Good trades create strong bonds
Written by Mitri Ng - Apr 04 2022
Growing up in Southeast Asia, I would often follow my parents to the market to buy produce. I remember the sound of buyers and sellers going back and forth on price – a monetary tug-of-war. I remember the first time I managed to haggle a price down to something I wanted, and how good it felt. I felt accomplished.
Chinatown is a trading game that recreates that same amazing, energetic chaos. In Chinatown, you play as an entrepreneur trying to make the most money after 6 rounds. The game revolves around a grid representing New York’s Chinatown, with different squares having different numbers.
At the start of each round, you are dealt cards that are deeds to various squares, and a bunch of tiles that represent the different types of shops you can open up. The gist of it is that you want to own a bunch of squares adjacent to each other and build them up with one type of shop, for example having 4 Florists bunched together. At the end of the round, your shops spew out money, and the bigger the group of like-shops bunched together, the more money you get.
However, since deeds and shop tiles are dealt randomly, chances are you won’t have everything you want. So, how do you get what you want? You trade with others!
The bulk of the game involves negotiating and trading with your friends around the table, and there are no restrictions on what you can do here. You can freely trade deeds, tiles, and even cold hard cash, with anyone and everyone. Chinatown intentionally gives you a lot of freedom for creativity, and this means trades are creative, intense, and can sometimes involve multiple people at once.
This really shines through at larger player counts with a group of close friends. In my experience, negotiations in this setting can be loud, exciting, and aggressive. Mind games play a part in negotiations too. If several players are interested in something you have, why not pit them against each other and make them bid for it? That’s not to say trading has to always be mean. Inevitably, good trades create strong bonds between players, and they start to be happier to trade with one another. Sometimes, you get people agreeing to suboptimal deals, in exchange for better deals in the future. The possibilities are almost endless.
Finishing the game is a breeze as well, as you simply count up all the money you have and declare a winner. This means you have a simple game with very few rules, but one that puts the emphasis on player interaction. Players aren’t getting bogged down in rules, but rather using them as a guide to interact and talk. It’s an easy sell for beginner board gamers because the rules are easy to grasp. But it’s also a great offer for more experienced hobbyists because the difficulty and strategy is determined by those sitting around the table.
At the end of the day, we play board games to have fun with our friends, and Chinatown shines by letting the relationship between players take centre stage.
