No Sleep 'til Ketapang

Despite my best intentions, to spend more time with my existing games collection, I sat down, on Monday night, to yet another new game.

There wasn't much that I could do about this - Grima was the Sommelier and he had chosen Indonesia for the nights entertainment.
Not really a new game, I think it is about six years old now, but new to the motley crew assembled around the kitchen table.

In Indonesia, you grow crops and ship them around the various islands for profit.
Players own companies involved both in the production cycle and in sea transportation. So a balanced portfolio is not just raping the land for rice and palm oil; it is also belching diesel into the sea getting your goods (and those of your opponents) to the ever expanding cities.

Although it sounds like a simple "Pick up and Deliver", in the Far East, it's actually more of a financial game where merging and acquiring companies, at the right time, turns out to be more important than fiddling with your chits (and there is a lot of fiddling, let me tell you).

The game is played on a gorgeous ink drawn atlas-style map, with names written in an indecipherable font. The board is way too small, to be practical, but is definitely a thing of beauty.

It takes a little while to get into the swing of the game but it has that 'Steam' quality where this is not a problem, because the tableau starts fairly sparse and progressively clutters up as the hours drag by.
Ok, I jest a little.
Actually the game is really engaging, from the start, with some interesting decisions and some neat mechanics.

Unfortunately the game is over long and, by the third era, it's getting really difficult to see where the production chits go, which routes they are connected to and which cities have already been serviced.
This means that turns really slow down as each player tries to ship their goods in the optimal way.

I got off to a flying start, coming out on the right side of a couple of mergers, and in the second era I found myself with a virtual monopoly in both rice and spices. Grima had converted all his rice/spice production over, into producing microwave meals, which left me with some quietly profitable trading lines for those years of plenty.

By the third (and final) era demand for my goods was dipping in the face of stiff competition and an explosion in new luxury items - fortunately this coincided with a dip in demand to finish the game.
We all agreed to play out a final turn rather than facing another hour of "lather rinse and repeat" and I managed to hold on to my slender financial lead.

As an ending it was something of an anticlimax but I'm not sure it would have been much different had we gone the full distance.
Except, I might have lost.

I enjoyed the game and felt the need to give it a bit of a cuddle like a family member who, perhaps, had expected A grades in all their exams but only managed a C+

Grima enthusiastically suggested some 'tweaks' to the game to improve the experience for next time; these involved somehow merging the last two eras and finding a better 'book keeping' mechanism for the cardboard tsunami. I wish him good luck with that. My feeling is that if a game needs that much tweaking then perhaps it should go back to the designer for further play testing.

Actually I think the game has a lot of really cool stuff going on. The problem is that there is too much going on for too long; it needs to be distilled down to its essence.

As I took my carriage, back to the castle, I pondered this and it occurred to me that Chicago Express had already achieved that distillation in a slightly different format.

Which, I guess, goes to show that we should have just played some of the old favourites.