by prael
I posted this on my blog last week. As suggested, I'm re-posting it here.Several caveats:
First, this is my first Phil Eklund/Sierra Madre game. I will sound like a newb because I am one. I can't speak much yet on how PaxEm's systems evolved from earlier designs, nor can I place this game amidst other Eklund/SM titles.
Second, I'm describing the game from the perspective that most interests me as both a player and historian: the full advanced game in three-player cooperative-competitive mode. For my money, the basic game is only useful in learning the advanced game, which is exponentially richer in both play value and history. So I'm interested in seeing the whole game in action, making its full case. I think that what I'm describing applies to solo play, but I've never tried the game in that configuration.
Third, my focus here is on mechanics rather than message. I really like this game, but I have serious problems with the historical argument underlying it. Do not mistake my enthusiasm for the game's play with an endorsement of the history behind it.
Finally, this is pretty long. I wanted to give every piece of the game its due. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts about how effectively this description explains the game.
Premise and player positions
In Pax Emancipation, three players represent different British antislavery institutions as they struggle to liberate the world from slavery and other forms of unfreedom. The game argues that the Enlightenment generated antislavery ideas, which then spread across the globe through the process of colonization. It offers players a chance to participate in what it declares to be the greatest accomplishment in human history, the process of outlawing slavery. Red plays Parliament (the forces of state colonial agents), green plays Philanthropists ("the merchants and explorers of London"), and white plays Evangelicals (missionaries). In the first part of the game, players work cooperatively; if they achieve their individual goals for this part of the game, they enter a second era, in which they compete for the title of greatest abolitionist.
I haven't played many cooperative-competitive games, so I have a slim basis of comparison, but I am a big fan of this implementation. In the first part of the game, players must truly work together if they are to achieve their individual objectives. The game makes this natural, as accomplishing the goals of one player-position (e.g., for Parliament to have more Agents on the board than slavers) actually helps others (e.g., the Philanthropists' need to collect barriers). It's easy to see how players comfortable with the system will begin to angle for the competitive era during the cooperative game, making for some juicy player interaction that keeps things tense.
Finances and gold
Let's start with the money system that runs much of the game. The game has a quick and clever mechanism for managing wealth, which gamifies the handling of money while effortlessly reinforcing one of its key metaphors. To spend a gold unit move one financial agent from the top box marked "Capital" to one underneath titled "Wealth." There's yet a lower box that can be spent into, titled "Debt." Spending money quickly drives you into penury, but before that happens you can raise new funds if you're careful with your money management. When fundraising, for every Agent in capital you move down to Wealth, you may bring up one from Debt to Wealth. Then everything in wealth moves up to Capital.
It's ingenious. You wind up thinking about your money just the way the game wants you to. The only way to raise money is to keep it, then spend the opportunity to pay your way out of debt, then invest what you've managed to save. What's more, the tokens on your finance board aren't units of gold, they just record the flow of units of gold. They're actually financial agents who represent productive capacity. This is because they're also workers you'll have to remove from your coffers to place on the board. Money is workers, and workers are money.
This finance system exemplifies the kind of common mechanical shorthands that I suspect appear in other Sierra Madre designs. Take the principle of squared costs: an agent placed on an Idea must pay gold on the number of agents already there, squared. Placing the first is free; placing the fourth costs 9 gold, which is an awful lot. Simple, effective, elegant. These games have their own mechanical vocabulary, and if you enjoy deep designs you'll find yourself slowly learning them.
Mapboard and bits
A global mapboard is efficiently represented by two rows of five cards, assembled into a world map. Each card is a "sphere," such as Europe, East Africa, or South America. One side of the card represents its pre-revolutionary state; when a revolution in the sphere succeeds, the card flips to its modern side, which locks in most of the tokens on it. (As I'll explain, much of the game consists of controlling the induction of revolutions, as these give you extra actions that help you attain victory conditions and victory points.)
