Indonesia
Splotter remakes Roads & Boats again, this
time with an 1830-ish spin to it.
I like Roads & Boats a fair amount. It's a
niche game, but rather clever, and if you don't mind multi-player solitaire or
want a nice semi-competitive two-player empire-building game, it's a nice game.
But everything else I've played from Splotter subsequently has been
disappointing, so they're a try-before-you-buy label for me personally. So I
didn't buy Indonesia, but I was willing to
try.
Indonesia is vaguely (very
vaguely) a hybrid of Roads and Boats and Ur: 1830 BC. Players buy either
production companies (Rice, Spices, Rubber, etc.) or transport companies (in
this case, boats). Production companies build plantations; shipping companies
bring them to market. Each commodity brought to market earns a flat fee, of
which the shipping company take a portion based on how far it was carried. There
are no holding corporations as in 1830, however; everything is done with
personal cash, and at the end of the game all that matters is personal cash
– not owned plantations or shipping
lines.
So far, not much of a game. The
whole game here is tied up with mergers. Each turn, players can nominate
pairings of companies, with all the players then bidding on the combined entity,
with the eventual purchase price being split amongst the current owners of the
two companies based on how many assets they brought to the table (so if the
combined company has 9 ships, and I bring 5 and you bring 4, I get 5/9 of the
purchase price and you get 4/9. This means bids have to be a multiple of 9). You
have to do mergers because companies are small but there are lots of them, and
the number of companies you can hold is
limited.
I found Indonesia to be OK,
but not much better. The game is all tied up in the bidding for merged
companies, but I found the evaluation process to be not sufficiently interesting
(the revenue potential of the various companies is not complicated to see). I
also found the merger rules to be wonky. There are no limits on who can merge
what with whom (other than the fact that only like-type companies can merge), so
things can get weird with completely regionally disparate companies being merged
somewhat maliciously by a third party with no current interest in either. I
found this to be painful and a bit arbitrary. I also found the tactical game to
be overly fiddly for what you got out of it, which is not a lot. It's also
rather long, figure 3-4 hours.
This is
a game that could have been done as "Indonesia: The Card Game" in a much smaller
and more manageable package without losing much, but I fear that if you boiled
it down to its essentials, you would discover that there isn't much of a game
there beyond pushing around the counters. After having played, I was comfortable
with my decision not to buy.
Posted: Wednesday - November 02, 2005 at 06:07 PM