Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Tablestar Games |  Wealth of Nations

Wealth of Nations Price: £39.99 Currently unavailable Board Game; 3-6 Players by Tablestar Games In Wealth of Nations, you take on the role of a national leader. Your goal is to take your nation from humble beginnings to the status of a world economic superpower. You achieve this by building Industries, which allows you to produce Commodities. There are six types of Industry tiles: Farms, Generators, Academies, Mines, Factories, and Banks. Each Industry is capable of producing a certain type of Commodity: Food, Energy, Labor, Ore, Capital, and money (respectively). Each Commodity has one or more uses in the game. For example, Food is required to \'feed\' your Industries when they produce, while Capital is used to build certain types of Industries. As you build Industries, you create ever larger Industrial Blocs. The larger a Bloc is, the greater your return on investment when the Bloc produces Commodities. The main focus of the game is trade. Because it is economically unfeasible to produce every Commodity you need, you must engage in trade to get the Commodities that you require. Each Commodity has a trade value influenced by the Markets. There is one Market for each type of Commodity. If you can\'t gain a Commodity that you need by trading with your fellow players, you must buy it from the Market. Buying a Commodity from the Market increases its price, reflecting increased demand. Similarly, there are times when you can\'t unload your surplus Commodities because your fellow players have no need for them. If you wish to earn money from these Commodities, you must sell them to the Market. Selling a Commodity to the Market decreases its price, reflecting increased supply. As you build new Industries and earn more money, you acquire Victory Points. The player with the most Victory Points at the end of the game, i.e., the player with the most valuable combination of Industries and money, is the winner. How will you build your Nation? GAME REVIEW BY COUNTER MAGAZINE Tablestar Games 3-6 players, 2.5 hours designed by Nico Carroll reviewed by Ben Baldanza Wealth of Nations is an ambitious economics and trading game. Players represent nations and drive the economy by developing industries and using their output to trade or invest further. The goal is to earn victory points and these are obtained by owing industry tiles on the main board and from final cash reserves. The game board is a large hexagon divided into smaller hexes. Six different industries are represented on hex tiles, and each produces a specific commodity when fed the right amount of food and energy. Farms produce food, academies produce labor, banks produce money, mines produce ore, factories produce capital, and generators produce energy. The industry tiles are colored to show their type and have markings of full and partial circles on them. This creates one of the more interesting elements of the game design, in that industry tiles can be built up into ``blocs\'\'. By connecting same-industry tiles, partial circles become full circles and since each full circle generates a commodity cube during production, industries benefit through economies of scale. Surrounding the main board are six market boards, one for each commodity type. These boards begin with a specific stock of each commodity and through the game players can buy from and sell to these markets, affecting the price of the commodity in the process. One of the perils of being too efficient in production is that a commodity that is overproduced will have its price driven down. While the game is large and seems complex at first, these two ideas - building industries to produce commodities and managing the market price of the commodities - are the core of the game. Everything that the players do affects one of these two activities and the two winning conditions are direct resultants. Each player starts the game with a few industry tiles and a starting set of commodities and cash. The setup process is somewhat similar to Die Macher; in that game players choose from a menu of alternative starting resources and set up their initial strategy accordingly. In Wealth of Nations, the starting alternatives are laid out into industry and commodity ``packages\'\'. The industry packages include two or three tiles of one industry type, and possibly some cash. The commodity packages include combinations of commodity cubes and cash. Depending on the number of players, each player selects two to four of these packages in order, and the game is then ready to begin. The game is played in rounds of three phases: trade, develop, and produce. The trade phase allows players to buy or sell commodities to the market. The market boards are well constructed and have small wells to hold each cube rather than just markings. This is a very nice design feature that keeps the pieces in better order through the game. Each well has a price inside it, which is the price you get for placing a cube into it when selling. There is also a higher price below it which is the price to buy it. The market boards are like the Power Grid commodity market on steroids; each board has three rows of cube wells with higher prices at the top left working down to low prices and the lower right. Each time the player trades at the market, they buy the lowest price available or sell to the highest open spot. Players can also barter; we\'ll have to see if ``labor for capital?\'\' replaces ``sheep for wheat?\'\' anytime soon. To the right of each well is another smaller price, and this is the ``barter price\'\', used as a reference but not a requirement for when players trade with each other. When the trading is complete, players enter the develop phase. This is when industry tile are placed onto the board. This is a multi-step adventure, as first the open hex space must be claimed with a flag from your nation, and only then can an industry tile be placed there. There is a spatial aspect to this phase as the connection of industry tiles is important so players must plan to be sure they have space for the tiles they need. The game uses well-defined and largely intuitive rules about how tiles can and cannot connect. By spending capital in certain situations, you can place two tiles next to each other that normally wouldn\'t be allowed. Capital also allows you to pick up tiles previously placed and move them to a new area of the board as long as you have placed flags in that area. This is sometimes necessary when the neighborhood gets crowded. The remaining action in the develop phase is to automate an industrial bloc. This is an interesting alternative and allows the bloc to produce when surrendering ore rather than food. Production is the final phase, and here the fruits of the development are harvested. Players choose to run their blocs by feeding the proper inputs to create the commodity output. All industry blocs use the same inputs - one food cube per tile in the bloc and a single energy cube for the entire bloc. The process is as simple as it sounds; turn in the inputs and take cubes of the output. This is where the advantage of multi-tile placements is seen, as larger blocs create more production for less input per unit. If the bloc is automated, the entire bloc can be ``fed\'\' with a single ore cube rather than using one food cube per hex. This can be quite useful if you don\'t have a strong enough food source or if the price of ore is particularly low. As the game is played the economies grow and market prices fluctuate accordingly. Proper timing of buying and selling while building up enough real estate with industry tiles is the key. As in other games of this type, being able to produce the inputs you need rather than be forced to purchase or trade for them is essential, and it is this balance that keeps the game humming. The decisions are often difficult and planning is essential, yet actions are quite straightforward and easy to comprehend even though their resulting effects may not be clear initially. The game ends after any player has placed all of their flags on the board, or every hex on the board holds either a tile or a flag, or five of the six stacks of industry tiles have run out. At that point, players score four victory points for each tile they\'ve placed on the board and one point for each $10 they hold. It\'s easy to see everyone\'s victory point total from the tiles; often the cash determines the final winner. In less balanced games, the game feels like it should end sooner that it does. This is the kind of game that I really want to like; the subsystems are cleverly designed and interact in logical and expected ways. Yet the game feels a bit dry and I dare say that it may work better as a computer game. Maybe it\'s as simple as the colored tiles versus using more descriptive graphics, or more substantive like the game could possibly use a further round of development to get it to play in about an hour and a half. Wealth of Nations is a substantial effort, no doubt, but I\'ll be surprised if it has a very long shelf life. More ...

Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Tablestar Games |  Wealth of Nations