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Cole WehrleUnited States
St. Paul
Minnesota
"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation"
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John Company debuts this week at SPIEL '17, and it looks like copies will be shipping to those who preordered the game in the coming weeks. Given that the design of the game has taken nearly a decade to realize, I thought that I should offer some accounting of the time I've spent on the project.
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The Idea
In 2009 I was living with my wife in a ramshackle cottage on the steep southern shores of Lake Monroe in southern Indiana. I had never lived in such a remote place before. It was a solid twenty minute drive to the nearest gas station, and days could go by without seeing a single car drive down our road. In the winter, a big snow could leave us homebound until a neighbor with a plow would bother to dig us out.
We were both newly out of college and working low-paying jobs. Gas was precious, so we spent most of our days out in the country, tending to the garden or reading. I also had a big pile of games. Getting enough friends together for a game was a logistical nightmare, however, so the games mostly sat on their shelf. At some point that autumn, I found myself reading rulebooks of older Avalon Hill games to pass the time. Though my wife and I played plenty of two-player games, my tattered copy of Squad Leader didn't entice her. Thus, I found myself learning games, setting them up, then packing them away after I moved through a few turns to make sure I had the rules right. I could never muster the focus to manage a full solo play of anything, but I liked the exercise of mastering an unfamiliar and erudite book of rules. I must have been missing my undergraduate coursework.
In any case, it wasn't long before I got to my old copy of The Republic of Rome. I believe I had scrounged a copy on eBay for twenty-odd dollars the year before but hadn't had time to fight through the rulebook. Well, I had time now, so I set it up and got learning. It didn't take long before the design overwhelmed me. I had never encountered anything so immersive. It was a perfect combination of a strategy game and a role-playing game. I needed to play it, now. I convinced a bunch of friends from out-of-town to come down for a visit, and that night we put Republic of Rome on the table. The game exceeded every expectation. I loved the game's core tension: the game's winners needed the other players to win. The game was about interdependency and all of its horrible and necessary complications. I wanted more games like it, and before long I stumbled on a host of economic games that were covering similar ground such as Container, Brass, the Winsome train games, and, eventually, 18xx games.
Those games got me thinking: Was it possible to create a historically sensitive and immersive "experience game" like The Republic of Rome that was built around a business rather than a state? As a late November storm rolled in one afternoon, I scribbled a list of possible subjects in my notebook. At the top of the page, I listed my first entry: the British East India Company.
The Problem
In my experience, learning about any subject follows a little cycle from ignorance to mastery, then back to ignorance again. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don't understand a particular thing. When I first thought about making a game about the British East India Company, I thought I had a pretty good sense about what it was. I knew it was a ruthless monopoly that was propped up by the British Empire and that ruined India. I had a sense of its internal organization and its behavior. I knew the key figures and that the Battle of Plassey happened in late June of 1757. I could tell you the difference between the Nawab of Bengal and the Nizam of Hyderabad.
But as I attempted to deepen my understanding, I began to lose my footing. India was more nuanced than I had first thought, and the operation of the East India Company stunned me in its complexity. My sense of the Company's behavior and that of its officers moved from clichés about British imperialism to total bewilderment. I lost the narrative thread.
So the idea for the game gathered dust. I didn't have a story I wanted to tell about the East India Company. I also didn't know much about game design, and my early attempts were mostly just loose re-skin built on the bones of The Republic of Rome. Over the next couple of years, I would revisit the design a few times, but nothing ever came together.
But if the central design was proving to be a dud, it was at least generating interesting offshoots. My reading on the cosmopolitan life of British and Mugal families living in the eighteenth century lead me to William Dalrymple's writings and his work on Afghanistan. These books would in turn lead to a serious interest in the Company's policy on the Northwestern frontier, and those ideas eventually became Pax Pamir.
At some point I decided that perhaps the best way to tackle the subject was to look at the end of the monopoly. Now deep in graduate school and desperate for a side project to distract me from my dissertation, I tried to make a game on the Great Rebellion of 1857. After that design failed, I turned my attention to the trade in China and tried to make a game about the end of the Company's monopoly and the Opium Wars. This game, too, seemed destined for failure when while reading about some of the critical figures engaged in the opium trade, I had an insight: These people did not care about selling opium; they cared about respectability.