Each sphere has two ports, each of which has a space for a player's Agent pawn. This represents an institutional administrator, known in the game as an Admin. Admins are vital for performing liberty-enhancing feats like liberating slaves, sewing dissent, and removing barriers to liberty. The problem is, every Agent placed on the board must be taken from your finance board, which makes it a considerable investment, and difficult to replenish. (More on the action system later.)
Each port also has a variable number of black squares. Each of these empty spaces denotes a slave; using actions to place a colored meeple on it "emancipates" it, converting it into a VP-generating Freedman. The pre-revolutionary side of the card also has spaces for dissidents, who help stir things up and get revolutions going.
Cleverly, the game uses the spaces between orthogonally-adjacent cards to do a lot of work. Evil slavers (ship-shaped tokens) troll these seas, making it difficult and expensive to remove barriers to liberty. But players can build ships in these seas as well. Left alone these are vulnerable Merchantmen, but place a state agent on one and it becomes a powerful Marine - an effective weapon against slavers, mercantile embargoes, and other barriers to liberty. Shipbuilding is also a good way to get more agents; appropriately, this new productive capacity begins in the gutter of the Debt box.
There are a few other touches, all deeply integrated into game play. Several spheres take disease markers, which prevent you from taking actions in the sphere. You can "collect" disease tokens, which at 3 VP each are worth a lot, but this requires building a Factory, which you can only do as the result of participating in a successful revolution. Factories also decrease the costs of ships to 2 gold, and score at the end. In fact, all tokens placed on the board are worth points, so you desperately want stuff out there.
The Elephant token constitutes a final board bit. This denotes the port and sphere that are the focus of the turn's actions. This was a new system for me, but it works effectively. While some actions (like using your Marines, or syndicating ideas) do not focus media attention, others (like posting agents, freeing slaves, or creating dissidents) take place in a specific port. As soon as you perform one of these actions, the Elephant is moved to the port; all other "elephant actions" that turn must take place in the specified port. If you take no such actions, the Elephant will move spheres according to a die roll.
Barriers and anarchy
The Elephant's location is important, because the game fights you back in the Elephant's sphere. This is called a "hate roll," which feels a little weird saying. Hate rolls aren't a problem if you're not trying to liberate the sphere, because you'll have no targets there. But crack new spheres carefully, because the game can kick back hard - in my view, just enough to keep things interesting. The barrier system is elegant: roll the specified number of dice (the less liberated the Elephant's sphere is, the more dice you roll), and see how many dice match the ones appearing on the barriers.
Let's say the Elephant is in Europe, and you must roll three dice against the only barrier there, a purple "Embargo" barrier ("Continental System"). You roll two 4s and a 2. A diceface showing 4 happens to appear on the barrier, so we will suffer the loss designated by its color. The purple diceface indicates an attack on our shipping, which will remove one merchantman ship in the seaways adjacent to the sphere. Some barriers pose special problems. In our example, the 2 matches a green diceface on the barrier, which would normally remove a green Agent or Freedman from the port. We have none, though, and there is a dark collar around the diceface (in game terms this is a "bloody" die). If we can't resolve this by taking a green piece, we suffer "frustrated hate," which spreads anarchy.
In addition to mitigating attacks on your resources, removing barriers has other benefits. Of course each is worth 1 VP. But removing barriers also helps soften up adjacent spheres. If one sphere is absent of a certain kind of barrier, the adjacent sphere is considered to be absent as well. This reduces the otherwise daunting cost of taking actions in new spheres. The rules title these trans-oceanic networks "Underground Railroads," and they can be incredibly helpful.
The specific barriers represent different obstacles to freedom, from the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, to the Hindu caste system, to the Timar land system of the Ottoman Empire. It's an impressive array, and one is bound to encounter new concepts (what's Zamindar feudalism?). Each of these barriers is coded by color to denote its political ideology, and in the competitive game players work to leave "their" barriers in place while removing others. Red indicates left-wing barriers to liberty; a sphere ending the game with many of them will be a left-leaning "democracy." White indicates right-wing barriers, which will produce a right-leaning "theocracy." Note that each of these is related to a player position, such that the red player benefits in end-game scoring by having red barriers on the board, etc. The green player favors "republics," which are created when all barriers have been removed.
