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queenluaI (finally!) got a chance to play John Company (2022 edition) with some friends last week :3
For those not familiar: Cole Wehrle is a very interesting board game designer who I've blathered about before; he tends to make board games with asymmetric gameplay and complex mechanics... but the complexity of the mechanics usually feel less in service to Making Stuff Hard and more in service of Providing A Nuanced And Detailed Experience. (The way Bird Guy described it was, "I feel less like I'm playing a board game and more like I'm engaging with some sort of... interactive art-piece-slash-simulation? in which I'm roleplaying something dictated by my position in the game?" And, yeah. That really is the best description of the Wehrle board game experience. This one included!)
ANYWAY. Jotting down some brief thoughts for posterity and/or anyone else curious about this game:
* John Company is a game about the British East India Company at the ~height of its power—but, unlike most board games of this sort, you aren't playing as the Company, and your success or failure is independent of the Company's. Instead, you're an ambitious family trying to utilize the Company to enhance your family's own standing in the world.
The implicit satire/dark comedy/etc becomes apparent pretty quickly: in practice, this means you're competing to retire as many of your failsons in as fancy of estates as possible. There's other sources of victory points in the game but the lion's share (at least in the game I played) comes from How Fancy Of A Retirement Can You Fund + How Fast Can You Force Your Guys Into Retirement. And you start feeling the pyramid-scheme-y effects of the game's economy quite quickly: while you earn points based on those retirements at the end of the game, you do have to pay to fund those retirements each turn, so if you expensively retire several guys early on, you'll be scrambling to find ways to keep your revenue streams high, which may mean selectively dicking over the Company's prospects in some way that advantages you personally, which will work for one turn but then if the game lasts yet another turn then you'll need to scramble for some new avenue of advancement...
* In our game, I opted for my usual "I'm new to this board game" strategy of (1) just try different stuff and to see how it works rather than wasting a bunch of time trying to intuit how it works, and (2) pick some strategy relatively early on and just Stick With It To See Where It Goes. So, I noticed that owning a majority of company shares seemed pretty busted, because the shareholders vote for the new chairman of the board, and if your family is the majority of the shareholders, well. Then I always get to be chairman! And chairman is a pretty powerful role (though not unlimited in its power—more on that later).
This was a pretty solid strategy, except... when it became obvious both that (1) I had the board locked down, and (2) there was one slightly-less-profitable season, everyone else stopped buying shares in the company, which, uh. Rather limited the amount of trade/military operations that the Company could do. Which winnowed down returns more and more over time, until the company went so in debt we had the option to either (1) get emergency funding, or (2) pass a law to allow for deregulation, aka "every family can now start their own mini-company & also the Company's debts will get slashed in half." They generally do not recommend you play with deregulation as an option on your first playthrough, but, well, I was the only one at the table who hadn't played before :D;;;.... It was fine; I just asked "I don't have to start my own company, right?", because I didn't want to have to understand the deregulation rules, and I was told that was indeed true, so everyone else started their own firm, and I bravely & boldly kept running the goddamn British East India Company. (We joked that I was the glass cliff CEO of the company at that point, and like... yeah that was pretty much what was happening lmao.)
* Everyone running their own little company was mostly a disaster btw. One company's firm failed in their first season and got merged into another firm, and I'm pretty sure all firms at the table were insolvent by the end? (British East India Company included, to be clear. Like my company was NOT doing well.)
* If the company fails, that adds an element of randomness at the end of the game, where you draw a "company failure" card and apply its effects. In our game I think it was something about... public outcry against the Company's behavior in India, which caused some victory points for military victories to get taken away? Something like that. I was technically winning until that company failure card, but really, the game isn't about winning. It is about the experience of empire-from-the-inside as this unwieldy, horrible contrivance of families that all hate each other, occasionally forming alliances of convenience, sometimes doing things competently, but also doing a lot of things incompetently or for selfish reasons, with big consequences for The Rest Of The World. All so your guy can get retired to a nice manor. lol, lmao, dark humor, etc
* (and I know all the dark humor and satirical and anticolonial stuff is by design—you can look up Wehrle's writing on the design process of the game; it's all very interesting and he has cool stuff to say!)
* In a previous game (which I was not in attendance at), apparently everyone owned substantial shares in the Company... except one guy, who owned none. And at some point that one guy figured out (1) wait, if the company goes bankrupt, all shares are worth negative victory points, ergo (2) it is in my direct interest for the company to fail, and also (3) he had one of his family members as the Manager of Trade AND the Director of Trade, which would allow him to intentionally dick over the company. That plus some luck in his favor meant he tanked the company in one turn and caused him to win lmao. A good lesson in how not to handle corporate governance :D;;;
* I recommend the game & I really enjoyed it, but it did take like five hours to play. So, uh, keep that in mind. I do think it's more accessible than you might think because, if one person understands the rules really well, that's probably all you need—I was able to frequently ask D&D style "suppose I wanted to execute plan such-and-such, is there a way in the mechanics of the game for me to do that?", and the Ruler Knower among us could fill me in. That is not possible in most very complicated board games! But yeah it's a pretty complicated game.
