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I never cottoned to chess, but I've enjoyed plenty of perfect information strategy games over the years, Corné van Moorsel's Floriado in particular, playing more than four hundred times on Mastermoves.eu. In that game, set in a 8x5 field of flowers, you and your opponent take turns moving your token left, right or straight ahead to collect flower tiles in five colors, with you being able to collect a tile only if it has fewer flowers on it than any tile you've already collected of that color. Once both players can't make a legal move, you score points for each color via triangular scoring (1, 3, 6, 10... points for 1, 2, 3, 4... tiles) and the player with the most points wins. The game tree is dense enough that you can't imagine how everything will unfold, but it's not too overwhelming, allowing me to skip a few turns ahead and explore back-up plans before making my current move.
Pak Cormier's Chicago Stock Exchange, which debuted at Spiel 2013 from publisher 1-2-3-Games and distributor Blue Orange (EU), features another small-scale game tree, this time themed around a stock market that combines the buying and selling of stocks with hopscotch. Well, that's what it feels like anyway. Here's a complete description of the game:
Quote:
To start, shuffle the 36 tokens — which depict six types of goods — then place them in nine stacks, with the stacks in a circle. On a turn, the active player moves a pawn 1-3 stacks, then takes the top token from the two stacks adjacent to this pawn. He keeps one token for his own holdings and sells the other, lowering the value of that good by one. (Wheat starts with a value of 7, and the other goods start at 6.) When the last token in a stack is taken, the circle shrinks. When only two stacks remain, the game ends and players tally the value of their holdings to see who best judged (and manipulated) the market.
That's it! Simplicity itself, and since the tokens are double-sided, information about which tokens are in which stacks is open knowledge. Whether you decide to lay out the stacks in order to more clearly see what's where is up to you, but in my five games so far — one with two players and four with three — we've kept the tokens in piles, possibly to keep the players from looking too much like the dudes on the front cover: "So if I toss corn to take coffee that leaves her with a chance to then hit coffee while taking another sugar, but if I take the corn while three corns are visible now and in the second layer, their value is likely to be tanked quickly, so maybe I'll— Oh, geez, my heartburn..."Naturally the two-player game gives you the most control since your move determines exactly which six possible moves are available to the opponent, and that set-up leads to more pondering about moves because you can see those next few turns relatively clearly. With three players, the game turns into an interesting team-building exercise of sorts as you want to side with each other player to some degree (because they're not going to tank the value of the goods they're collecting) while not doing so too heavily because the third player out will always take the opportunity to hit that one good, if possible.
With three players, the number of tokens collected isn't necessarily even as the game ends immediately when only two stacks remain, but the player (or players) with fewer tokens can win just as well as the player with more. It all depends on what you're collecting, and if you've managed to leave only garbage available for your opponents, then that extra token is meaningless. (If you're concerned about fairness, you could play three rounds and have each player start once, but I haven't seen the need for such a change.)
Chicago Stock Exchange includes a variant for expert players in which you can move around the circle as far as you like, but you must stop if you hit a stack topped with a token matching the one from which the pawn started its move. I haven't tried this variant yet, but I'm only five plays in, and lots of room remains for getting a better feel of the game and acquiring an instinct for which branches of the game tree bear the best-looking fruit before I need to go looking for variants. After all, I stopped playing Floriado after more than four hundred plays not because I was tired of the game or felt it was played out, but because it was eating up too much work time! In practice, I've found that if you're interested in taking the time to explore a game, you can almost always find something new...
(Thanks to Blue Orange for providing a review copy of this game.)
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