Arkwright

On my sixth play, Arkwright remains perhaps the best economic game I own, though it certainly charges for the privilege in stamina. It has become a fixture for our group alongside The Cost, Carnegie, Dune:Imperium and Dominant Species: Marine, not because it indulges anyone. One particularly fierce game came down to a single point. That will do.

Its core is the development of your factories within an economy where the main markets are not scenery but the place where everyone arrives with sleeves rolled up. The interesting decision is where to apply pressure: ships and export contracts, or the immediate fight for those markets. In this game nobody pursued the shipping route, so the economy did not expand outward; it tightened in on itself.

That made prices the principal weapon. Everyone contested the same markets, each decision rewriting the others' sums, and the result was a sequence of brutal price wars. This is not merely a game that permits interaction. It requires you to read what opponents are attempting, then decide whether to follow them, beat them there, or bury them commercially. Not friendly at all, which is precisely the point.

The intensity does come at a cost. Once the market has wrung you out that thoroughly, Arkwright can leave you spent even after an excellent game. That is not a flaw in the system; it is simply the entry fee for a design that takes economic conflict entirely seriously. Monumental stuff.

Updated session

East Indies had not impressed us, whereas the anniversary edition's asymmetric factories — mass prod and luxury — made the game easier without making it gentler. They produced all-time high scores for all of us and opened more elaborate lines that can ignore ships entirely while keeping prices merciless. The judgement did not change; we simply found a variant that makes it still more interesting.