My friend Joe and I share an interest in logistics games that feature planetary rotation. I’m not sure exactly why he’s into it, but I like it for the interesting questions that emerge from having to plot movement in two dimensions: distance and time.
Plutocracy got me excited because it puts landing on moving planets front and center. Unfortunately, while many of the mechanisms within the game are clever, the process of playing the game is frustratingly obvious. It puts you in the unenviable position of both having to do a significant amount of analysis and then discover that the analysis you did wasn’t really worth it.
As the world(s) turn
The object of Plutocracy is to turn money into majority points. You fly your ship around a truncated map of the solar system (sans Mercury, Venus, and if you’re not a hater, Pluto) buying and selling various goods. Each planet buys one type of good and sells one type of good. When you buy, supply price goes up 1, when you sell, demand price goes down 1. The objective is to buy low and sell high, and also land on planets where you can turn money into planetary council seats, which gain you points in the “Plutocratic Council” when scoring happens 3 times during the game.
Turns are pretty simple. You sell goods on the planet you’re on, buy goods on the planet you’re on, buy council seats with money, do some special actions if you’re on an asteroid or Earth, and then travel to a new location. The traveling is the most novel mechanism in the game. If you’ve played Thebes, Gentes, or Kraftwagen, you’re probably partially familiar with it. You have to move at the end of your turn, and your movement costs 2+n, where n is the number of hexes between your starting and stopping destination, which must be either a new planet or eventual trajectory of a planet.
That cost you pay moves your time tracker on a track (which starts at 0), and then the player with the lowest time tracker takes the next turn, which might be you if you’re still the lowest. In a four-player game, you’ve got 75 time units to spend over the course of the game.
That’s pretty much it. You try to maximize your movement as efficiently as possible, buying low, selling high, and trying to win majority competitions on each planet.
Slight heavenly bodies
There’s a maximum of 45 points to go around in a game of Plutocracy, a few more if you play with the Passengers expansion. Herein lies the problem. This is a game of efficiency, but there’s not really that much to work your brain out over. On the time track, there are events that occur at the same time every game: planetary rotation, small price adjustment, and scoring. You know when they’re going to happen, and you can math the whole thing out if you need to. There’s no incentive (without the expansion) to make a suboptimal or lateral move. You should always go where the most money is and always buy the cheapest majority tokens when possible for scoring. Even with a variable setup, you’ve seen everything the game has to offer after one play. There’s no way to accelerate the game clock or put pressure on other players, beyond maybe a move that hurts you more than it does them.
It’s more of a model than it is a game, and Passengers, the expansion, unfortunately doesn’t fully address this.
The Passenger
The Passengers expansion adds some cards. Basically, before you make your move, you can load a passenger and/or deliver a passenger if you’re in the right location. The goal of this is to inject some variability, because you get your choice of a one-shot special power each time you deliver a passenger, along with a shrinking cash payout. The powers are fun and inject some levity into what is otherwise a pretty staid experience, but they don’t offer enough to break from the central loop the game demands. You still win by buying low, selling high, and chasing majorities in the most efficient way possible.
Ultimately, the problem with Plutocracy is the coolest thing about it: the time mechanism. In other games that use it, making a big turn so you can launch yourself forward in the game state feels like a risky gambit. Here, it’s just a bean-counting exercise that is secondary to being as efficient as possible. There isn’t a moonshot plan you can execute (you’re limited to holding five goods of each type), and the markets remain relatively stable.
For a game that has you racing around the universe, it feels pretty slow. That is damning in and of itself. The game also has the hallmarks of first-time and confused design work. There is a variant where players are forced to make decisions on a clock, and more confusingly, an auction variant where the winner goes first for their starting planet but last for taking the first turn, which actively punishes you for spending resources to get priority selection position.
I’m a bumbling game designer too, but perhaps the biggest lesson that Plutocracy teaches is that shoehorning in a concept like supply and demand in its simplest form actually results in an experience that’s a little boring and not at all chin-scratchy. If you’re looking for a more compelling supply and demand model, try one of my favorites, Captains of Industry, or something more explosive like Container. There isn’t enough Plutocratic decision-making here to warrant the name, and not enough cosmic dancing to tickle my fancy.
