by jwarrend
Note: This is the second in a series of reviews that are written with specific attention paid to the considerations of the game for a family setting – specifically, for families with kids older than 6 and younger than, say, 12. I’ll probably start a Geeklist for these at some point, and will update this review with a link when I do.Introduction
Chinatown is simple and intuitive; its few rules and few components provide an unobtrusive framework that allows deal-making between players to shine as the game’s driving mechanism. The game’s simplicity makes it easy to teach in a family setting. And trading and making deals are so familiar to kids that the game’s action is a natural extension of skills they have probably already acquired trading baseball cards, Halloween candy, etc.
Gameplay intro
Chinatown is a pure deal-making game; there’s almost nothing other than deal-making that happens during the game, and almost nothing in the game that can’t factor into a deal. Players will be randomly dealt some spaces on the board, and business tiles, and these, along with money, are traded between the players. Once the deals are all done, players place their business tiles into spaces they control (if they wish), and then receive income for the businesses they own. The more businesses of a certain type the player has in a contiguous cluster, the more valuable those tiles will be. So, players obviously want to make deals that give them sets of tiles and contiguous spaces in which to place those tiles. This cycle repeats 6 times, and the player with the most money at the end is the winner.
The game is solidly built. Particularly nice are the money cards, which show their respective denomination on the front and a common back, so the other players never know exactly how much money you have. Technically, the hidden-but-trackable information folks might debate this, but in a family setting I’ve never found this to be a problem; unless your family includes an exemplary card-counter, I suppose!
Thematic considerations
The theme is fairly light in this one, and there’s nothing especially objectionable or worrisome about real estate wheeling and dealing in Chinatown – at least, not in the way it’s handled in the game. And the game’s mechanics do a fantastic job of creating a chaotic atmosphere of wheeling and dealing.
Having said this, the setting in which you’re playing the game is a consideration. We once brought the game to a game session that was held in a library. With 5 kids playing the game, things got pretty loud – not the best thing for gaming in a library!
Skills that the game teaches
Chinatown teaches the important gaming skills of negotiation and deal-making, and does so in a simple way: all transactions happen immediately, so there’s no additional element of keeping your word (and the associated meta-game element of back-stabbing, which isn’t always as appropriate for a family setting).
It also does a good job of encouraging players to recognize that some things are “just business”, and to not get too bent out of shape over it. If a player drives a particularly hard bargain, this may upset you, but you have to shake it off and still be willing to make deals with that player in the future; otherwise, you’re just hurting yourself (since they might have something that you want or need).
We also used the game as a teaching tool in a math lesson, to predict the long term value of a deal with respect to how much income the tile would generate for you when placed. I don’t recall whether we saw a big bump in the girls’ performance after this session, but it was at least a good introduction to strategy in gaming, and how math informs strategic thinking in games like this.
Things they might find difficult
One of the chief difficulties for kids seems to be the long-range planning. Particularly in early turns, the actual value of a deal may have long-term, far-reaching consequences that must be taken into account by a shrewd wheeler-dealer. But our girls are mostly content to make simple deals in small commodities – one tile, one space, or $10k or $20k, but rarely more than that.
The funny thing about that is that in a negotiation game, being more savvy about the actual value of the deals doesn’t necessarily put you in a stronger position to win – you are limited by the group-think, and if $40k is a completely fair price but is more than your daughter is willing to pay, you’re not going to make the deal!
We’ve also found that sometimes they become preoccupied with amassing a “full set” of businesses of a particular type, but pay inadequate attention to acquiring sufficient board space to place the tiles together on the board. Or, they wait to add their tiles to the board until they can place a complete multi-tile set.
One minor issue that isn’t confined to the younger players alone is that the board state is somewhat fragile – if a piece gets bumped, it may be easy to forget where it was located, because of the game’s frenetic pace and large number of spaces and tiles. The game sort of comes to its own rescue here; the same cards that are dealt to confer ownership of the spaces initially can be traded along with control of the space, and the game recommends this. We don’t generally do this; having to rifle through your stack to find the card for the space you just traded away just slows the wheeling and dealing down too much.
However, we had one situation (at the aforementioned library gathering) where one of the players was cheating by adding tiles and control markers to the board when other players weren’t looking, then claiming them as income. We could have prevented him from succeeding simply by requiring him to show his cards and prove that he owned the spaces in question, and we may have done this, I don’t remember. Of course having a cheating player is a problem above and beyond the game itself, but it’s useful to have a way to prevent accidental cheating as well.
Ways they might surprise you
Our younger daughter once remarked that in the previous playing, she had given out her money too easily, and that this time around, she was going to insist that every deal she made would have to involve some money coming her way. We all chuckled about this and indulged her by making deals with her, (not necessarily at personal disadvantage), but sure enough, at game’s end, when the money was counted up, she had won handily. The game’s three currencies – tiles, spaces, and money – are all important and it’s impossible to claim that one is more important to victory than another, but the dynamics of the game vary strongly group to group and session to session, and in this playing, her emphasis on cash won the day!
Variations you might consider to make the game easier
The written rules governing the payout for partially complete businesses do a nice job of rewarding progress towards completion, but I’ve found that this can be too much information for the kids to take in. For our first several games, we simply played that every business placed on the board was worth $10,000, and when a business is complete, it doubles in value.
Conclusion
Chinatown is the most requested game in our family, and provides a great setting for a lively and highly interactive family gaming experience. Too many of the games that I pick are quiet and serious; this one is loud and raucous. And because it tests familiar skill sets, it gives all players a comparable chance at victory, with the always-satisfying “reveal” at the game’s end, when the money is counted up and the winner declared, serving as the icing on the cake of a fun session.