Dale Yu: On The Road Again / Revisiting Chinatown
One great benefit of my involvement in gaming is that I’ve been able to make friends all over the country, as well as in Europe, since I started this over ten years ago. I’ve found that wherever I go, I’m not too far from someone that I know—if only by email—through gaming. I’ve also had a chance to host a few travellers that pass through Cincinnati.
Never has this been more useful than in recent months as I’ve started to do more travel for work. Just last week, I found myself in Dallas for a three-day long convention. The “work” portion of the convention had me busy each day until about 5pm, but I had plenty of free time at night. As I pulled into the airport, I quickly got a hold of some friends via instant messaging on my Crackberry. It took only about 15 minutes to find out that there was some gaming going on that evening somewhere in Big D. To make a good deal better, the locals also managed to find someone who could get me to gaming and back! It was a better reception than I could have ever imagined, and I’m extremely grateful for the kindness given to me from the whole Dallas group. Special thanks to Randy Shipp for being the de facto BGN limo service and to Aldie for hooking me up with the group in the first place.
The bad news for me is that I still have a fair amount of travel on my calendar. The good news is that I think that I have gaming friends and contacts close to every location that I’m travelling to: West Virginia, Houston, San Diego, Orlando, Southwest Michigan, Atlanta, and Washington DC. I’m looking forward to more “networking” opportunities in the months to come! I’ll thank those friends in advance for the gaming hospitality.
While in Dallas, I got to catch up with some old friends and played two familiar games. First up was Chinatown. I hadn’t played this game in quite some time. It had come back on the radar in the past few months—primarily due to an interesting deal made at the Gathering of Friends prize table. As you likely know, Chinatown has been out of print for awhile, and its value on the secondary market has remained quite high. One of the early names picked out of the hat was Anthony Gallela, one of the higher-ups in GAMA. He made his way up to the table and quickly offered his pick from the table (which was still laden with quite a number of very nice games, including the copy of Keydom that I really really really really wanted) to anyone who would give up a copy of Chinatown. It took only about 15 seconds before someone came forward with a copy of Chinatown for that pick. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who traded the game nor what that person ended up choosing from the table as a result; but the end result of the transaction was a renewed interest in the game.
I had somewhat written the game off a few years ago as a good, but not great, game. It sort of got lost in the shuffle back then as I was in my “crazy acquisition” phase. I had just started to concentrate on Euros (and I had finally started my first income-producing job), so I was acquiring new games at an alarming rate. I was buying all the new and shiny games as well as buying older classics that I wanted to add to the collection. In any event, many games—such as Chinatown—only received a few plays and then were destined for the trade pile or long-term storage. It didn’t help that my group at the time didn’t like negotiation games (and still doesn’t really like negotiation games!) Chinatown stayed in the collection mainly because it was an Alea game, and it looks quite nice next to all of the other same-sized, sequentially numbered boxes!
John Haley gave a very complete, yet concise, review of the rules, and we were underway in less than 10 minutes. I was quickly reminded of the good and bad qualities of the game. This duality was seen in the initial distribution of building plot cards. I like the fact that the game allows you to choose your cards from a larger selection. This allows the player to mitigate a bad draw as well as give some latitude to make some strategic decisions based on the locations dealt to you. However, the luck effect is still too high for me in this negotiation-style game. Players who get dealt a better (more inter-connected) set of cards stand to do better than those who don’t. I’m not a big fan because it can set one player up in a much stronger negotiation position than another.
The other place where luck plays an unwelcome role is the bonus cards that are exposed at the end of each round. In some ways, the bonus cards are nice because otherwise the game can be a bit too dry and calculating. Playing the odds with what type(s) of buildings will come up on the bonus cards adds a bit of uncertainty to an otherwise mathematical game. However, the presence of the cards feels like a pasted-on mechanism that doesn’t fit in well with the rest of the game. It also gives an “arbitrary” feeling to scoring in what is otherwise a very calculating game. For instance, in the last round, all players built as many tiles as they could in order to maximize their score. I happened to have a boatload of 4 and 5 tiles, and as luck would have it, the “4/5er” bonus card came out in the last round. I ended up placing many more 4s and 5s than my opponents in the last round, and the $1,000 bonus for each of these due to the bonus card pretty much gave me the win.
In the end, I still found Chinatown to be an adequate game, but it won’t ever be amongst my favorites. The negotiations tend to be a bit too formulaic as it is quite easy for all parties to determine what the “value” of any deal would be, and as a result there’s not a lot of room for creativity in the negotiations. I prefer a more free flowing type of negotiation, as in I’m The Boss, to the style seen in Chinatown. Furthermore, as far as the “city-building” games go, I’d still prefer to play Big City or even Metropolis (which has its own set of rules issues) than Chinatown. Oh well, Chinatown will remain in the game closet, but it’s certainly closer to finding its way out back into the wild…
Well, time for me to get back to work. I’m still helping iron out the kinks in Age Of Steam, 3rd Edition, and we’ve been cleared by Mayfair to start talking about it. Hopefully I’ll be able to give a more detailed preview on the game in columns to come!
