Is JOHN COMPANY still in business? A Review.
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- Опубликовано: 19 янв 2023
- When will someone start a Scott Company? Sorry that's the one joke I have.
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I’ve only played it solo so far but it’s one of the best solo games I’ve played so far. The Crown is complicated but the amount of meaningful and tough decisions more than makes up for it. So satisfying and interesting the entire time
So glad to hear that, Game seems so fun but my gaming group is not to keen to try it. Will try the solo game soon
He's back!!
Welcome back! Love the new look
"...or awfully, catastrophically fail." That's often my experience of the dice. More important than the dice--as you allude to--are the people with whom I play. Folks who understand how the game works, how to leverage power, and enjoy negotiating in (mostly) good faith can make JoCo2e a remarkable gaming experience. Excellent, useful review. Glad you're back, Scott.
One of the best games I’ve ever played.
First video I watched on your channel. Not an easy game to cover but you did a really good job! Thanks for posting.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
Great review! I already own this game, and really enjoy it. I watched your review to see how it jibes with my impressions. This allows me to true-in how your opinions with my own. As I said initially, great review. I'm looking forward to checking out your other reviews.
Great paintjob on your pieces, Scott!
If my group doesn't have 3-5 hrs, 1758 is also my preference. :)
My favorite thing (not mentioned) about the promissory notes is that like almost everything else, they're tradable! Also: took some practice but now my setup time is 10 mins or less. Which is wild to me for a game in this weightclass.
Thanks! I always mean to note in my videos when I am using painted pieces so people don't expect a painted thing in a new game.
And yes, you are right that being able to trade basically everything is a great part of this game, and is something a lot of players overlook until it gets pointed out. It really opens up the negotiations.
We should have a game series about the corporations that made our world great.
Is there a bricks and mortar store where I can purchase this in the suburbs of new York city or in New York City?
Love that painted elephant. Im definitely going to have to do that
RE: Manager of Shipping not having a lot to do: They have almost total control over what regions ships are in and which ships get fitted. This effectively gives them a huge amount of power over other player's income. If the MoS moves all of the ships to the West, then the Presidents of Madras and Bengal have no way to trade which makes their Presidencies almost worthless. If the MoS insists on blowing company funds on temporary ships instead of fitting yours, you lose out on $1 per turn per ship. If the MoS moves ships away from where the Chairman just allocated funds to conduct trade, they basically doom the company to bankruptcy. All of this means the MoS is a great position if you want to extort the other players for cash or if you want to inflate the value of your own presidency or writers.
I agree! I was referring to ship manufacturing in the first edition not having much agency or choices, which is greatly improved in 2e.
Any idea about how this one compares to East India Companies, which seems to be based on a very similar theme?
Haven't played it! It's a tough subject matter to turn into a play thing, and while John Company handles it well I would approach other games with trepidation.
@@PhasingPlayer Thanks for the feedback. Fair enough, but my view is a bit different. We have good games about Jack the Ripper and WWII, so you can make games about anything, and I think that's a good thing. Doesn't have to be to everyone's taste of course, but it's still just a game.
One of my favorite games all time. Good at every player count (except maybe 3), and is definitely my top solo experience!
Why dont it work with 3? 😢
@@TheNicholaiMoeller Well I would say 4 is ideal. Solo is also exceptional. The solo bot can be used with 2. And 5 is almost as good as 4. That really just leaves 3 and 6, and both leave something to be desired. 3 plays like normal, but the kingmaking from other Wehrle titles creeps in. And 6 would just have way too much downtime and each player has such little board presence.
The promise cards are a clever mechanism, but I'm not sure how non binding deals are a "conundrum." The cards aren't mandatory I hope?
Not mandatory. Newer players may rely on the notes as they learn what kind of deals they can make. But also, & this wasn't mentioned in the review: the notes are fungible. So someone can give me their votes promise, then later I can sell that note to their own boss, or enemy, etc., and they can't do anything about that. ;)
Sick American Movie poster!
Could u tell us about replayablity?
Entirely in the players' hands. It is very open ended and will feel different every time if players are willing to try new stuff and think outside of the box. So yeah, lots of variability on repeat plays.
HUGE. The offices you'll have, when different events/laws happen, deregulation, company success or failure, all mixed in with how players decide to negotiate around all of those things, makes every game feel very different.