I'm sure I had been told this before. Certainly, I could have taken that insight from Edward Said or from just about any Victorian novel about business, but for whatever reason, I hadn't thought of it in terms of building a model on which to construct a game. I'm sure my heavy playing of Splotter's Greed helped, too. In any case, I now had the proper lens and the game An Infamous Traffic snapped into complete focus almost immediately.
As I finished An Infamous Traffic, I started thinking about taking that lens and applying it to John Company. Though I was happy with how AIT had turned out, I thought the core idea could work in a bigger format. It was time to take on the East India Company once more.
Production Limitations
From the start, I knew I wanted John Company to be published by Sierra Madre Games. I could not think of a better and more dedicated audience than the one that Phil Eklund has cultivated over the past thirty years, and I knew they would be interested in this design. But publishing with Phil likely meant working once more with a very small form factor. I wanted a game that would give players the entire history of the Company — but could I fit that game in just 60-120 cards and a small box? My production limitations for An Infamous Traffic had brought that game to life. Perhaps the challenge would be just what the game needed...While I worked on my geopolitical and economic models of eighteenth century India, I also kept in mind that I would need to fold this game into a very small box. I wasn't sure how to do it until I played Food Chain Magnate. Perhaps the various offices of the company could be captured by cards. Instead of each player having their own company (a là FCM), players instead would temporarily take control of aspects of the Company. I built my first draft on the premise that I would have sixty cards. If the entire company could be done in twenty cards, that left forty to cover prizes, player aids, and events in India.:strip_icc()/pic3792603.jpg)
An early attempt at the cover, back when the game had a very different feel
That brought me to my second problem. With 25 cards likely taken up by player aids and prizes, how in the world was I going to manage with a deck of only 15 event cards? With eight regions in play, that means fewer than two event cards per region. By this point, I had written extensive notes on over one hundred events I wanted in the game.
At that point I did what any self-respecting graduate student would do: I went through my collection and pulled every title with an "event deck" so that I could look for good ideas to steal. This tried-and-true method has saved me more than once, but in this case it just made the problem worse. I discovered that I hated event decks. Even in The Republic of Rome, the universe of the game is so arbitrary and produces more-or-less the same type of game each and every play. In a standard event deck, players can more-or-less bank on certain things happening; they are just unsure when the event will happen.
This works for certain kinds of games like Richard Borg's Commands & Colors line or for Cosmic Encounter, but it did not work in John Company. The chief problem had to do with timing. In John Company, players needed to know a lot more about which events were likely to be drawn that particular turn than an event deck could provide. In effect, I wanted something like an adaptive event queue in which players could see certain events on the horizon and react to them, but where the resolution of an individual event could shift the order and contents of the queue. I didn't want my players to have complete knowledge of what was coming, but I wanted them to be able to make good guesses. Somehow I had to squeeze those ideas into 15 cards.
The old idea of the event table came to the rescue. I decided to make each of the eight regions in the game "players" in a simple game of geopolitics. Each region would have four event tables that would dictate their behavior depending on their status, so Bombay would behave differently when dominated by the Mughals than it would as an independent state. Initial reports for this new system were good, but I needed some way to prioritize certain regions so that they acted more. To this end, I created an initiative system whereby events "move" through India. Here's how it worked: After an event in region two, the next event will be in region three. Then, to stop it from being a fully predictable cycle, I put in a couple of redirects that will accelerate either the expansion of Indian empires or their disintegration.
In testing this system, I wrote a little Python script that would allow me to easily make adjustments to the characteristics of each region, then I ran hundreds of thousands of games. From those runs, I was able to look at a wide range of metrics that helped me get a sense of whether India was behaving in a way that seemed sensitive to historical circumstances. Even when the simulations produced odd results, as long as I felt like I could offer an explanation, then see that explanation operate mechanically, I could let it stand. I was helped in this process greatly by my friend Chas Threlkeld who also served as the game's developer and was kind enough to rewrite my messy script about halfway through playtesting and to help me make my own studies of the game more rigorous.:strip_icc()/pic3792640.jpg)
Before I learned the virtues of outputting to a .csv,I had to sift through pages data that I was just spitting into the console.My training in the humanities had not prepared me for a project like this!