This creates an interesting game dilemma for the red and white players: collecting barriers earns VP and makes things easier, but remove all barriers and green runs away with the game. Become a bit comfortable with the system, and choices about which to take, or even whether a barrier should be taken at all, start to get interesting.
Those are just barriers. The game hits you yet again if you haven't properly controlled the popular unrest your activism generates. This is represented by black anarchy discs placed on the spheres, which (in another elegant compression of a familiar game system) functions like diseases in Pandemic, spreading to adjacent spheres if they overflow. This is why it's so important to be thoughtful when opening up new spheres, for frustrated hate can quickly go viral. Each player starts with six anarchy discs each, which effectively means 6 VP. Anarchy on the board is placed from the moving player's player board. This is another impressively multilayered system: because you can also collect anarchy from the board, a plotline develops around contests for these easy VP.
Action system and the market of Ideas
Ultimately, though, PaxEm is a game about manipulating the worker placement system to choose the right actions and chain them efficiently. You start with workers on your finance board, who represent financial agents. You start with a basic menu of actions (two per turn), which include things like fundraising to replenish your gold, or building a new ship (which gives you a new Agent from pool). The "Syndicate" action lets you extend this basic menu by placing Agents on cards in the market of ideas, which is a matrix of cards (six Western ideas and six Eastern) depicting important thinkers and the concepts associated with them.
These cards do a lot of work; they are the most densely mechanical element of the game. The Western Idea deck represents an incredibly wide range of figures, from the missionary David Livingstone (whose tells us he represents "colonial altruism") to Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, to Brazilian abolitionist José do Patrocínio. Eastern idea cards are fewer but likely to be even less familiar to most players, including figures such as Antonine mystic Kimpa Vita, Russian Decembrist Pavel Pestel, and Chinese "self-strengthener" Zongli Yamen.
The market itself (a powerful metaphor for the "marketplace of ideas" concept pioneered by Milton and John Stuart Mill) is based on many similar card markets in familiar games: the lower in the market, the cheaper they are, and gaps are filled by sliding new cards into the most expensive slots. The addition of an Eastern market is an interesting riff; not only does this effectively double the actions available (cards give you extra actions), it succumbs to "idea diffusion," whereby a card that the Elephant roll knocks out of the Western market may "diffuse" to the Eastern market. This is important when committing agents to the market; you can count on Western ideas that diffuse (not all do) to hang around a little longer.
The Idea cards serve multiple functions. Most players will use them first for their "Ops," or special actions they permit agents placed on them. The more agents you have "syndicated" on Idea cards, the more actions you can take. These are the key moves that actually liberate slaves, create dissidents, remove barriers, and employ the navy. You cannot succeed without exploiting them efficiently.
In addition to offering extra actions through Ops, Ideas also offer extra actions through Impacts. Impacts occur when an Agent is on an Idea card that is "globalized," a process I'll describe shortly. Impacts tend to be powerful, letting you do things for free that usually cost a lot in gold or opportunity. They might let you post an Agent for free, add a new Agent from pool, or claims a barrier, for example.
Each card also carries two symbols, which the game calls "freedoms," which identify its place in Enlightenment ideology. These condition the process of "globalizing" ideas into two idea splays, which I'll discuss shortly. In theme terms, these symbols indicate the ideological stance of the person and idea depicted on the card. The black symbols denote "ideas," with the black candle representing ideas drawn from natural sciences and the black comet representing supernatural ideas. The red symbols denote political activism, with the feature representing intellectual and left-wing approaches, and the red unlock representing economic and right-wing approaches. Each Idea card is assigned two of these symbols. For example, David Livingstone ("Colonial altruism") features a black comet (supernatural ideas) and a red unlock (right-wing economic activism). Karl Marx has a double feather, denoting his strong association with left-wing intellectual activism (the rulebook says this combination represents "egalitarians" and "pragmatism").
