Traders of Genoa
December 3rd, 2004We played Traders of Genoa with three players on Wednesday night. I had never played it before and enjoyed it, but it must have been designed for five.
As you may have guessed by now, exhaustive descriptions of game mechanics bore me. Compare the word counts of Shannon Appelcline’s review ([*3,329*]) to the rules ([*5,432*]). I would rather dive into the rules than read a review of that length, so I will just write the next two paragraphs and hope they are enough for you.
Traders of Genoa is based around an 8×8 grid of buildings and streets, in Renaissance Genoa. Players take it in turn to manoeuvre a stack of six discs, the trader’s tower, around the grid. Each orthogonal move leaves a disk behind, so the stack can move five squares maximum. On each building square, an informal negotiation/auction takes place among the non-controlling players with the controller deciding who wins the right to take an action. Players can only take one action per turn. Road squares allow no actions, so players are often left with nothing. The controller pockets the cash, special cards or goods offered for that right. Each action allows one player to take advantage of the benefit of the building beneath, for instance collecting goods, cashing in goods or collecting special cards.
The heart of the game is the competition among players to influence the route of the tower. There are different ways to amass ducats (victory points). One of the two main options is to go for Prestige cards, which represent buildings around the board. These score at the end of the game and are worth more in large numbers, rather like aristocrats in Saint Petersburg, but they must be connected at the end of the game. The other main approach is to fulfil contracts, by collecting various goods at some buildings and then delivering to others.
From that dense description, you can see there is a lot to Traders of Genoa and due to this complexity and the components it resembles Princes of Florence. It takes at least one game to really understand what is going on. I was sure I was going to win until the final scoring, but I had not bought any Prestige cards and the other two players completely destroyed me. I enjoyed myself and it was generally popular. The negotiations are tense and there is plenty of bluffing. My only problem with it is that I suspect it only really comes into its own with five players, the maximum allowed, due to increased competition for building actions. I also suspect it is a bit too long, but that is easily fixed by playing fewer rounds. ([*448*])
December 4th, 2004 at 01:28
I recently played with 4, and I think it works well at that number too (5 can be a very tight game, because people are often losing actions). But I agree, 3 seems like it would be a bit thin.
Like any game that is primarily auctions, what’s good and what’s not depends to a large extent on the market. But I find the Privlige cards frequently over-rated. Since they are so easy to value, it’s really hard to complete sets late in the game since people will a) assume all your cards are contiguous and b) demand a premium. But goods are easy to over-value too, so it’s a tough game. I like it a lot.
Once you get a litte more familiar with the game it will shorten, not just because it plays more easily, but also because there is almost always one player whow has peaked early and will use the wheel tile to drop the tower into the marketplace, thus trimming off a turn or two.
December 4th, 2004 at 02:13
Oh, and by the way, I thought that was a great short description of Traders. I too am aggravated by reviews that spend an inordinate amount of time explaining the details of the mechanisms of the game – the reviewer’s job is not to transcribe the sequence of play – but boiling things down to a short explanation that gets the job done but doesn’t miss stuff out isn’t always easy. Shannon is actually usually pretty good, but does tend to err on the verbose side.
December 5th, 2004 at 20:20
Thanks for your comments. There is certainly plenty to chew on. It is nice to play negotiation games that are not too nasty. I think that is the reason why Settlers and Bohnanza are so successful.
Thanks for the encouragement about short, capsule reviews. This minimalist bias of mine leads me to prefer reviewers like you, Mikko and Rick Heli.
By the way, I did not mean to pick on Shannon specifically. He does a very thorough job and, despite the length, is pretty readable. I also tend to agree with his reviews. His review was just one of the first I found while looking to copy a description of the mechanics (with attribution, obviously), but when I saw the length I started my rant.
December 7th, 2004 at 00:35
If you won’t do it, I will
Shannon is a great reviewer, one of the top few currently writing, but like Ted Racier, he has a blind spot for length in my opinion. I think the reviewer is there mainly to express opinions rather than to provide a laundry list of facts. Movie, art, music, car critics – none of them delve into technical specifications the way game reviewers seem inclined to. Of coure, those reviewers all tend to get paid, at least a little bit 
Anyway.
I draw a bright-line distinction between what I think of as negotiation games and deal-making games. Negotiation games are stuff like Diplomacy, A Game of Thrones, Rette Sich Wehr Kann or I’m the Boss, where it often literally turns on strength of personality and where people who don’t make deals are going to be actively hurt, generally. Deal-making games are games like Traders, Bohnanza, or Chinatown, where you tend to make deals that can be evaluated strictly economically, and where two players who make a deal move ahead of the pack, but nobody actually loses ground. I greatly prefer the latter, as apparently most people do.
Quo Vadis is one of those classic unquantifiable Knizia games which seems to be a hybrid.
December 7th, 2004 at 13:28
That is an interesting distinction. It is similar to the distinction between strategy and tactics. Both are closely related concepts, but in practice mean different things.
I think Quo Vadis is a negotiation game. We played it the other day, and it’s impossible to win without clever negotiation.
December 8th, 2004 at 00:40
True, but the same could be said for Bohnanza. In Quo Vadis, if you don’t make a deal, you won’t advance, but you won’t fall back either. Two players can make alliances (wide-ranging deals) but they can’t really use it to bash specific other players. All this has a lot more in common with Bohnanza than Diplomacy. And the wreaths which you receive for “being agreeable”, which are hidden and the ultimate arbiter of victory, make for a far subtler game (one which encourages one-off deal-making) than the usual bash-the-leader of “negotiation” games, for which I now admit I may need to find a better term. Perhaps “diplomacy” would be better, although also more confusing.
December 8th, 2004 at 13:40
OK, I see what you are getting at. I would agree that diplomacy is a better term, as it is closer to the concept of allying to attack others.