Welcome back to the popular and frequent series where I write about games I like. This is the second one, the first one was last year some time. The game I will be talking about this week is John Company, Second Edition.
This game gives players control of investors in the East India Company and tells them to find a way to win. The map, tellingly, is one of India. Regional kings rule. The players can only make money one way, by spending company funds to prise open the subcontinent.
Now, it is possible to cooperate with those kings. Players can make some money working with them. But they are fickle and can close up trade routes at random, delivering a blow to the Company’s coffers. So in order to secure the trade routes, armies can be raised and regions conquered. This opens the map up for trade…and for drugs.
Across the map there are symbols for opium, which players sell to China. The margines on the opium are higher than anything else. And so, in service of the Company, player sell opium. Large armies are maintained in order to keep the conquests, and before round two is up, the players have seized control of India to protect their money making.
And what does the money go to? Private coffers which pay for swanky homes and luxuries. Those prizes are the points by which you win. The Company can either succeed of fail based on revenue, and the players can win even when the company fails.
All the fighting is spent on upgrades to your family’s social life. In this way players are presented with a choice. The more control taken of India, the better their family will be. I have never played a game where we peacefully coexisted. The first round is always spent on spending the war chest to take as much as possible.
All players choose greed as they seize control of India for their own aims, cooperating when it suits them and seeking their own areas of control. Players push deeper, trying to extract all they can before the loot train is over.
There are plenty of games where the goal is money, but there are few where the actions of greed are so blatantly open. The game wants players to do bad things to win, and through this they learn how this period of history played out. In my experience, there are few games that place you in the position of a historical period and allow you to make immoral choices to win.
I think that is a good way to teach history. Give players a slew of choices and ley them make the bad ones that were historically made, because that is what the systems of the time called for.
Michael Frutig 