Yukon Company

From: db Spiele List Price: $55 Players: 3-6 Playing Time: 90 minutes  Type of game: Family Strategy Skill level: 7 Complexity: 7  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 23, April 2000

Perhaps “journeyman” isn’t the right word to describe Dirk Henn, but his designs convey that feel to me. He doesn’t hit home runs like a Kramer, Teuber, or Knizia, but rarely does he strike out either. His designs usually hold together, sometimes very well, but are a bit too dry or fiddly to carry them into the sweet spot players hope for. For those looking to calibrate their Sarrettometer, I’d put ShowManager and Iron Horse/Metro in the win column, Texas/Rosenkonig and Stimmt So! in the loss column, and Tendix, Timbuktu and Spekulation somewhere in-between. Henn’s latest db Spiele offering, Yukon Company, joins the no-man’s land of games with intriguing subsystems that add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Yukon Company is a market game in which victory depends on buying low and selling high. The game’s five colored commodities can only be bought from the general store at Dawson City, but can be sold at four different creeks elsewhere in the Yukon. The prices at each location are random, set initially by die rolls. After each round some prices are adjusted according to a card that’s been visible throughout the previous round, so players can factor these adjustments into their plans. You can only see one round into the future, however, so some purchases must be made on spec hoping their value will increase sometime down the road. Actually all purchases are made on spec, since you can’t be sure which creek you’ll be selling at until later in the turn. You might wind up someplace where none of your goods can be sold at a profit.

The reason for that is bound up in the multipurpose action cards, the distinguishing central device driving the game. Each card has four elements: a number (1-4), a letter (A-D), the name of a creek, and a set of 1-4 goods. The number of goods on a card is always the same as the number of the card itself. These cards are used throughout the game to indicate decisions and preferences, always played secretly and revealed simultaneously.

Each turn begins at Dawson City where players have the chance to buy goods. Players don’t get a free choice at whatever they wish, but instead play a card and purchase the set of goods indicated on that card. Want to buy two cheap yellows but not the expensive red that comes with it? Tough—it’s an all-or-nothing deal. Unless the store doesn’t have enough stock, in which case nobody gets any of the commodity in short supply.

Resources are scarce in the Yukon—there’s just one canoe for everyone to share, and it can only visit one creek each turn. Everyone plays a card to decide where the canoe goes. Each card is worth its numeric value in votes for the creek named on it. The creek with the most votes receives the canoe. It can be amusingly calamitous when you intend to burn your vote because you have plans for your other cards, voting for a creek you don’t really want but which you don’t think will win, only to find that yours was the deciding vote that carried it over the top!

Having decided where they’ll be going, players now decide what they’ll sell when they get there. As with buying from Dawson City, this is dictated by the set of goods shown on the card of the player’s choice. Players must sell the entire set, like it or not. If they’re unable to do so, they pay a fine for each unfulfilled portion of the contract. But players actually play two cards simultaneously at this junction, the second card casting votes for one of four possible events. These events have been face-up all along and only the one with the most votes gets triggered. Their effects can be minor (“All goods sell for $2 extra”), significant (“Each player can sell goods at any one creek he chooses”), or disastrous (“All players return half of their goods to the General Store without compensation”). Players must factor each event into their plans, weighing the likelihood of that event getting triggered. Should you sell your high-priced items, knowing the “All goods on the canoe are lost without compensation” event might get voted in?

I really like this system. The events influence everyone’s actions, from voting on a creek to choosing what to sell, varying the decision factors in each round. This variety doesn’t come at the cost of players being surprised by truly random events, so nobody can blame their fate on the luck of the draw. Sometimes players’ individual ambivalence can lead to an unexpected voting outcome, but then you’ve only got yourself to blame for not casting a stronger vote in a different direction.

Staggered throughout the event deck are special events which, if triggered, end the game. Untriggered events stick around for next time, so over time the percentage of events which end the game will increase. Additionally, once one of these game-ending events turns up the game leader can buy it outright at the end of the round. The cost decreases as more game-enders appear. The effect is to allow for an early end to the game if someone’s running away with it, while slackening the definition of “runaway” the longer the game continues. Thus-far it’s felt like a great deal of thunder signifying nothing, coming off as a hack to prevent the game from continuing until the event deck is exhausted. There system doesn’t allow for any kind of go-for-broke strategy to synergize with the buy-the-end mechanic—you’re always trying to earn as much as you can every turn, and there really aren’t many chances you can take to accelerate that pace suddenly. More likely is that someone just has a couple of good turns in a row just before the first game-ender appears, allowing them to snatch a quick win.

Deciding how to use your cards is a delicious problem. Often you want to use the same card for multiple purposes and must decide which is the more pressing. Sometimes you don’t want to use any, either because you’re saving them for the future or, even worse, you don’t want to perform the action they might require. You can purchase additional cards, sorted and priced by numeric value, at the start of the round to try to avoid the latter scenario— but do you buy cheap cards and just try to avoid disaster or swing for the fences with more expensive cards? Only two cards can be carried over between rounds. Players prone to analysis paralysis will find plenty to consider here. Fortunately everyone else is going through a similar decision-making process, so there’s less downtime than if turns were serial.

If the central mechanism is so nifty, why the luke-warm reaction? For starters, the pricing model is entirely random. There’s no correlation between supply and demand. Prices are adjusted according to a card drawn from the deck, which can sometimes result in prices being regenerated at random. There’s no real market model here, which is something of a problem for a market game. One can argue that being able to see the market adjustments coming a turn in advance simulates the forecast of market trends, and certainly the game plays better than it would if the card was only flipped over just before it took effect. But players’ lack of control over the market makes other game actions seem hollow.

Other gripes are that there are a lot of fiddly bits to track and the game unfortunately takes more time than it deserves. Each turn takes about ten minutes. Because of the way the event deck is structured, that means it will be fifty-eighty minutes before the first opportunity to end the game arises. The game’s likely to continue for a few turns beyond that. If each turn was half as long, Yukon Company would pack a lot more punch. Even so, I feel like I’m doing the same thing turn after turn with no real progression in the game state. Actions are dictated by card draws, so it’s impossible to execute a long-term strategy. I come away feeling like I’ve made a bunch of interesting decisions which have had a negligible effect on the game outcome. In a 30-45 minute game, that’s enough. In a game of this length, I want more.