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November 13, 2006

Indonesia

Went to DougO's birthday gaming party Friday and Saturday and played a bunch of games and had a really good time.

Played Indonesia again and it just continues to hold up as a great game to me. All three of the other players were new and I think they all quite liked it too, despite my leading pretty much the whole time, particularly in the midgame. I generally prefer to be a goods producer in this game rather than a shipper, primarily because I dislike the element that often happens where a producer gets to choose which shipping player to give his money to (particularly as I am often doing well so am unlikely to get chosen very much). However, in this game I got a shipping line as the last available company in Era A and then someone merged it and I ended up buying the combined line, but pretty inexpensively. The interesting part, however, was on a later turn a player proposed a merger of a 2 ship line and a 1 ship line. I didn't own either of these but realized that buying them would give me a basic monopoly on shipping (6th/last line actually wasn't even owned yet) and I had the most money at the time so decided to seriously bid for it and ended up winning it. With this monopoly (which I had never seen before to this extent), I was able to really screw around with things and force people to do a large amount of long-distance shipping, and yet still often not be able to expand their companies. The other players should have done a SiapFaji merger to diversify the goods (and reduce their number) but didn't for an extra turn or so and I ended up making quite a mint off the ships. I had also forgot to mention to the other players (until the last turn which is the only time I have ever seen it done) the ability to upgrade someone else's hull capacity (I was keeping mine at 1). Not sure it really would have been in anyone's interest to do this at the cost of their own R&D (it would have helped them but also helped me and I think it wouldn't have been worth it for them - I was close to doing it myself and seems like if it is nearly worth it for me almost can't be worth it for them) but one player said he would have done it so I certainly am sorry for forgetting to mention it. I did at the end of the game misjudge the ending (ended a turn earlier than I expected due to tons of slots being opened by mergers) which cost me a ton of potential last turn money but I still won pretty comfortably.

As I mentioned in my post about Leonardo last week, this capacity in a game for drastic change (here going from a goods producer and minor shipper to having no goods and being a monopoly shipper) I just love, as long as it is not done in a chaotic fashion. The Merger rule in Indonesia, whether it happens a lot (as in this game) or only a little, is certainly the best rule in the game and turns what could be a pretty dry economic game into a bit of a roller coaster, in a great way.

Posted by aarondf at November 13, 2006 01:17 PM

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