Unless, of course, those windfalls prevent the bankruptcy you were longing for. Instead, it invests those moments with the same spikes of adrenaline that arise when you receive a holiday check from a relative or find a twenty in the pocket of your winter coat. It strives in many directions, but at its core it’s a creature of procedure and accounting. The ship being sailed by all those helms is the East India Company. Of the game’s thesis: that a world-spanning company isn’t directed by one villain, but by many hands turning many helms. Of your goals: you’re here to support your dynasty, and the Company may loom large in those considerations or become one opportunity of many. Of your role: you’re the head of a family, not some disembodied interest in India. Abstraction has its advantages, but there’s something about seeing a face that draws attention to the subject being depicted. The ruffled sailor, looking uncannily like Horatio Hornblower. The scowling clerk, too often overlooked. The smiling matriarch, certain of her position. Cameos, of the sort an adventurer might carry inside a pocket watch or a brooch. Before we dive into the particulars, it’s important to note that in place of cubes, the members of your family are represented by faces. The second edition still trucks in these currencies, and more besides. These cubes were versatile components, representing not only the company’s officials, but also tangible enterprises such as shipyards and factories, and even intangible “promises” between families, used to sweeten deals and offer ambiguous leverage in exchange for favors or money. The members of your family were cogs in the machine of the Company - or cubes in the machine, rather. In the first edition, this largeness was partially accomplished through abstraction. As before, players command a mercantile family across the decades of the East India Company’s ascent, possible collapse, and competition against smaller firms once their trade monopoly has been revoked. Something similar happens in John Company’s second edition, although the culprit is not a noun, but a face. They were no longer a protagonist adrift in someone else’s story. By decentering the game’s imperial forces, the native populations stepped readily into the spotlight. Your goal was to work with them only as long as they served your ends. Their coalitions were offshoots, here to cooperate with the locals to achieve foreign objectives before retracting like burnt fingertips. The empires in question were faraway things. “Empire” became “coalition.” Like that, the game’s focus on the local clans of Afghanistan became apparent. In my essay on the arguments made by Pax Pamir, I noted how something as subtle as one altered noun helped frame Wehrle’s thesis in a new light. In game design, small changes often beget big differences. And Cole Wehrle’s second edition accomplishes the improbable by making that message more articulate and more playable at the same time.
More than any game I’ve played, John Company is about culpability. Maybe even the sort of blame that might implicate us. Absent a villain, there’s more blame to go around. That the Company’s ascent was the work of clerks and captains, common soldiers and administrative functionaries, merchants selling on commission and thousands struggling to earn their daily bread. As is always the case with sweeping evils, it’s easier to tuck a mastermind behind the curtain than to acknowledge that reality is so much more banal. Perhaps even occult.Įxcept that’s far too tidy. How else to explain the company that became leviathan - that touched half the world’s trade, employed twice the fighting men fielded by the British army, and ruled India for a century? Surely it was sinister. It’s easy to imagine the East India Company as a cabal: an instrument of villains, territory marked by the plunging of daggers into nautical maps, shareholder meetings held by candlelight, masks mandatory.
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