Chart the rise and fall of the East India Company in this cutting negotiation game about high society at the dawn of the British Empire.
ohn Company is the second game in our series on the British Empire. In our previous game (Pax Pamir), players attempted to construct a new future for a land caught between two global rivals. This game presented agents of empire as hapless interlopers, caught up in a struggle that they could scarcely understand.
In John Company, players move deep into the bowels of empire and take the roles of ambitious families out to make a name for themselves at the dawn of the British Empire.
Though often upsetting, this vantage point offers a better understanding of how empires work in practice. Empire-building is one of the most common themes in game design, but the vast majority of games get the fundamentals completely wrong. Empires are certainly not heroic enterprises, but they are also not comic book villains, masterminding global domination. Instead, empires are something far more insidious. They are something that happens in aggregate, composed of a thousand little choices and many individuals with their own interests and ambitions.