Thanks for the review. You put across some interesting ideas about why to, or not to, play the game. As someone who backed the game, & now has played it, I've become vary wary of the game. Undoubtedly it is an extremely well researched & designed game (though the event elephant rules are baffling, as many have said on BGG etc) - and I discuss this game almost bi-weekly with different players at meet ups - nevertheless I have become exhausted by what I'll just simply term here as games in which you play out "the problem". The BG Market is dominated by games about oppression, racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy & so on. While those publishers who make anti-oppressive, anti-colonialist games are far & few between. Where we practically get no coverage of actual anti-oppressive struggle, solidarity economy, social ecology, social reproduction & kinship structures, & so on. It's almost as if there are systemic reasons for why this is the case, though the liberties granted us lucky few by free market economics reassure me that this is not the case. That last joke aside this is a serious problem I think.
Took me practice but the Elephant is simple. I do think in a way, the rulebook makes it seem more complex than it actually is.
Re: your other comments...I think I understand you, although I certainly disagree there's "practically no coverage" in the other direction.
Personally, I think the real question is the age-old one: about representation. E.g., is bad or inauthentic representation at least better than no representation at all?
So when we see a slew of games depicting imperialism, for instance, that's worth criticizing; but I think the real question is, what do they **really** represent? Because then you've gotta ask, what would an anti-imperialism even game look like?
Take Navajo Wars. You are the Dine people resisting oppression, over generations of time. That sounds like good representation. Except (& I say this as a fan of the game, & a denizen of the Navajo Nation region) that a lot of what the game has you do as the Dine is repeating a cycle of resource extraction, violence, and even certain elements of appropriation, all against those oppressors. Is that bad? well...is that inaccurate? And anyway what/who is is being represented, really? Certainly not the people on the receiving end of what I'm doing as the Dine. Is that really anti-XYZ? or better than other representation...or even none at all?
So I don't think the problem is quite that we have a market dominated by games about oppression et. al. It's that we have a market dominated by simple, easy, reductive, one-note representations: which consumers are hardly or never compelled to argue with. Are more anti-XYZ games the best answer? I'd say no, cuz that representation problem is still there. And, so is the potential for failure to engage.
Thus, & finally, consider this analogy:
The market's saturated with more & more editions of Jane Austen's novels. But, what about an edition where every page has footnotes by, say, Edward Said? And what if that representation, itself, could become more thoughtful: because now it is speaking in multiple voices, making more than one argument or representing only one thing....i.e., it represents *both* imperialism AND anti-imperialism? thus compelling engagement from multiple angles & levels, not just one or another? And now, this representation of a beloved-yet-problematic historical period is truly challenging both its consumers & the marketplace at large...?
Well I'd say: that is, in fact, exactly what John Company is.
No, I'll stick to my guns & maintain that anti-oppression is key to this issue. This includes anti-racism -patriarchy -white supremacy -colonialism -ableism, including oppression of sexuality & neuro-divergence, & yet you can further the critique to anti-class oppression, exploitation, domination & the interconnection that extraction & ecological destruction has to community Expulsion & imperialistic war (global conflicts are a huge factor in environmental destruction).
So let's contextualise the coverage of anti-oppressive BGs being published. Over 4000 BGs have been published a year for 6 years now, 2019 had 4677. I'm familiar with Najavo Wars, I've played it (I think that GMT has tried various games, but IMHO is held back by its military game design, in respect to this discussion, inc COIN games.) I know TESA do a good job of creating grassroots democratic kinds of games. There's Freedom The Underground Railroad. This Guilty Land. More besides. But the list going back say 10 - 20 years is extremely small in comparison to the thousands upon thousands of games that have been published in that time.
Representation is an issue. Yes. Actually the struggle for representation is an anti-oppressive struggle. There is a strong element of struggle & hard work behind, for example, the LGBTQI+ games being brought out these past few years. Where there is real industry & BG community push back.
The BG industry operates under the principles of capitalist ideology. On a banal level it could be said market pressures mean publishers don't want to "take risks". The realities however behind the kinds of social norms that say Habro like to replicate are actually highly ideological.
There is a mind set of care free resource extraction in gaming and its design. Turns are spent placing workers on spaces & gaining resources consequence free in a manner completely divorced to the realities of a finite planet, environmental & habitat destruction & community displacement.
