Dissection of Cargo Noir

Last Friday, after playing Thurn and Taxis, I played Cargo Noir.  I have played this game several times and have really enjoyed it.  It's a simple, elegant game, with a great theme and art style.

Players are smugglers traveling the world and trading in illegal goods.  At the start they each receive  3 ships and 7 coins.    Each player takes his turn by placing all of his ships on locations around the world to make a Bid of no less than 1 coin on the goods located there.  This is called Worker Placement.

WORKER PLACEMENT

The Worker Placement mechanic is very common and there is nothing unique or special here.  In many games, the spaces that workers are placed can only be used once or have limited space requiring players to make the hard choice of choosing one thing over another because, once each player has gone around in order, the thing you want to do might not be available.  However, in this game there is no limit to the number of players that can occupy a spot.

Players may also choose to go to the Casino space or they can go to the Black Market space.  Then it's the next players turn.  That player has the same options of placing his ships where he wants.  But now if he wants to bid on the same cargo as the first player, he must outbid him.  Play continues like this until it is the first players turn again.

The first player, at the start of his next turn, recovers his ships in any order he wants.  If he is the olny bidder in a world region at the start of his turn, he pays his coins to the bank, recovers his ship, and collects the cargo and places it in his warehouse.  If another player has outbid him, he has must choose to up his bid or pull out.  If he ups his bid he must sit there one more round and hope that no one out bits him again.  If he pulls out he gets his ship and his money back.  This is called Bidding.

BIDDING

Games that have a Bidding type of mechanic often do it all in a single turn where all players participate in the bids.  This game has an interesting twist on the Bidding Mechanic because players must decide if they want to spend an action to keep their ship in that spot, increase the bid, and hope they are not outbid again, having to wait until their next turn find out if each player in turn will jump in on the bidding action of that space.  This makes staying in an auction costly and should only be done if you absolutely need the cargo at that location.

If a player's ship is on the Casino he takes his ship back and gets 2 coins for each ship on the Casino. Any ships on the Black Market are recovered and allow him to choose to ether draw a random cargo from a bag or trade any one cargo for any one of the eight cargo there at the black market. Once he has collected all his ships, cargo, and coins, he starts placing his ships in hand back out on the board again like he did on his first turn.

My warehouse has too much in it.  I must spend it or loose two cargo.

Collecting all this Cargo is great, but there is a problem.  You can only hold 6 cargo after our turn is done.  If you dont spend it you loose it.  Before the player's turn ends he may have as much cargo as he wants and he can spend the Cargo before he looses it.  The Cargo value is a little tricky.  In the image above I have collected 3 Jewels, 3 Alcohol, a Uranium and a Gold.  Looking at the chart at the bottom of my Warehouse you see the scoring chart. Three Cargo of the same type is worth 9. Two Cargo of different types are worth 3.  So I have a total of 22 points (3 jewels = 9,3 Alcohol =9, Uranium and Gold = 3) to spend on victory cards.  This mechanic is called Pairing.

PAIRING

Pairing is the act of collecting many of the same type of item, resource, card, etc.  Many games have this and is most familiar in games like Poker.  The interesting thing in this game is that the Pairing mechanic is coupled with a scaling value system applied to it.  This makes it more difficult to collect large number os the same type, but also a lot more valuable if you can do it.  The nice thing is that they have an alternative scoring mechanic if you cant make the more valuable Pairs.

In addition to victory cards there are 3 cards that affect the game.  Syndicate cards give you 2 coins if you are ever outbid.  The Warehouse lets you hold two extra cargo.  Cargo Ship gives you one more ship token to place on your turn increasing your actions each turn.  Each of these cards are great but will not win you the game alone.  This gives some nice perks but if you spend your turn buying these thats one less turn focusing on wining the game.  Its a balancing act that has to be evaluated carefully.

The game is elegant but there are some problems.  As the game progresses it starts to slow down.  Each player that gets more Cargo Ships adds to the duration of their turn and decision making.  In addition it is a perfect information game where you know everything out on the board and in each player's warehouse.  This can create long waits between turns if you have players that are very analytical who evaluate every player's option and likely direction.  This is the one bad thing about this game.

Our game was less than stellar.  Coming off of Thurn and Taxis which didn't go that well for me, and John didn't seem to enjoy it all that much, there were a general feeling of unhappiness.  I thought this game was light enough and it would play fast enough to be OK.  Unfortunately, there was an important rule that we over looked until mid way though the game.  When cargo tokens are removed from the board they are immediately replaced from the bag.  Well, we were mistakenly putting the tokens that we were spending back in the bag.  It should not have been done this way, the rules say to remove the Tokens from game until the bag is empty.  Removing the tokens makes for a more balanced distribution of the cargo allowing players who are collecting one type of cargo know the value of the cargo out on the board.  i.e. if you know there is only one more of a token on the board it can be a lot more valuable depending on if another player is trying to grow his set of that cargo type.  This might encourage other players to out bid him to prevent him from getting a large scoring set of cargo.

This was the worst game of Cargo Noir I have played and I think its because of the mistake we made about putting the cargo tokens back in the bag.   There was another issue that only seemed to be affecting John.  If you are out bid and remove your Ship and Money, you are not allowed to place your ship back on that spot to out bid another player.  John kept forgetting where he pulled his ship from and then got hung up on it.  His frustration was palpable about half way thought the game.  To solve this, we used black wooden cubes from another game as markers.

