Links: Chinatown, Dungeon Masters, Atomic Empire, and a Roll-and-Move Proposal

Chinatown is far from the only excellent economic board game on the market. Power Grid, Food Chain Magnate, Brass, and hundreds more economic games explore themes of trade and commerce. But Chinatown stands out as a particularly elegant example of the genre.

From an economics perspective, the great thing about the market dynamics of Chinatown is that they emerge organically from players' decisions. In many games, the economics of the game come from the mechanics created by the game designer. These are often clever and inventive, and in many cases, they reflect interesting observations about markets. But nothing quite beats the way Chinatown sets up the most simple of rules and lets the players discover the benefits of trade for themselves.

Woods discovered the world of role-playing games, or RPGs, when he was about 10 years old, after finding a free Dungeons & Dragons demo game online. He cast himself as the DM, even though he wasn't entirely sure what that entailed. He soon realized that the DM could function as a sort of semi-benevolent story-deity —
the one who ignites the adventures, emcees the action, and ultimately oversees a fantasy world where new thrills or terrors can be unearthed with a roll of the die. After a few rounds, "I realized, 'Oh, shit. You can do anything with this,'" Woods says.

He was hardly the first to have that realization. First introduced in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons soon become standard-issue equipment for geeks everywhere — not that they had a monopoly on the game. In its Reagan-era heyday, D&D was like convenience-store Schnapps or Jim Morrison lyrics: Everyone indulged at least once, usually late on a weekend night, and either become an instant devotee or spent the rest of their lives denying it ever happened.

At first, Gayatri decided to tell Queen Ketevan's story as a film, but quickly realised that the medium didn't quite do justice to her process. "This story has a lot of multiple narratives that criss-crossed at different points and I realized that the optimal experience of the story wasn't in the form of a film," she explains.

Gayatri's aim was to simulate the process of an actual excavation — each time you play, you discover a new piece of evidence and get to speculate on what might be true and what might be partially untrue. "What I felt while telling the story was people would be more interested in how I found something, rather than the actual narrative itself. And that kind of clicked with me," muses Gayatri.