Until your next appointment,
The Gaming Doctor
Posted by Dale Yu on Jun 6, 2007 at 01:00 AM in Columnists, Dale Yu / 1264
Comments:
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Sadly, the bonus cards really need to be there. Otherwise, in the 5th and 6th rounds, you know EXACTLY what any building or plot is to someone. Kinda sucks the fun out of the game. And I prefer Metropolis as well. I just wish we could settle on a solid set of rules---maybe with the Face2Face version. Posted by Frank Branham on Jun 6, 2007 at 09:36 AM | #
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Dale, we love Chinatown and have never played with the bonus cards (and frankly, were never tempted to). As you say, they are obviously an add-on that only increases the luck factor. Without them, the game is fabulous. Is there some luck in the way the cards are distributed? Sure, but that’s mostly self-correcting luck; the player who got the more interconnected cards will tend to be shunned during the trading. Besides, I’ve rarely seen real extremes here; most of the time, players are fairly close in their money making potential. And no creative negotiations? Clearly, you’ve never played with the DC Gamers! In particular, Ben Baldanza (a great Chinatown player) comes up with the most innovative and intricate trades you’ve ever heard of. I swear, some of those get carried out just because his opponents are so impressed he thinks of this stuff! To me, the only game that approaches Chinatown for creative dealmaking is Traders of Genoa, which is a much longer game. In fact, it’s these interesting trades that I miss in a game like Colosseum, where trading seems so much more mundane--I’d be much happier with the trading in that game if it approached the creativity we find in Chinatown. If your group isn’t much into negotiation games, I wouldn’t think Chinatown would resonate with them, because that’s pretty much all it is. But I consider it the King of trading games: lots of deals, lots of creativity, all in little over an hour! Posted by Larry Levy on Jun 6, 2007 at 10:25 AM | #
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Larry—the problem (as Frank noted) is that the game is explicitly calculable. The total value of any deal can be calculated in advance. What happens is that (in our group at least) any deal sounds like: Player A: “Hey, trade me this plot for that business. There are three rounds left. I’ll finish a business and will earn an extra $3,000 per round. You’ll get plots that will allow you to finish a business and get $5,000 per round. There are three rounds left. So—I’ll get an extra $9,000 for the rest of the game. You’ll get an extra $15,000 for the rest of the game. So why don’t you throw in $3,000 and we’ll both do better than our opponents?” Player B: “Sure. Exactly what I had calculated” I’d be interested to see what kinds of trades Ben has to offer, but I still think that, in the end, you can break down any trade in Chinatown to its financial value which, to me, takes the fun out of it. Posted by Dale Yu on Jun 6, 2007 at 11:06 AM | #
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Things are only calculable towards the very end. In which case, sure, trades aren’t very exciting, but are still carried out. (Very often, though, we make trades for the future in earlier rounds. So we say, do this trade and I’ll promise to give you a Fireworks if I get one next round. So even the later rounds can be interesting.) But in the first two thirds of the game, you don’t know who will get which buildings and which spots on the board. So it ISN’T calculable and you have to try to maximize your possibilities. We just find there’s enough going on to have very dynamic trades. The example you listed is a mundane one, and sure, those pop up occasionally. But most of our trades are much more interesting than that. Posted by Larry Levy on Jun 6, 2007 at 12:44 PM | #
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As many of you know, we always play Chinatown with a set of variants that we THOUGHT were the original rules. You see, we were taught these rules way back in 1999 by Jay Tummelson, when he was getting ready to release one of his first batch of games under the Rio Grande label. The full variant can be found on the East Tennessee Gamers and Westbank Gamers websites. Basically, all tiles held by players are SECRET. So, you don’t know exactly what tiles each person holds. This makes the trading FAR more interesting and not completely calcuable. There are other changes as well, including the ability to maintain and trade plot cards. I’ve played both ways and MUCH prefer this “unofficial” variant. Posted by Greg Schloesser on Jun 6, 2007 at 10:14 PM | #
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tsk, tsk. Chinatown is one of my favorites of all time. Definitely my favorite negotiation game.
When are you coming to Houston? I can safely say I won’t be moving before you come out this time so can offer you gaming and dinner at Chez Sellers. Posted by Anye Mercy on Jun 15, 2007 at 06:05 PM | #
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