Larry Levy:  Gulf Games Glimpses – Der Markt von Alturien

If you believe games have an afterlife—and really, who doesn’t—then I hope there’s a special circle of Hell reserved for those that look like they should work, but don’t.  I don’t mind designs that feature few decisions or tons of chaos—I just avoid them.  But it’s really annoying when the rules include some interesting mechanics and innovative features and then the game just plays like crap.

All of this is a none too subtle introduction to a new game from Pro Ludo called Der Markt von Alturien.  This is a redesign of a 1989 Wolfgang Kramer design called City, supposedly beefed up for the twenty-first century.  City was Kramer’s paean to the roll-and-move property game genre.  Just as Big Boss was Kramer’s twist on Acquire, City was his attempt to modernize Monopoly.  Despite some interesting sounding ideas, City didn’t quite catch on.  But there remained hope for the revised and much better looking 2007 version.

And while I almost always avoid games like this, this one really did seem to have promise.  Markt is played on a board showing half a dozen or so interconnecting streets meandering through a city square.  Each space on a street is adjacent to exactly one shop location.  There are six different groups of adjacent shop locations, each with its own color.  Most of the street spaces are light colored, but a few are dark colored.

At the beginning of the game, the players claim shop locations for themselves by placing one of their shops on it.  No location can have more than one player’s shop, but a player can stack his shops at a single location to show that he has multiple shops there.

Players do not have tokens of their own.  Instead, there are seven neutral characters which move on the street spaces.  Six of them are customers and they vary in their buying habits (so that the most valuable of these buys three times the amount of goods that the least valuable does).  The seventh is the dreaded thief and he can help you or (more often) hurt you.

After the initial shop placements are made, the game begins.  On a player’s turn, he rolls a single die (which is an ordinary die, except that the 1 face has been replaced with the numbers 1-3, just as in another Kramer game, Colosseum).  He then moves one of the characters on the board the number of spaces rolled.  Each character has a facing which must be maintained, so they must move in the direction they begin the turn in.  At crossroads, the player can choose to have the character turn, but they can never double back.  Characters can’t be moved to an occupied space.

If the character lands on a space next to a player’s shop (whether or not it’s owned by the moving player), the shop’s owner collects money from the bank.  The exact amount depends upon how many shops he has there and the value of the character.  If the player has more shops at locations of that color than any other player, his payment is further increased.

Rather than move a paying customer, the player can choose to move the thief.  The thief swipes some hard-earned cash from the owner of the shop he stops at and generously gives it to the player who moved him.  The victimized player than gets the City Watch card which grants her immunity from this larceny on future turns, at least until another player gets robbed and the card moves on.  If the victim has more money than any other player after having her pocket picked, she doesn’t get to claim the City Watch card.  After moving the thief, the active player gets to roll the dice again and move any character.  He can move the thief again (and collect again) but he doesn’t get any more free rolls.

Dark colored street spaces are special.  After the active player has moved a character, he also collects from the bank for any other character that’s on such a space where he has shops.  So if you can get a character on one of your dark street spaces, you could conceivably collect for it on multiple turns.

After the player moves a character and money is paid from the bank, he has the opportunity to buy one thing.  He can add a shop, either on a space he already owns or on an unoccupied space (a shop on a dark space costs more).  There are also some permanent special powers available for sale.  Two of these affect his dice rolling ability (one lets him add 1 to a die roll, the other lets him throw two dice on his turn and choose the one he wishes) and two increase the value of his shops.  Finally, he can buy a Prestige card for a fairly hefty price.  The first player to own three Prestige cards wins the game.

So yes, it’s a roll and move game, but it has some neat features.  There’s the choice of who to move and of which paths to take, great freedom in which spaces to own and how to build, and you can tailor your special powers how you like.  Once you pick up one or both of the dice special powers, you have even more choices in how to move.  Plus, there’s the question of when to stop improving your position and start picking up Prestige cards.  So combine all that with the fact that it’s a Kramer game and there’s every reason to think this could be fun.

