Review: Oligarchy
Oligarchy is a strategy game from Talismapic in which players take the roles of syndicate lords in a banana republic. It is mostly card-based but also has boards with chits for tracking resources and paper money, since the main goal is wealth.
The central mechanic involves bidding and card draws, representing the business interests of the oligarchs: essentially, investments are made in various areas, and returns come in later turns. This part of the game is straightforward in itself, but players can also borrow from each other and several common pools, each with a different rate and penalty for defaulting.
These borrowing mechanisms become more complicated because their terms are not set, but subject to player manipulation. Through use of money, and the help of some cards, players can gain influence in the other half of each turn, the policy phase. In this, the government sets policy on borrowing. Players essentially spend money to bribe the politicians, whose actions are otherwise random. It’s also possible to buy one or more offices, which are expensive but give you continuous influence for a time. Among the most powerful instruments a player can effect this way is government insurance and other protections against loss.
This brings me to the pitfalls of the game. While the concept is interesting, I can only assume that very little play-testing was done. In theory, there is a trade-off between investing and other actions in the buy phase, and bribery. But bribery is a far better “investment” as long as a little money is left over for buying up a mercenary company or some-such.
There is also supposed to be heavy competition between the players, with the rule-controlled government agencies being something of a intermediary. But in practice, the competition only enters at the very end of the game: early on, players can easily be wiped out by random events, so it is in everyone’s interest to cooperate and change all the rules to be more favorable. Though total government protection is expensive, a few turns of bribery by all the players can effect it easily. In the final few turns, most everyone has racked up huge sums of money, to the point where almost any policy-change that comes up is trivial to buy.
The way the market-phase works, various commodities shift in price. The randomness depends a lot on policy-phase adjustments: generally, players can opt for safe but low-yield rules, or highly random but lucrative ones. By the end of the game, the only sensible choice is the high-risk option, as the government corruption level will be at maximum, protecting the players from any loss. Eventually, a random price-change card will crush one of these “dangerous” investment’s prices, and because of various rules put in place so far, the rest of the prices will also collapse. The only real competition thus comes at the end of the game, when this cataclysm becomes more likely: players keep goosing the system but will secretly be planning to pull everything out at the last minute and then kick the house down on all their enemies. However, even if this works, the players will all have thousands of dollars (“zuros”). The player with the most wins, but the difference is often arbitrary.
To play Oligarchy is thus basically to win automatically, and simply win by a little more or less than everyone else by chance. There’s only one strategy: to maximize government corruption. The rules would have to be completely overhauled before I think the premise could work. Finally, I have to say that the price of the game is extremely high: at least four years of college and multiple CFA exams, followed by several years of internships.
Update: I have been notified that the price of the game could be less of a concern. If you are able to befriend the game designers at their favorite convention (or a nearby bar) they often give the game away for free.