Playtesting
Over the past few years, my development strategy has undergone considerable changes. Originally I opted to put my designs out there for anyone to mess with and provide feedback on. Like many young designers, I had a habit of making my projects available before they were ready. Playtesting was chaotic. There were always too many voices in the room, and too often I pushed design problems onto my playtesters that I could have easily solved myself.
Now, any designer, developer, or publisher will tell you that the process of playtesting is critical for a game to succeed. However, folks tend to say less about the huge differences in development processes and the different ways playtesters are deployed. In my experience, I find playtesters are best at recognizing ergonomic problems in the design. There's no substitute for a second set of eyes on a pair of rules or watching someone who has never played your game attempt to teach it to another new player. I do a lot of playing of my games in spreadsheets and in my head, so having unfamiliar players go through the various phases and procedures gives me a critical window into how a design works in the wild.
I've gradually created a system for organizing a game's development based upon a simple insight: Most playtesters will burn out after about 3-5 sessions. I've seen this in every single project I've ever worked on as a playtester, developer, and designer. The burnout happens for lots of different reasons. Sometimes there's a new game they want to test, sometimes something has shown up on their doorstep, sometimes they just get tired of having to keep up with rules changes. To address this problem, first I figured I should get as much life out of my playtesters as possible. To that end, I try to be abundantly clear about when updates are coming to a game, and I try to limit myself to a big update once a month. I also designed the playtesting kits so that they would be easy to assemble and I always had "patches" to update old kits if a group didn't want to rebuild everything. In short, I did my best to respect my playtesters' time. Far too many designers and publishers just explore a big pile of jpegs for their testers to sort through.Second, I tried to use my playtesters strategically. Instead of letting everyone in at the start, the testing for John Company was invitation-only until the last phase of testing. Furthermore, I organized my testers into waves, with certain kinds of groups going earlier in the development and others not being deployed until the final stages. Game development is a marathon, and there's no sense in spending all your best blood in the opening sprint. I also tried to have a clear development schedule composed of different cycles. Each cycle had a set of goals that needed to be addressed before we could move on. Sometimes cycles got added if new problems were found, and sometimes they got taken away as problems resolved themselves. I was transparent in this schedule so that my playtesters would always know what they were looking for when they played.:strip_icc()/pic3792624.jpg)
Back when the game was lighter, I had planned on usingillustrations drawn and painted by my wife, Cati
In December 2016, after about six months of local testing in Austin, John Company entered its closed "beta" phase. For this first phase, I knew the game worked, but I wasn't sure whether its presentation needed adjusting. At that point it was a card game, and players had to visualize the Company. I didn't think this was too much of a problem, but my opinion didn't count for much; I had been living with the Company in my head for too long.
To my surprise, my first playtesters didn't have too much trouble with this, but as I brought in new waves of playtesters over the winter, I noticed these new groups were having trouble keeping their games on track. There was clearly a problem with the game's presentation. Early in the design, I had wanted to build something much lighter — even real-time — but as the design grew up, it also grew more procedural. Freeform elements were abandoned in favor of rigid processes. The game was better for it, but despite that shift in design, the physical profile of the game was largely unchanged.
It needed change, though, so following the suggestions of my playtesters, I constructed a game board that we could use for testing and lobbied Phil for an expanded production. The reports on the board were overwhelmingly positive, and the switch to a board game was made. At the time, I was sad to lose the small profile that had informed so much of the game's design, but the fact that the switch to the board required only two small rule changes was a sign that the game had changed dramatically from that earlier vision. At this point, development was mostly about being a good steward of the version of the game before me — not the version I had first imagined.
Another place where the development took me away from my original intentions was in the negotiation rules. In its early iterations, Pax Pamir was dominated by negotiation, but as the design grew up much of the negotiations were baked out. With John Company, I initially had built a system of subtle, implicit negotiations in hopes of recreating the respectability politics and social mores of the time. The whole thing was built around a "letter writing" system which I loved, but found too cumbersome for a design of this scope.