The ten possible combinations of symbols offer ten different flavors of Ideas. These make for interesting subjects of analysis in their own right, but in game terms they're important for transferring ideas into globalized idea splays, which represent the worldwide discourse of liberty. In game terms, these splays are critical not just for generating the impacts of their spread, but for creating new possibilities for ideas and revolutions to enter the common storehouse of ideas. More on this in a minute.
The penultimate function of Idea cards is to determine where Revolution cards are placed in the market. Each card has a "firebrand" rating, with lower ratings indicating Ideas that are more susceptible to launching a revolution. Low firebrand ratings are found on cards like Palmares (the long-lived Brazilian fugitive slave state), Captain Cudjo (the Jamaican maroon captain who treated with the British), or Toussaint Louverture (the former slave who became the George Washington of Haiti). Because any Agents on a card like this are replaced by the new revolution, having Agents placed on these cards can help you successfully carry out, and benefit from, the revolution.
Globalized idea splays
The final purpose of Idea cards is to "globalize" them into two "splays" of cards, which "represent the Enlightenment concept of international law." The game calls one General Will and the other Bill of Rights. They function similarly, but have different mechanisms for flushing outdated ideas. You'll want to add Idea cards to these splays for various reasons: to obtain the Impact on a globalized Idea card, to make a revolution possible, to create the possibility of adding new cards, or even to prevent another player from taking an Idea card's Ops.
The key to working the splays is matching the freedom symbols on the Idea cards. You tuck your card under other cards in the splay so that only one of its symbols shows. With the right action you can add any card to one of the splays, choosing which of the two freedom symbols you wish to be visible. In the splay this creates a "freedom pair" of two adjacent symbols, which in turns makes it easier to get new Idea cards into the splay. One action (which is not always available) lets you put any Idea card into the splays, while another (always available) only lets you put in Ideas whose symbol-pairs match symbol-pairs already in the splay. So, mechanically, you're thinking about which symbol-pairs you want to create, so you can globalize cards with symbol-pairs that match, and thus gain their benefits.
For example, a player placing the Liberty Party in a splay might display its Unlock aspect (right-wing economic activism), and hide its Candle aspect (natural ideas), to begin a freedom pair in a splay. Let's say this is placed after the Harriet Tubman card, which has been placed to expose its Unlock symbol (her Comet symbol for supernatural ideas is left obscured). This produces a Unlock-Unlock freedom pair, which represents right-wing political militancy. Once this freedom pair is in the splay, it welcomes the addition of new cards of that ideological flavor - in this instance, cards such as John Brown of Bleeding Kansas fame, who was nothing if not a militant. Lacking such a freedom pair in the splay, John Brown's ideas would be hard to globalize, or spread into the worldwide discourse of liberty, where they could then be used to develop new freedom pairs, and thus new possibilities for globalized ideas.
Revolutions
The same principle applies to Revolution cards, which enter the Market of Ideas, and may also be globalized. PaxEm's Revolution system constitutes a fascinating and prominent game within a game: for players to win, they must induce or ride a wave of revolutions that strikes the mapboard. The game may end before all the world has revolted, but the modernization of the world order through revolution is the game's central plotline.
A revolution begins in a sphere when it acquires one dissident and one anarchy. This isn't too hard to do; it feels like a natural outgrowth of trying to liberate a sphere. Players may skillfully manage the process, but it can also happen without much direction. And once a revolution begins, there is some time pressure to successfully complete it. Perhaps it will diffuse through the Idea market before it's done, thus voiding your hard work to support it. Or perhaps other players will take better advantage of it, and you'll lose relative position. I find that lack of total control an effective way of simulating an inherently chaotic process.
Each sphere has its own two-sided Revolution card, which enters the Idea market, replacing the card with the lowest firebrand rating. Once active, the Revolution card can accept Agents. And just like a regular Idea card, it has Ops on it that you can use. You can even globalize a successful revolution into the splays, where they can form new symbol-pairs, and confer endgame VP, depending on how they are globalized.
