From: "Douglas E. Jorenby" Subject: Milton Friedman In Space Back in 1983, when I was running a role-playing campaign using SPI's "Universe" rules, I picked up a copy of "StarTrader." Published in ARES magazine, "StarTrader" was designed to simulate interstellar trading in a variety of commodities (as well as illegal goods) with a fairly heavy economic emphasis. At the time, I thought it might provide a good macroeconomic system for the RPG. The "Universe" campaign ended before I was able to do much with the macroeconomic side, and "StarTrader" has been sitting on my shelf for a good 15 years since. Unlike the US stock market, its value as a game has not skyrocketed during the intervening years. I convinced our local cadre of 5 players to give it a go yesterday, to disappointing results. The map is a stylized representation of six star systems, each of which produces one or more of four commodities (Alloys, Isotopes, Spice, Magnetic Monopoles). Players may build warehouses or factories in each system, and build spaceships from a number of standard hulls that can be customized by the addition of various specialized pods (cargo, passenger, weapons, etc.) The heart of the game is the trade sequence. At the beginning of the turn, players write bids to buy or sell commodities at a given price in a given system. Following a random events phase and ship movement, trading takes place. A 2D6 roll (modified by a system-specific supply/demand modifier) represents nonplayer influences on the market, after which valid offers to buy or sell are processed. System prices may then change up or down, due to market activity. The S/D mechanisms are less than intuitive, and caused a fair bit of frustration in our playing. It's quite possible to bid to buy a commodity in a system and then see nonplayer influences create a seller's market; the converse also resulted in ships full of commodities sitting in starports because they were unable to sell their cargoes due to excess supply. While this may be a quite valid economic model, it didn't make for happy players. We opted to play the corporation game, since it gives players a couple of ships and some money to start. Each corporation gets to select a victory condition from a set of 2 or 3, adding a nice sense of variability to the game. However, most of the variable conditions required actions that made it obvious in a turn or two what that player's goal was. Even with corporate differentiation, the game really lacks color. All the ship counters are identical, and the vast majority of the map is taken up with various tables and game record tracks. Apparently if you're raking in the HectoTrans (unit of exchange in the game), aesthetics are irrelevant. The uncertainty of commodity trading was a major turn-off for this group. I was a bit surprised, since we've played (and enjoyed) "Lords of the Sierra Madre" many times. While the latter has a very heavy economic component, it also has color to spare. Also, while profits in LotSM can be changed quite a bit by event cards, I believe the player perception is that the model is more predictable, and thus more enjoyable. Perhaps if we'd had a few free-market economists in the group... Regards, Doug