Scott Tepper: Back to the Playground

I happened to play The Downfall of Pompeii and Silk Road in the last couple of weeks and noticed that they share a mechanism that doesn’t crop up very often in Euro games.

In the first half of Pompeii, you are trying to bring as many of your game pieces, representing relatives, onto the board.  In the second half of the game you try to safely remove these relatives from the board and prevent them from being destroyed by the lava that is flowing from the volcano, Vesuvius.  During the first part of the game, the players play cards which determine where their relatives can be placed on the board.  When players draw replacement cards at the end of their turn, if they happen to pick an Omen card, they are allowed to select a relative of any other player and throw it into the volcano.

This spiteful action of destroying an opponent’s piece in Pompeii does fit the theme.  In ancient Rome, haruspices would practice divination by interpreting omens such as animal and human entrails.  While I don’t think it’s uncommon in wargames to have a random mechanism where you can hurt a chosen opponent, you don’t see it very often in Euro-style games.  In Pompeii, however, it is possible for seven Omen cards to be turned up arbitrarily during the game.  The randomness of these cards opens up the possibility that one player doesn’t draw any of them, or even that one player draws them all.

When you draw one of the Omen cards, you are, in effect, given a tool to hurt, albeit slightly, one or your opponents.  But how do you choose who is to receive this setback?  From what I’ve observed playing with my friends, when a player draws an Omen card they look to see who has the most pieces on the board, then target this player.  The nature of this mechanic, however, opens up the opportunity to hinder someone for whatever reason comes into your head:  Maybe they threw one of your pieces in the volcano a few turns ago, or they won the game last time you played, or maybe they stole your girlfriend.  Eurogames, by nature, don’t usually give you the opportunity to act out whatever aggressions you might have towards your opponents.  When a Eurogame gives you a method to hinder an opponent, it is usually in very controlled situations.

Silk Road, on the other hand, uses the same sort of mechanic, but in the adverse way.

The gameboard of Silk Road is a map of sorts with the start point at one end and the ending city at the opposite one.  The objective of the game is to buy goods cheaply, then sell them on a later turn for a (hopefully) large profit.  Action tiles are randomly distributed at each city on the board with one less at each city than the number of players.  Every round begins with an auction for the start player, who takes one of the tiles at the current city and completes the corresponding action.  The actions mainly involve buying, trading, or selling goods. The game proceeds until the final city is reached and the player with the most money wins.

The twist in Silk Road comes after the start player takes her action.  Unlike most games where the next player would be the one who bid second most or is seated to the left of the start player, in Silk Road, the second player to execute an action is whoever is handed the Caravan Leader Pawn by the start player.  The second player chooses one of the remaining actions then hands the pawn to the player of his choice, etc…until the pawn is handed to the final player.  Because each city has one less action available than players, the final player in the round does not get to carry out an action.  Instead, he can choose, after the subsequent auction for the new start player, to either accept the highest bid offered or to spend the value of the highest bid to become the new start player.

So after the initial bidding of each round, unlike most games where the turns you take or the benefits you receive are due to the cleverness of your actions or the randomness of a die-roll or card draw, the turn order and your subsequent options are heavily based on the whim of your opponents. 

While playing Silk Road, I sometimes find myself silently wishing the start player would “Pick me!  Pick me!” Other times, when none of the remaining actions appeal to me, I silently chant, “Don’t pick me!  Don’t pick me!”, so that I would have the choice of getting paid to not take the start player role.  It’s as if I’m transported back in time to my junior high school playground for a game of kickball and the ignominy of being chosen last.

Wasn’t that one of the situations I thought I’d forever avoid by growing up?

This could be the reason we don’t see this meta-mechanic—which for want of a better term I refer to as Playground Picking—in more games.  Who wants to feel like they’re in the middle of a reality TV show elimination round?  On the other hand, I have to admit that both of the games I’ve mentioned here give me a little bit of a gut-wrenching feeling that reminds me of being on an amusement park ride.  I don’t know about you, but I’ll choose a roller coaster over a carousel any day.

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