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John Company: Second Edition (Kickstarter)
90m - 240m
1 - 5 Players
Ages 13+
Dice rolling in a game can be used for many things, randomness being the most obvious. Dice can also be used as counters. The dice themselves can be unique and different sizes, shapes and colors to represent different things.
Dice Rolling
Voting allows players to influence the outcome of certain events within the game. The vote may be all or nothing, choosing a target for an effect, or to determine the results of certain situations. Players’ votes may not have equal weight, and blocking a player from voting can be a valid tactic.
Voting
This mechanism requires players to select individual actions from a set of actions available to all players. Players generally select actions one-at-a-time and in turn order. There is usually(*) a limit on the number of times a single action may be taken. Actions are commonly selected by the placement of game pieces or tokens on the selected actions. Each player usually has a limited number of pieces with which to participate in the process.
Worker Placement
98.00
€
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ajewo
Will I like it? This is very much not a game for everyone. If you like negotiation games, games about history, business simulations, or wish your political games were less about fantasy/scifi empires and more about wearing nice looking hats, you will find a lot to enjoy here. Is there as much luck as in the first edition? There is less, though still much more than your average eurogame. How easy is this game to learn? It's an interesting teach. Unlike many of my other games, the design sort of teaches you how to play as you play it. It is dramatically easier to learn than the first edition but still takes time. I think it's best learned at a sort of leisurely pace as you play through your first two turns. There's a good chance we'll include a walkthrough of some kind. Are there still wild negotiations, marriages, and drama both petty and grand? Yes. This game generates at least one Victorian novel worth of drama each play. Is it a negotiation game? Basically everything in this game is tradeable and players can be quite creative in their deals. However, the negotiations in this game are very different from other negotiation games. In games like Catan or Sidereal Confluence, players trade because of comparative advantage. There's a lot of room for win-win deals that help both parties and getting good at those games is often about knowing when you can push your positions. In John Company, negotiations are more often about raw leverage. That is, players are trying to find points of leverage against each other. This means rather than making deals, you're more often asking for permission to do something you'd like to do.
Bobekistan
I can appreciate this game as a thesis on the evils of colonialism and exploiting people for the benefit of a few who then suffer little consequence and a cushy retirement. However, as a game I would say this is over-indulgent design to the extreme. In the hands of anyone with an actual editorial process, this could have been something spectacular, but as it is, it's barely a game. What's baffling to me even more is that Pax Pamir 2E was carefully re-designed to remove a lot of the clunky elements from the first edition. Yet here, it looks like they bolted on extra complexity with little gain. Details: 1) The fun part of the game, at least for me relates to the jockeying for position within the company. Yet this cycle is just too slow. We had the same chairman for basically the entire game because they just would not roll a god damn retirement. Didn't help that the setup cards also handed that person the director of trade for also basically the entire game. There's just too little going on in each office and too much upkeep and granular overhead to actually eek out anything resembling the "game" part. The mini-decisions just don't provide enough interest individually, and ultimately the level of opaqueness between what you can do and what you need to win is frustrating. I would have much preferred that each position cycled quicker and was easier to get into, with the game rewarding you for time spent + prestige accumulated over time. Given that this system is based on the whims of a die roll, it would be nice if the design treated this as a feature rather than another chunk of administrative management. 2) The entire second half of the game should be abstracted out. The sheer amount of overhead and time wasting doing the India part, e.g. the events is beyond ridiculous. Then add in the political phase, revenue, cleanup... Why? Seriously, this could have been done with one deck of cards that just tells you what region a rebellion/attack happens and what policies are available for implementation, or better still have been implemented. You could even make it feel like your actions in India have genuine consequences by creating some simple reactive threshold system instead of random bullshit. Seriously, in our game the locals basically did nothing except for the very first event which almost collapsed the company. 3) Governors are an additional time waste. This again, should have been abstracted out. Fold the governor powers into the presidency and just have the governor be a token that gets handed out (that you can also trade) giving you a few dollars per round. Why have an entire other office you need to bother with. Same thing can be said for the trade in China office. These are just there to net a few more dollars and provide more retiring opportunity. Why add so much rules overhead for something that is only useful as an additional die roll. 4) Why does the rulebook fail to have a fucking index. Do you on purposely want to make learning the game even more of a chore. You're already asking people to put in a lot of effort to learn your game, can you at least do a modicum of effort to make the process less laborious. 5) The negotiations might be something that becomes more interesting once the opaqueness is gone, meaning you have a few plays in to really understand the relationship between each player (or maybe more obvious when firms are in play). However, I'm sure it doesn't need to be said that if the game is about negotiation/trading etc, there needs to be a sense of clarity so you can actually accurately judge WHY you want to do a thing. Here, not so much. I'm sure some groups who have played this game a sufficient amount of times or played the later scenarios with firms can tell me that this is great, but at this point I doubt I'll ever know unless I play this game in a convention or something. 6) Lots of pointless extra edge cases to have to remember in the rules that could have been handled better with more reminders placed around the board, on cards etc.
adamxt
Five games in and I'm still not sure how to judge this one. The strategy is buried under so many fascinating moving parts. The favour element is difficult for new players to grasp (what is my "consent to nepotism" actually WORTH?). And it's damn hard to keep the company solvent even when everybody apparently wants to. Reserving judgment for now!