy currency - but you don’t start the game with any. There are other spots on the board that require basic currency and give you back the fancy one, and other spots that don’t interact with the fancy currency at all.

Right away at turn one there’s a story being told. If you want to interact with the fancy board squares, you’re going to need some fancy currency. Suddenly there are two steps to your plan.

Step 1 → Get Fancy Currency.

Step 2 → Use it on fancy board space.

Step 3 → ?????

Step 4 → Profit.

Or, you could decide that this story is such an obvious one to play out that there’s going to be too much contention over the fancy currency, so you’re going to ignore it for now, avoid the players fighting over it, do something else, and maybe slip into the fancy currency later when there’s less contention.

The point I’m inarticulately trying to make is, when the mechanics of the game tell you a story and give you an idea of where you want to end up, I believe it’s easier to play those first few turns because you can understand at least what the start of your goal is. The more systematic economic games feel like a sandbox in which you’re told - here are your tools, you must figure out how to use them, making them quite overwhelming at first, but perhaps giving you room to learn the system and improve your decision making over time?

Don’t get me wrong - I love a game with multiple paths to victory. I love the existence of weird plans that might never work out but feel so satisfying the one time they do. But what I do want is for everyone to hit turn one with an idea of something they can do. A clear signpost that says, if you have no other ideas of your own, here’s at least a direction to head in.⁴

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