You can at least begin to present an anti-imperialism game by having populations depicted that exist based on their own terms, as living communities, with their own issues, agency & story. But what do we get? Populationsabstracted as regions, or cubes, to be taken by a players imperialistic forces.
That the BG market is dominated by simple & reductive games is linked exactly to their oppressive game designs. There is no arbitrary connection here, it is part & parcel of the same systemic oppression described by bell hooks, Abdullah Öcalan, Silvia Federicci & so many anti-oppressive critics besides.
And finally sorry but where are the multiple voices of John Company? The voices & perspective are exactly of the Upper imperialistic classes. Yes it peels away the veneer but there is no anti-imperialist, or other voice here. You may, or as many players do not, feel guilty when you play John Company. But a representation of the voices & perspectives of the vast diversity of Indian peoples is not this game. Plus this is no criticism of Cole Wehrle, on this point, as that was not his design intention, it would seem with John Company. Pax Pamir 2e is another matter though.
John Company is a great design, its strength lies in how it presents a very clear picture of the English upper class of the era, when other games do not. See the BGG conversation recently on the slave cotton behind the English industrial revolution in Brass Birmingham.
@@egoDEATH33
Stick to those guns by all means: but what does that key anti-oppression look like? That's the problem I'm identifying: in part a failure of imagination. It is not sufficient to me to simply posit anti-oppression without also saying what it looks like, what it's representing, etc. No matter how many anti-oppression guns you've got. (" stick to my guns & maintain that anti-oppression is key..." interesting phrasing...)
No disagreement with your points re: quantity of anti-XYZ etc. games, industry pushback, so forth. Personally I would go further back to the pedagogical use of boardgaming starting in the late Victorian era: to teach & produce good citizenship.
But when you say: "That the BG market is dominated by simple & reductive games is linked exactly to their oppressive game designs [...]"
....that is almost exactly what I'm saying. I'm just going a step deeper to argue the question of representation is, to me, clearly at the crux of all that.
Whereas I don't see much change at all if (despite prevailing ideologies) one just relies on really exactly the same market forces & ideologies to put more allegedly anti-XYZ games out, that inherit & perpetuate more or less the same questions/problems of representation.
You sketched out the beginnings of your anti-imperialism game example. It sounds like a framework in other games I know (some I like, some I don't like). I'd ask to see more of this sketch...I'd ask, what is the game, i.e. what is being gamified? A game can show populations/communities with their own stories etc., but I feel that's only theming. What is the game itself representing, at its own mechanical level? How does it argue anti-imperialism? by giving players populations to manipulate in order to score points? Is it possible to win or lose this game? then what does that represent?
To me, some of what you're describing is only framework, i.e. only player perspective, & not necessarily a game's vocality.
>> "And finally sorry but where are the multiple voices of John Company?"
In Pax Pamir, players manipulate pieces that don't belong to them & sometimes behave outside their control: these are the ferengi, or foreigners, the imperial forces. (Importantly: there as well, it is not the British government but the EIC.)
In John Company this is reversed. Players are not able to control what India does, & in fact certain player actions will only increase the responsiveness from India: which, far from being a neutral automa, can factor largely in determining not just the winner & losers, but how they won & lost.
This is all besides the fact that India has its own empires growing, shrinking, responding to other foreign invasions, etc.
All perspective & framing. I'm ultimately saying, now one must take a step deeper & ask about representation. I.e., it would almost seem India plays a game of its own kind, with its own rules, with the players: why is that? what kind of India is being represented by that? You literally cannot even win or lose the game while simultaneously ignoring what India does during your game, or what the game's representation of India is.
This line of questioning about representation in John Company goes way beyond just its framework. Consider for instance, the aesthetic choices: the India Events deck artwork (done by Indian artist Amita Pai) is very contrasted with the artwork depicting the British landed gentry.
Consider as well the game is not even truly a historical simulation. E.g., the spouses are all characters from Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Bronte, and Trollope. E.g., ships are taken from literature & even a video game. I.e., the game is in a non-literal mode, of historical fiction. Why might that affect its representation? Finally, consider the rulebook contains a works cited page with a fairly wide variety of sources, from academic scholarship past & present to curated blogs & novels, etc., & a note from the designer/producer urging players to investigate these sources.
