The East India Company

Overview

A Look at the Design

Goal when designing

While designing East India Company, there were 2 main goals, create an area control game without combat/war being the major focus and create a game that attempted to accurately portray the colonization and explotation of the greater Indian Ocean region. One of the first decisions I made was to base the game around running one of the many companies that took hold in the area, like the British, French, or Dutch East India Companies.

Unique Mechanics

Area Control

One of the first things I had to come up with was how area control was going to work. Like I said before, fighting is not a major focus of the game, so how would players expand and mess each other up? So, I came up with a system. It starts much like Monopoly, with players buying up open tiles with money, there are also tiles that are closed at the beginning of the game limiting where players can go. Eventually, though, more tiles open up, and you get the ability to buy tiles from other players, which is done the same way as unopen tiles, but there is an extra tax to top it off, making it less effective and more risky, but it can also severely punish an opponent if done right.

The Market

One aspect I was originally having trouble with, was how do you similuate a market. Throughout the colonization of this area, empires went for different resources and areas based on the time. So how would you show that? and how do you make it different in each game? The solution I came up with was quite simple looking back. There are 6 resources in the game: wood, minerals, textiles, spice, rubber, and drugs, each of which has its own price, which is listed on a whiteboard. Each round (every time everyone takes 1 turn), a card is pulled from a special deck; this card has a resource and a price change (Example: Wood +5, Drugs -10), which you would then use to update the boarding accordingly. Other than those cards, event cards (which each player pulls after their turn) could also change the price, but those are much rarer or only affect specific situations.

Trade Routes

Unlike other games, you don’t get resources from simply owning a tile, you also got to guide the resources back to Europe for you to actually get them. This is done with trade routes, in which there are 3 steps: ground routes, ports, and sea routes. Ground routes are easy and automatic, any tile that is connected to another and is owned by the same player will have trade flow threw them naturally. Next, there are ports; for trade to go from land to sea, it must flow through a port. Finally, there are sea routes, which the player makes a path for by buying markers, which can then be placed on sea tiles; note that the further the markers get from a friendly port, the more expensive they get. Sea routes are vulnerable and are susceptible to piracy (another mechanic) if players do not do a good enough job protecting them.

Ruleset

You can also check out the player aid here!

Honors

This game was reviewed by Edward Castronova who is a board game designer and has written many things about the games industry. When I had him review The East India Company, he had these things to say:

“The best design in the class. Strategic depth. Fantastic rulebook. Player aids. A goal of simulating something difficult.”

“At its core, the game is about factories, ports, and trade routes. The players are building amplifying loops in competition, just like Power Grid and other great economy games.”

“This one is a keeper.”

Now coming to players soon!

After sitting on this project for around a year, I decided I wanted to do more with it. Using my skill set, I have decided to put my skills to the test and attempt to port the entire thing to PC, so it can be released and played by the masses. Currently, the prototype is in the early stages, with most of the basic mechanics being complete, such as buying, tile statistics, board layout, and more working, while more complicated mechanics like moving resources, multiplayer, cards, and more are still in development.

Designing Algorithms!

If you recall in the trade section, I said the following: “Finally, there are sea routes, which the player makes a path for by buying markers, which can then be placed on sea tiles; note that the further the markers get from a friendly port, the more expensive they get.” Below is a visual diagram of the system:

The issue I was running into was calculating this cost for each sea tile. Each sea tile needed to know the distance to the closest port owned by the player so it could properly determine the cost to put a trade route in the zone, but could only see the tiles around it. To fix this problem I had to make a tree search algorithm, that would continuously search out on the board, until it found a port owned by the player, and then report back the distance for the price calculations. After doing research and learning different algorithms, I didn’t find exactly what I needed since they were all for pathfinding, but I used my newfound knowledge to make my own algorithm that fit my needs.
The needs of this algorithm are as follows

• Search for the CLOSEST port owned by the player
• Don’t repeat tiles already searched
• Report back the distance
• End once a port tile is found

Here is the algorithm in full with comments so it’s easy to follow and you can see how it works

Finally, here are the results in-game (please give gifs a second to load!)