Each Revolution card has a white (right-wing "slave revolt") side and a red (left-wing "civil rights") side, with small but vital functional differences. For example, the Revolution for the North American sphere has on its red "civil rights" side the American Revolution, represented by George Washington. It has spots for three revolutionaries, which must be filled or exceeded for it to succeed, and it has Emancipation and Suffrage Ops. Like Idea cards it has two freedom symbols: a feather (left-wing intellectual activism), and a candle (natural ideas) symbols. If the revolution is globalized with the candle showing, it's worth 2 VP for the green (philanthropist) player at endgame; if the feather shows, it's worth 3 for red (Parliament).
The other side of the card, its white, right-wing "slave revolt" side, is the American Civil War, represented by Abraham Lincoln. It too has spots for three revolutionaries, but its two Ops are Maritime and Westernize. Its freedom symbols are a Candle (natural ideas) and an Unlock (right-wing economic activism). If the revolution is globalized with the Candle showing, it earns 3VP for green (philanthropists); the Unlock side is worth 3VP for white (evangelicals).
Players have limited control over which side of the card will be face up (and thus perhaps gloabalized), and this may even change, making for yet another nested minigame. A revolution cannot even succeed unless it can be globalized into a splay with a matching freedom pair. This may start a mad scramble to make a revolution viable by globalizing other ideas (and making new freedom pairs), for if you succeed in making a non-viable revolution viable in this way, you get a free Agent from pool to join the revolution.
If the revolution succeeds, Agents on it may select from a wide menu of bonuses, from things like globalizing the revolution, to claiming barriers or pirates, to building the Factory that will cheapen your ship costs and let you collect valuable disease tokens. As you can see, there's a lot of strategy around these revolutions. Want to get in early on a revolution so you can get the first bonus and globalize it the way you want? Syndicate an Agent to a low firebrand card, even if its Ops aren't that attractive, or it is expensive. Should you join that budding revolution? How expensive is it, and what is it worth? Perhaps you should pass this one by.
A successful revolution modernizes the sphere it strikes, flipping its map card to its "modern" side. (This is clever and efficient design: a game map made of cards instead of a board is of course smaller, cheaper, and easier to produce and package; here, though, the cards are not a publisher's concession to economy, but the most useful tool for their purpose.) Once flipped, any tokens on the sphere are retained for endgame VP, except for Dissidents, which in another clever little wrinkle, emigrate to the next most volatile sphere.
Player powers, scoring, and narrative
Each player position has its own unique abilities. Parliament gets a free Maritime Op every time it raises funds without divesting Agents, and a free Agent installation and gunboat diplomacy after it builds a ship (it's also the only position that can install new Marines on ships). Consequently, Parliament spends a lot of time on the sea, taking slavers and softening up spheres. Philanthropists may install Agents from the bottom rather than the top of their finance board, thus saving up to two gold on each posting. This financial advantage often results in lots of green Agents in the Ideas market, active in revolutions. Evangelicals may post Agents for free, as the rulebook explains that "missionaries are rather abstemious." This helps them with their main goal of manumitting slaves, but also leaves them the most desperate for money.
Each position also has its own goals. In order to win the cooperative first round and proceed to the competitive second, the forces of Parliament must have more Agents on the board than there are Slavers remaining. The Philanthropists must ensure that fewer than twenty-six barriers remain on the map, and the Evangelicals need at least fifteen freedmen (of any color) on the board.
If players make it through the cooperative game, they can ultimately score endgame VP. They earn 1VP for each Barrier, Slaver, or Anarchy collected; 1VP for each Freedman, Admin, or Marine on the board; 3VP for each disease disc; and VP for their factory (VP = number of agent ships2).
The barrier scoring system, in which each player-position has a preferred final barrier configuration, customizes endgame scoring. Parliament wants "democracies" where one or more red barriers remain but no others, Evangelicals want "theocracies" where only white barriers remain, and Philanthropists want "republics" that have no barriers. For each sphere where your preferred type of government remains, you score 1VP for each Freedman, Agent, and Factory token in the sphere, regardless of color. Any revolutions in the splay will now confer VP on the player of the indicated color. The Evangelicals get a special boost in endgame scoring, of 1VP for each Dissident on the board, regardless of color.
