Trade and exchange in 30's New York
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Publisher's Description:New York, in the mid-30's. The Great Depression is ending, the city is flourishing again. The new upturn can be witnessed particularly in Chinatown, the lively quarter in the south of the metropolis: everywhere laundries, offices and restaurants are mushrooming. And all want to work together. Whether openly or privately, everyone deals with all. And you are right in the middle of it! |
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Trev says:This is an excellent game. So go and buy a copy! It is a game that is built around trading but, whereas many games of that nature can be quite intense, this one seems to have a much more relaxed feel to it. The board consists of 85 numbered building plots on which businesses can be built. The game has six rounds, each having five phases. In phase one, each player gets dealt a number of plot cards and chooses some to keep and some to discard - this excellent mechanism mitigates against the problem of being dealt bad cards. You tend to keep plots that are useful to you as well as plots that may be useful to someone else. Once everyone has discarded the requisite cards (which are shuffled back into the main deck), they all then place their coloured markers on the plots they have kept, to show which are owned and by whom. In phase two, players draw a number of business tiles. These are available in matching sets (3 sets each) of 3, 4, 5 or 6 tiles - with three 'spare' tiles for each set. For example, there are four tiles to a full Laundry set, with seven Laundry tiles available in the game. Phase three is where all the action occurs as this is where players can trade the plots, tiles and money that they own in any way they choose. Naturally, players are trying to get full sets of business tiles and adjacent plots - not to mention money, although that is less important early in the game when expansion is the key. Phase four allows players to place business tiles on plots they own. Once a plot is designated a particular type, it cannot change - although it can change ownership in future trading. In the early stages it is often wise to leave single plots empty to see who gets ownership of the neighbouring tiles before committing them to a particular business type. Phase five is the payout phase. First, a bonus card is revealed that may pay out bonuses to certain business tiles that are placed on the board. Next there is a payout for each business - a contiguous set of identical business tiles up the the full size of that set. Businesses pay more the larger they are, and pay even more once they are full size. Then it's on to the next round, until the game ends - at which point everyone adds up their cash to find the winner. I think the reason the trading is so much better than other games is that it isn't all focussed on one player. As long as you have at least four players, there can always be two active trades going on at once and, if you're spending too long on the details of one trade, you may find that the other players have traded enough to spoil your plans. This encourages you to try and keep things moving along fairly briskly. And unlike many trading games where you may be trying to score an advantage over the person you are trading with, in Chinatown you are trading co-operatively so that you both benefit compared to the other players. You tend to win the game by placing more emphasis on trading frequently than on getting the best possible deal, and a plot of land or a business tile that isn't making you any money is better traded such that you and the other party are both making a bit extra. So the trading, coupled with the excellent method for getting new plots each round, leads to an exceptionally good game. Probably my top game of 1999. To buy: |