For those not familiar: Cole Wehrle is a very interesting board game designer who I've blathered about before; he tends to make board games with asymmetric gameplay and complex mechanics... but the complexity of the mechanics usually feel less in service to Making Stuff Hard and more in service of Providing A Nuanced And Detailed Experience. (The way Bird Guy described it was, "I feel less like I'm playing a board game and more like I'm engaging with some sort of... interactive art-piece-slash-simulation? in which I'm roleplaying something dictated by my position in the game?" And, yeah. That really is the best description of the Wehrle board game experience. This one included!)
ANYWAY. Jotting down some brief thoughts for posterity and/or anyone else curious about this game:
* John Company is a game about the British East India Company at the ~height of its power—but, unlike most board games of this sort, you aren't playing as the Company, and your success or failure is independent of the Company's. Instead, you're an ambitious family trying to utilize the Company to enhance your family's own standing in the world.
The implicit satire/dark comedy/etc becomes apparent pretty quickly: in practice, this means you're competing to retire as many of your failsons in as fancy of estates as possible. There's other sources of victory points in the game but the lion's share (at least in the game I played) comes from How Fancy Of A Retirement Can You Fund + How Fast Can You Force Your Guys Into Retirement. And you start feeling the pyramid-scheme-y effects of the game's economy quite quickly: while you earn points based on those retirements at the end of the game, you do have to pay to fund those retirements each turn, so if you expensively retire several guys early on, you'll be scrambling to find ways to keep your revenue streams high, which may mean selectively dicking over the Company's prospects in some way that advantages you personally, which will work for one turn but then if the game lasts yet another turn then you'll need to scramble for some new avenue of advancement...
* In our game, I opted for my usual "I'm new to this board game" strategy of (1) just try different stuff and to see how it works rather than wasting a bunch of time trying to intuit how it works, and (2) pick some strategy relatively early on and just Stick With It To See Where It Goes. So, I noticed that owning a majority of company shares seemed pretty busted, because the shareholders vote for the new chairman of the board, and if your family is the majority of the shareholders, well. Then I always get to be chairman! And chairman is a pretty powerful role (though not unlimited in its power—more on that later).
This was a pretty solid strategy, except... when it became obvious both that (1) I had the board locked down, and (2) there was one slightly-less-profitable season, everyone else stopped buying shares in the company, which, uh. Rather limited the amount of trade/military operations that the Company could do. Which winnowed down returns more and more over time, until the company went so in debt we had the option to either (1) get emergency funding, or (2) pass a law to allow for deregulation, aka "every family can now start their own mini-company & also the Company's debts will get slashed in half." They generally do not recommend you play with deregulation as an option on your first playthrough, but, well, I was the only one at the table who hadn't played before :D;;;.... It was fine; I just asked "I don't have to start my own company, right?", because I didn't want to have to understand the deregulation rules, and I was told that was indeed true, so everyone else started their own firm, and I bravely & boldly kept running the goddamn British East India Company. (We joked that I was the glass cliff CEO of the company at that point, and like... yeah that was pretty much what was happening lmao.)
* Everyone running their own little company was mostly a disaster btw. One company's firm failed in their first season and got merged into another firm, and I'm pretty sure all firms at the table were insolvent by the end? (British East India Company included, to be clear. Like my company was NOT doing well.)
* If the company fails, that adds an element of randomness at the end of the game, where you draw a "company failure" card and apply its effects. In our game I think it was something about... public outcry against the Company's behavior in India, which caused some victory points for military victories to get taken away? Something like that. I was technically winning until that company failure card, but really, the game isn't about winning. It is about the experience of empire-from-the-inside as this unwieldy, horrible contrivance of families that all hate each other, occasionally forming alliances of convenience, sometimes doing things competently, but also doing a lot of things incompetently or for selfish reasons, with big consequences for The Rest Of The World. All so your guy can get retired to a nice manor. lol, lmao, dark humor, etc
* (and I know all the dark humor and satirical and anticolonial stuff is by design—you can look up Wehrle's writing on the design process of the game; it's all very interesting and he has cool stuff to say!)
* In a previous game (which I was not in attendance at), apparently everyone owned substantial shares in the Company... except one guy, who owned none. And at some point that one guy figured out (1) wait, if the company goes bankrupt, all shares are worth negative victory points, ergo (2) it is in my direct interest for the company to fail, and also (3) he had one of his family members as the Manager of Trade AND the Director of Trade, which would allow him to intentionally dick over the company. That plus some luck in his favor meant he tanked the company in one turn and caused him to win lmao. A good lesson in how not to handle corporate governance :D;;;
* I recommend the game & I really enjoyed it, but it did take like five hours to play. So, uh, keep that in mind. I do think it's more accessible than you might think because, if one person understands the rules really well, that's probably all you need—I was able to frequently ask D&D style "suppose I wanted to execute plan such-and-such, is there a way in the mechanics of the game for me to do that?", and the Ruler Knower among us could fill me in. That is not possible in most very complicated board games! But yeah it's a pretty complicated game.
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Date: 2025-09-01 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-01 10:12 am (UTC)