I.e., even if players have a choice in how deeply they engage with John Company (maybe they don't read those sources, maybe they don't care India's art & behavior is in such stark contrast with their own) ....**the game itself is quite multi-valent.** You cannot find it definitively says/argues/represents only one thing or another. Several different things are represented within it & by it. It shows imperialism, oppression, racism, etc., but crucially it shows those things as being domestic forces, not just exports to some helpless victim out there (& indeed, India is no helpless victim in this game). At the same time it shows community/nativist resistance, autonomy, & consequences of harms players do.
Finally, it is historical fiction: I would argue this is far more effective than if it were attempting an even vaguely accurate simulation or model of its history, because people, especially consumers in an entertainment industry like gaming, engage very differently with arguments in a fictional mode, than they would with, say, a tool of pedagogy or ideology.
It's not a lack of imagination. Anti-oppression is huge, so wide a books worth of analysis would only cover say one example of it, eg anti-racism. Give. Me. A. Break. These are RUclips comments.
I think our comments here might be a good example of talking at each other, and not so much hearing what the other is saying. The comments I made were often in response to your 1st comment, but you don't seem to see that, & I'm sure the same could be said for me.
Amusingly enough that is specifically the case for the examples you quoted me from. They were in direct reference to what you had said. And I'm going to directly reference what you wrote here too. But not quote you.
You make a case for a deeper analysis, this is nothing I shy from, & all I can do is reassure you I am not coming from a flimsy perspective. If you want a category, I am a Democratic Confederalist.
By putting forward anti-oppressive perspectives a designer is EXACTLY going against market forces & the current dominant ideology.
If a game has the same imperialistic setting, say British colonialism dominating the Indian populace, and yet in that game design you actually have INDIAN pieces with their own agency, ways of developing their own actions, not only determined by white supremacy & imperialism, then actually I would say that would be a quantum leap FORWARD from the common 1000s of games published today. Take 4x... other than explore ---> expand, exploit & exterminate, are casual concepts that I would say are actually highly offensive.
I think when I write about social reproduction as a critique of worker placement design, I mean that worker placement games are oppressive in their sexist casualisation of what is often women & BIPOC labour that goes into just how "a worker can be placed." It is sexist & patriarchal & racist information war that erases this truth from the public domain. So if the general "target audience" of BGs has been traditionally white het-cis men - then I would argue the fact that white het-cis men are in common socialised to take social reproduction for granted, that it gets done FOR THEM, not by them --> then I would argue those same white het-cis men never notice the absence of social reproduction in games. They don't need to. Its not part of "their world". In fact bringing it in a game, I think would get the kind of response you often here in BG forums, "these are games, take your politics out of my hobby."
So just to make it clear I am most certainly NOT arguing for the same market & ideology behind the design of BGs. Cooperative & Solidarity Economy are examples of alternative models.
Yes but in Pax Pamir players are Afghan chieftains, that goes a snails step closer in my mind toward alternative perspective. John Company most certainly does not.
Actually in John Company the representation of India is little more than any other colonialist or civ game: a deck of cards. Responses on white supremacist & imperialist terms. Definitively not the perspective of the Indian populace.
That "Indian Empires" expand, contract etc is an abstraction & dehumanisation to a level that IN NO WAY compares to the humanisation in John Company of the English Upper Class that includes character spouse cards, and individual manors, and so on. Please don't try to equalise the two. The representation of INDIAN PEOPLE is absent.
And again I am not criticising Cole Wehrle here, in this case, he had his design intent & carried it through. I think he knew what he was doing. Again John Company is an excellent game. Nor am I specifically targeting you M Alexander. I honestly do, in London meet ups & online, talk to people about this game A LOT. My problem is how people interpret the game & how they are perfectly fine with casualising oppression & let it run a hundred laps around them in their game fan boy joy (I most certainly have noticed fandom being predominantly male), yet as soon as I even try to discuss anti-oppression they present me with a hundred hurdles at every step. People don't like it when you try to offer critique of their toys. Talk about Victorian values.
What's interesting about Cole Wehrle's bibliography in the rule book is this time he doesn't mention Braudel. When on other occasions he has categorically stated how influential this key French historian has been in his design ethos development, Long duree etc. I wonder why this is the case.
Dominant capitalist ideology means that many of us have been indoctrinated to not see what is obviously the case. Like: Social Reproduction, cooperation, mutual aid, solidarity economy. It is only when state & corporate systems are most in crisis that they must acknowledge the cracks in the system, eg hurricane Katrina & COVID making mutual aid suddenly visible to corporate media.