Sadly, it isn’t so.  Now I should mention that my one game of this was with six players and there’s no question in my mind that that’s the worst number to play with.  I’m almost certain it will play better with four.  However, I’ll never be completely certain, because there’s next to no chance I’ll ever play this again, with four or any other number.

You do indeed have choices on your turn, but there are frequently no good ones, which leads to a good deal of frustration.  One problem is the fact that characters have a facing.  I understand why this is so (Kramer wants to encourage players to establish loops with opposing players and allowing the characters to move in either direction would let two players set up an endless ping-pong movement between two lucrative properties), but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating.  What happens is that a character is set up to be able to move onto one of your properties, but then an opponent moves it past, so that now that character is useless to you.  This, combined with the inability to move to an occupied space means that your theoretically large number of choices often dwindles down to a depressingly small set.

These problems are magnified by the presence of the thief.  This is counter-intuitive, since the thief gives the active player a good chance to accomplish something on her turn.  The problem is, the option is toogood.  There’s a good chance the spaces the thief can move to are occupied, and as long as the owner is one of the other players, you can gain.  You get to take some money from an opponent, plus you get another roll.  It’s a no-brainer!  So what happens is that many of the turns consist of the players wearily swiping money from each other, often back and forth on consecutive turns.  The leading player is a little more likely to be victimized, but you rarely have the chance to target him.

Some consider this to be nasty play, but I disagree.  I actually enjoy nasty games, where I can actively take it to the leader, as opposed to the kind of indirect actions many Eurogames feature.  But games like Markt have what I call random nastiness, where you can do bad things to an opponent, but it isn’t because you’re trying to bring down a leader, but rather it’s the only way to add to your position and someone has to lose.  This holds little appeal for me and only adds to the negative nature of the game.

The thief is also a double whammy, as it not only costs you money, but he now sits on your space, so that you can’t even move a customer there!  The frequent moves of the thief definitely add to the game’s frustration value.

Several early reviews of Markt mention problems with the dark spaces and a number use the word “broken” to describe it.  Well, that’s a word I hate to use, but if the mechanic isn’t broken, it’s awfully close.  Here’s what happens.  Someone is fortunate enough to move a character to one of their dark spaces.  If an opponent gets the chance to move that character away to one of her spaces, of course she’ll happily do it.  But more often than not, that won’t be the case.  Consequently, the temptation is great to grab some money that turn and let someone else do the dirty work.  Complicating this is that most moves away from the dark space will land the character on another player’s space.  So on that set of turns, the player sees no difference in opponent earnings (either the original opponent will earn income from the character on his turn or the new opponent will earn income on the active player’s turn).  This makes it very hard to move that character away, particularly if there’s money to be made by moving another character (probably a thief).  So it isn’t uncommon for a player to gain income on several turns from the same character.  Of course, if this allows the player to clearly establish himself as the leader, someone will bite the bullet and move the character away, but that’s little compensation to the player who wasn’t lucky enough to get such a space occupied.

Adding insult to injury, this isn’t a particularly quick game.  Our session took over an hour and a half, even though we unanimously decided to shorten things by requiring that only two Prestige cards were needed to win.  (Although to be fair, the game moves pretty quickly at the end, so that it probably would have only taken about 10 more minutes for someone to manage a third card.) However, this was a game we were all happy to end early.

So Markt is another temptress that looks appealing (in every sense of the word), but which doesn’t live up to its promise.  In the end, success has much more to do with good dice rolling, along with other cosmic occurrences like avoiding thieves and not having pieces slip by your properties, than it does with good strategy.

After the game had thankfully ended, my first question was who the likely audience for this design is.  There are many who won’t mind the luck and who will enjoy the ups and downs of the game, but I’d think the arbitrary nastiness would be a turnoff for most of them.  Then again, LCR is filled with random nastiness (that’s pretty much all there is to the game) and it’s a huge seller.  So I guess Markt should work well with that crowd.  But not with anyone I game with.

Once again, I need to emphasize that six players is clearly the worst way to play this game.  If, in spite of this review, you want to try this out, by all means limit the players to three or four.  Maybe, with any luck, this will raise the game out of its designated Circle of Hell.  But, in this life at least, I have better ways of spending my time than lingering in gaming Purgatory.

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