So you're trying to collect the bad stuff on the board, get your pieces onto the map, and work your unique scoring system. To do this, Green and White especially need to invest in getting Agents from pool (unless you like to cut things close). It bears repeating: workers are money and money are workers. The general course of play will be to crack open new spheres, not just to liberate slaves there but also to spark revolution. But be careful, because once you open a region, it will fiercely resist your efforts to bring freedom. Cautious players will want to soften up spheres with Marines before investing a lot of tokens in them.
Once the first dominos start falling, they don't really stop. I can't imagine succeeding without playing the revolutions, so the question is probably about choosing the right opportunities, and making the most of chances you get.
I think this is the heart of the game. Since you never have the capacity to do what you'd like to do, the game is all about making the most of what you've got through action-chaining. The most frequent bonus actions you'll receive will be Bonus Petitions, which you receive after using a Lawsuit or Plebiscite to globalize an idea into a splay. You can use these for a free Fundraising or Legislate action, or to engage in a tug-of-war over your Agents with the Parliament player. Manifestos, which come from making a revolution viable by globalizing an Idea, let you add a valuable revolutionary Agent from pool. Revolutions are great because succeeding in one lets you do a lot of often-expensive things for free. But beware: spend all your Agents on syndications and revolutions, and you'll quickly find yourself in the poorhouse.
The fun, of course, is figuring out how to pull off so much with so little. Syndicate an Agent on an Idea, take its Ops for as long as they're useful, then Legislate it into a splay to get its Impact bonus. That bonus may be a new Revolutionary Agent from pool, which may complete a revolution, which gives you yet another bonus. In several games, I've seen the East Indies revolution fully resolve in the same turn it started.
As I see more of PaxEm, I also come to appreciate how effectively it integrates the cooperative and competitive games. I find myself angling for position even during the cooperative game, in a good way. This is particularly the case with barriers, which red and white both want and want not to take. It can be very powerful to take your own barrier, only to regress it to the board at the moment of modernization, to lock in the type of government you want. There are other endgame scoring bombs you'll find yourself angling for in the midst of "cooperative" play. Factories can score well because they are worthwhile in themselves (up to 9VP). But they also let you collect those 3VP disease tokens. This opens up yet another minigame, in which players race to build their factories and clean up disease.
Concluding thoughts
Pax Emancipation is a heavy game, featuring a bundle of interwoven systems that come together to deliver a rewarding experience. Getting to that experience requires a considerable investment, though. Learning the game takes time, not just because of the array of mechanics I've just surveyed. The rulebook is a heavy lift, as it is loaded with 125 footnotes, a glossary, and various appendices, all dedicated to conveying the message behind the mechanics. Plying the rules from it is not always easy. Simply to learn the game you have no choice but to internalize a lot of new game language.
But this is neither gratuitous nor meaningless, for it enormously reinforces PaxEm's theme and argument. This is a game that works hard to explain its meaning as you learn and play it. For me, the investment in the game's theme (and Ludica readers know how deep that investment is) paid off in the kind of immersion I look for in games. Over the course of a few short hours, PaxEm unspools innumerable suspenseful internal plotlines and nested minigames, all making for an epic experience that feels like a replay of a big history.
I find the game's historical argument at times fanciful or troublesome, but that has taught me something important. Had this game's systems been harnessed to a more conventional understanding of history, I would not have seen how powerfully it unites mechanic and theme. In my terms, I would say that PaxEm is an outstanding example of a game that melds ludic and discursive rhetorics into a highly didactic game experience. PaxEm further reinforces our faith that board games can make complex historical arguments about important non-military topics.
I hope to develop this analysis further. In the mean time, I hope this helps you decide if this game is for you. It sure was for me. I welcome your comments, corrections, and questions.