Eventually, I decided to make things explicit, and like any game with explicit negotiations, they had a way of taking over the design. Originally I had planned on having binding agreements between players to represent the advantages of the British legal system and the culture of respectability that characterized upper-class transactions at that time. However, binding negotiations are a nightmare from a design standpoint for all the reasons why you might imagine. Players have to word their agreements very carefully, and even when they do, there's still a good chance that players will look for a way out. I needed some way to adjudicate these agreements. At one point, I even had a lawsuit system in which players could sue each other for damages or contractual infractions. Things were getting out of hand.
Exhausted, I threw up my hands and reverted the game's negotiation format to that old standby of political games: non-binding agreements. Say whatever you want and let the table of players punish you in its own way. Ugh. The design worked fine, but the reversion felt like a serious retreat. I wanted the legal system in the game to be a central mechanism, and the prize system in the game benefited from the ability to make multi-turn agreements.Then the answer came. Through many long conversations with my playtesters, we arrived at something that I'll call the "Promise System". Basically, in addition to offering each other money and promotions as currency in negotiations, players can also give each other cubes. These cubes, called "promise cubes", represent an obligation from one player to another. Let's say Dick really wants the new house, but needs cash. Jane offers him the cash if Dick will give her four promises cubes. When Dick gives her those promise cubes, he loses control of them. He can buy them back for 2 bucks a pop or if he shows her some favoritism through a promotion or any other thing they might agree to, but for every one of Dick's promises that he can't get back by the end of the game, he loses 2 points. In this way players can offer each other loans under a huge range of terms and interest rates. Suddenly multi-turn agreements were possible without derailing the game.:strip_icc()/pic3792643.jpg)
This was the first game I've designed that Cati enjoyed playing,so it got a lot of two-player testing after the kids were in bed
Content with Chaos
With the negotiations solved, the rest of the development went smoothly. My incomparable playtesters provided wonderful feedback throughout the process and stress-tested the game's many systems to a degree far beyond what I had been able to give to Pax Pamir or An Infamous Traffic. By the time I sent the files to the printer, I was about as proud of this design as anything I've ever had a hand it making.
It wasn't until weeks later when I found myself playing the game at summer conventions and with old friends that I began to realize how difficult a game it was. I don't mean difficult in terms of rules. Though the game certainly isn't for everyone, I remain convinced that it is Sierra Madre's most accessible offering since Greenland (at least in terms of the rules). Like Greenland, John Company embraces the vagaries of fate. There are dice, and no how much you spent on an action there is ALWAYS the possibility for catastrophic failure.
What's more, in a world ever more filled with milquetoast event systems and other light points of friction, in John Company the movement of the elephant through India and the roll of an event die could upend the game. I don't use that word lightly. More than once in a post-game discussion we've been able to point to a single chain of events where all of India turned upside down. Fortunes were lost. Empires fell. There were usually warnings, but when the money is rolling in, you tend to feel like the good times are never going to end. John Company, in so many ways, is about that precise myopia. It seemed perfectly natural to reflect that in terms of the game's mechanisms.
However, as I played the game over and over again that summer, it occurred to me that if I was being true to my reading of the history and to the game's core argument, I was also treading through some tricky territory. A lot of folks like An Infamous Traffic, but that game didn't overstay its welcome. If the game could be tricky, it was also short and simple. A lot of folks who are excited for the game would probably want something a little more traditional. Even the venerable Phil Eklund, after a training session with some folks who will be demoing the game at SPIEL '17, suggested that I should soften the endgame a little for the game's living rules. My summer games had prepared me for this suggestion, and I already had some variants prepared that would answer his concerns. I'll be publishing these on BGG in the coming weeks, and soon new players will have a way to adjust the amount of chaos in the game to a more palatable level. There are even ways to play without any explicit negotiations.
While I'm comfortable providing these variants to players, I won't be including them in the core rules of the game. John Company was and is a game from another time. It's my love-letter to the big, open, unforgiving systems of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I don't mean to make apologies for it. It's exactly the game I wanted to make, and it's one that I would have loved to discover during those quiet summer days back in 2009. Taken on those terms, I think it has a lot to offer.
Cole Wehrle:strip_icc()/pic3795106.jpg)
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