I love the theme of the game and the art style captures this magical time of 1920's through the 1940's, but at the same time it feels modern.  All of the characters look like they are straight from a movie that I cant quite put my finger on (except the americans...that would be the Godfather).  They do skirt the edge of the offensive racial stereo types...but I also think that adds to the charm.

The last point I am going to make is that while I love the theme, its very abstract.  There is no reason it had to be smuggling.  There is no law officers trying to bust you.  No port authorities you have to bribe. No thugs with guns or attacking other players.  It could just as easily had been a merchant trading and biding game, but the theme makes it much more interesting.  I feel like it's fairly clear that the game was designed, played, and balanced, long before it was a smuggling game.  It just goes to show how a theme can carry a game idea and really make it shine.

Do your research!

I have a new lesson for you today.  Make sure you do your research before you get locked into a project.  You don't want to launch a game that is grounded in real history to be historically inaccurate.


I played a game on the old TRS-80 back in the early 80's called Taipan. The player is the Captain of a ship trading goods from the Japanese city of Nagasaki to many ports all the way down to Batavia (know known as Jakarta).  The game was inspired by the novel Tai-Pan and I am almost positive that the game inspired future games like Sid Meier's Pirates.

For years I thought Taipan meant Captain.  But I just recently discovered that I have been wrong all this time.

tai·pan

¹    [tahy-pan]  Show IPA

noun

(in China) the head or owner of a foreign business establishment.

Because of this I am going to make some minor changes to the back story.  Also, the Captain Cards I was working on will have a much wider variety of looks.  Now I can have them be English, Russian, as well as any of the Asian nationalities from Japanese, Chinese, and Thai.


In addition to this I have decided to allow you to give me some feedback on what you think.  I have created a Poll that you can add your voice to what themes are interesting to you.  Feel free to select multiple entries.

The age old question...

Fellow designer and blogger Jack, of the Blog Creation and Play, recently had a post asking the question: "What came first? The mechanic or the theme"?  Jack and I got into the discussion about our various approaches to game design and it got me thinking that I need to explore my understanding of what a mechanic is a bit more. 

I guess when I think of mechanics, I am talking about something more specific.  I love the Dice Altering mechanic of Kingsburg and would love to do a game using some aspect of that mechanic.  Attica has a great clean mechanic of placing tiles to make sets for points that is so easy to play yet impossible to ever get the same results.  In both of these cases, the theme could be anything.  Kingsburg doesn't have to be set in a Fantasy kingdom where monsters are coming to attack.  It could be a sci-fi alien world or Criminal Empires of the Roaring 20's.  Attika is so loosely based on building city empires during Ancient Greece that it could just as easy be Farmers competing over shared land in a wacky game of trying to plant their crops around each other.


In the development of my game I started with a pre-existing idea.  Taipan.  I knew the game was going to be about merchant captains in the Far East sometime in the historical 1800's.  With setting chosen and fairly well locked in place, I started thinking about what I was going to need.

• A Game Board: Knowing what that region looked like on a map made it obvious that there were going to be changes to the game.  
• Dice?: No, I wanted to do this game to be played without dice. I would use dice if I had to, but for now I would do without it.
• Decks of Cards:  I needed events like storms and pirate attacks to happen from time to time.  To balance that out I needed some good events to happen as well.  A deck of Event Cards seemed like an obvious choice.
• Combat: If I was going to have pirates attacking the player I would need to have combat.  I already decided that I didnt want Dice, so that meant some other way of resolving combat.  I settled on another deck of Cards.
• Cargo: I needed some way to represent each type of cargo that players were buying and selling. I also needed a way to gain random types of cargo. Cards seemed like the theme that was working so far.

So I had all my parts, but I still didn't have a mechanic.  Well, what is a Mechanic?  Wikipedia has this to say about it:

"Game mechanics are constructs of rules intended to produce an enjoyable game or gameplay. All games use mechanics; however, theories and styles differ as to their ultimate importance to the game. In general, the process and study of game design are efforts to come up with game mechanics that allow for people playing a game to have a fun and engaging experience.

The interaction of various game mechanics in a game determine the complexity and level of player interaction in the game, and in conjunction with the game's environment and resources determines game balance. Some forms of game mechanics have been used in games for centuries, while others are relatively new, having been invented within the past decade."

So the mechanics are everything from the rules to balance, and player interaction with the game, its parts, and other players.  So what this is telling me is....I dont have a game yet. Got it!

I started with movement.  I moved the ships around on the board and got a gauge of how many turns it would take to move around.  Next I started playing with Cargo and how cities produced Cargo.  This made me realize I needed City Cards.  Then I started intergrating when the player draws the event cards.  Now I had the mechanics of a game.  Event Cards, then Movement, then Combat (if the player encountered Pirates while moving), Port actions of buying and selling Cargo, and finally the End Turn where the clean up happens.

The game has changed since this humble beginning, but this was the slow process that brought the mechanics to my game idea.  Because I knew the game I was making, I guess knew some of the mechanics I wanted before I even got started.  I guess in that sense I did have some of my mechanics in mind before I started working on the game.

I think I have come back full circle to Jack's original Post: What came first? The mechanics or the Theme?