Hello, hello! Today I’m going to ramble about three games that are near and dear to my heart. These games have a heavy focus on managing resources and an economy, but an even stronger and more present focus on interacting with the players around your table. Please stand by while I praise them.
First up, Food Chain Magnate is a cutthroat, deep, and intricate contest of economic wills for 2-5 players. It comes from a design ideology that says that games should allow players to interact with each other constantly, and that games should be unforgiving enough that players can put themselves out of the running with a bad first turn. Practically speaking the latter won’t happen unless some of the players are much better than the others, but that’s what the designers are shooting for.
Over the course of the game you, as the CEO of your own personal food chain, will have to hire employees to run all the aspects of your business, promote your products to the hapless consumers populating your city, and viciously undercut your competition to ensure that you make all the sales while their refrigerators overflow with unsold stock. Somewhere in there you’ll also have to find time to actually make enough pizza, burgers, or lemonade to meet demand, as well as expand across town to pull more prospective customers into your capitalist embrace.
Food Chain Magnate is tough and unforgiving but commensurately satisfying, and will make you feel foolish, frustrated, brilliant, and elated all in the course of a single game. You’ll gloat and you’ll scowl, and most of all you’ll know that you can do better next time. It’s pretty special.
Antiquity is next because it’s made by the same gentlemen who crafted Food Chain Magnate and it shares the same design ideologies.
Over the course of about five hundred years, each player will manage the expanding operations of a group of cities in a region of Italy. You’ll be managing as many workers as you can support, while constantly trying to figure out exactly how many that is. You’ll be assigning those workers to your stables, to your fisheries, to your logging camps, and eventually to your university faculties. You’ll be deciding whether you’re harvesting that string of lakes for fish, pearls, or dye, and trying to plan precisely what you’re going to use the output for. You’ll be deciding whether this mountain range will produce stone or gold, and bemoaning your choice all game long.
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Antiquity is fascinating, exhausting, and satisfying in equal measure. Like Food Chain Magnate, it’s one that you can play over and over and over again, the puzzle constantly changing and evolving not only from turn to turn but also from game to game. If heavyweight worker- and resource-management sounds good to you, check this one out.
Finally, I’d like to talk about my favourite trading game, Sidereal Confluence. To give it its full, slightly tongue in cheek title: Sidereal Confluence: Trading and Negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant. This is a competitive game about cooperating better than anyone else.
The game’s premise is simple: a bunch of distinct alien races have all had enough of war, and now they’re going to do a bunch of trading to see whose culture is dominant in their new mixed society. To that end, they all start colonizing worlds, hunting for relics, and inventing technologies just so that they can share that technology with their species’ twist on it. Simple!
No. Well, sort of. You see, to do all these things, each species will start out by doing the things they know best. For the easily distracted, hyperactive space bugs it’s travelling to uncolonized planets faster than light speed. For the resource-poor space whales, it’s managing their resources extremely efficiently and offering that same service to their peers. As for the unscrupulous tentacle aliens, what they know best is running a protection racket! So, each playable species has a niche here, a particular set of skills that will serve them and the impending confluence well.
What you’re trying to do is acquire everything your economy needs to function, while folding whatever excess you have into ingenious long-term trades, or mutually-beneficial technology-producing agreements. The trouble is, no one can accomplish their goals on their own. Other species will often need what you produce, and you’ll need what they produce, and thus negotiations are born. Importantly, Sidereal is a game of friendly negotiation. All agreements are binding, and everyone is dealing with their eyes open. No one is deceiving anyone else.
All of this combines to make an enormously enjoyable and replayable game of wonderful space business. Sidereal is every bit as much about the people you’re playing with as it is about the game mechanics. With 9 playable species, each with their own foibles, strengths, and weaknesses, any difference in configuration makes the game very different. Playing with a different set of people makes the game very different. Even playing with the same group but sitting next to different people makes the game different!
Speaking as someone whose strong preference is for a) economic games with lots of options and b) games with constantly changing tactical decisions, Sidereal is the first trading game I’ve ever truly loved, and it’s easily one of my favourite games in general.