I think when you don't see you say the specific examples aren't provided. Otherwise I would hazard to guess you are perfectly happy to go along with all the assumptions like the rest of us. We all fill in the gaps, we all make the connections, it's part of day to day life.
But now suddenly me saying that the anti-oppressive forces need agency & their own story isn't enough for you. Do I need to email you my rule book?
Yet you're totally enamoured of John Company that laughably card back illustrations to you suddenly become great examples of a representation of a whole Indian populace. I'm sorry but can't you see the mix up you present here? You accept from John Company what you don't accept from an anti-oppressive perspective. Maybe if I sent you some pretty pictures would that be enough for you?
I'm sorry not sorry, but no, the event deck in John Company does not make for the perspective or agency of the entire Indian populace being colonised & horrifically brutalised by the EIC. If anything it represents much of the same, as it only recognises other hierarchical oppressive forces as being even possibly any kind of equivalence to British colonialism. Good Philip K Dick quote: Fight the Empire, become the Empire.
And actually your point about lack of Player agency on India, in this case borders on casualusation of mass murder. For the Players can, in fact, use actions to send in troops & officers to kill Indian forces & subjugate the populace, ie kill Indian people.
Sticking to my guns was a cryptic reference to the AK47s used in liberation struggles.
These are RUclips comments, a pretty low bar, I certainly am not presenting a water tight analysis here. But we live in a very problematic public Internet domain where people quite casually accept the oppressive. Meanwhile ask for unfair high bars of RUclips comment presentations for the anti-oppressive. For the well argued alternative see my mention of bell hooks et al. RIP.
@@egoDEATH33 Okay. Well, I'm not sure we're talking past each other, actually.
I only have my experience, spent in intersections of race, gender, and identity marginalization, as well a personal family history with colonialism, dictatorship, and exile.
And in my experience, anyone can be as "anti-oppression" as they like in politics, academia, etc. But, in a medium bound up in an entertainment industry: then, I'm arguing, the problem of representation become necessarily more fundamental than simply depicting a categorical position against oppression. Because this is arts & entertainment.
And when it comes to the arts & entertainment industry: which would include board games...in this space, that "anti-oppression" position is another product someone is selling, and someone else can be buying. And where there's a market, there's a demand: so a market with "oppression" entertainment makes room for meeting any demand, great or small, for "anti-oppression" entertainment as well.
In other words: if people can afford to be causal about oppression, people can also afford to be just as casual about anti-oppression. Especially because in either case, when you don't question representation, *that is casualization.*
E.g. My Indian friends give lots of acclaim to John Company for its critical representations, which to them are quite opposite from casualizing. Meanwhile, on the other hand, those same Indian friends express deep offense with the polemics of very casual anti-oppression, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, etc., all being represented, & on big-budget display, in India's million-dollar box office hit: "RRR." Both the game & the movie are about the British & India. Both are products of the arts & entertainment industry in 2022. The game centers the British, the movie centers Indians. But, it's anti-oppression! & it's hard to argue with how well that easy anti-oppression has sold, in spite of its problematic representation.
So. If I understand you correctly: you think nevertheless being anti-oppression "is key," as you put it, to resisting casualizing oppression. And insofar as this is "the problem," then John Company is a game wherein "you play out 'the problem.'"
And if so, simply put: we disagree with each other. Which is fine.
So, no one's talking past the other. No one here thinks you're flimsy, or needs your category. No one here needs you to email pretty pictures, or a rulebook. (all quoting your comment [EDIT: deleted?])
But I'm sensing from you, re: pointing to the "low bar" of youtube comments, this is not going to be a worthwhile discussion for you. That's fine too.
Maybe the only other thing I can say, finally, is this:
John Company is just "episode two" in a series exploring themes of empire, oppression, etc. Here, Pax Pamir is not doing something "better" than John Company: they are both consecutive chapters, in a comprehensive & ongoing argumentative treatise. And just because this "chapter two" represents oppression doesn't mean it is casualizing it. Nor will John Company be the last word on the subject.
[EDIT: ...what this responds to has been deleted]
Stop discouraging people from playing JoCo1 with me. You've lost all board game hipster cred now; might as well shave off the moustache.
Hey I shaved off part of it since my last video, isn't that enough?