I am obsessed with John Company after my first playthrough. Here’s how the major beats of our disastrous third round went.
At the end of the second round, we had a surprisingly high rate of executive attrition. Our chairman was forced into retirement due to a term limit law, and the Director of Shipping, the President of Madras, the Governor of Madras, the Director of the Military, and the President of Bombay all retired due to stress.
I had three members of my family on the board, while 🔴. 🔵 and 🟡 each had one. I convinced 🔴 to give me his vote to become chairman, then elicited modest bribes from 🔵 to become the Minister of Shipping and 🟣 to promote his Bombay commander to be the Director of the Military. 🟡. the Director of Trade, also received bribes from families for the remaining posts (The Director of Trade handles posts in India, while the Chairman chooses other posts.)
Then comes perhaps the most collaborative part of the game: strategizing our priorities for the good of the company and determining how much we’re going to have to borrow to make it happen. We were dangerously close to folding, so we ultimately decided to take out two emergency loans and give the Presidents of Madras and Bombay £5 each so that they each could make a 4d6 trade roll in the hopes of getting a potential life-saving haul of £30.
You have to spend money to make money in John Company, for sure. In order to trade successfully you need:
a) Open markets. These can be opened up one-by-one by the Director of Trade or forced open by military conquest. In our case, we had forced the doors open in both Bombay and Madras (though unfortunately my family saw none of the windfall of loot from those endeavors).
b) Writers to deploy to those markets. Why they’re called writers I’m not sure, but you need personnel in each region. Each of them will earn £1 for their family for each successful trade roll.
c) Money for the trade roll dice pool. The presidents of each area devote any or all of their assigned company money (not family money) to add dice to the roll. £1 = 1 die. You get -1 die if a market you’re trying to access crosses a border line. If the lowest die rolled is a 1 or a 2, it succeeds. If it’s a 3 or 4 it’s a failure, and if the lowest is a 5 or 6, it’s a catastrophic failure that results in the firing of the President.
d) Ships in the water outside port. For every market you hope to exploit with a trade roll, you need one ship.
In this case, we had three ships outside Madras and three outside Bengal, so we were in a good position to reap the benefits of our military conquest.
Speaking of military conquest, however, we had two Indian empires to contend with, one of them headquartered in Bombay. Local power tends to slow economic development (as far as the John Company is concerned). When the Director of the Military’s turn came up, he installed one of his family members as the commander of Bombay and shoved a bunch of fresh officers into the Bombay corps, clearly intending to make a push for personal fame and glory.
Military conquest is a very fast route to family wealth, which is the entire point of the game, but it costs the company dearly. The company has to shell out £1 for every deployed officer. It may not sound like much, but it’s significant when no trade rolls are going the company’s way.
The 🔵 President of Bombay’s turn came up, and he greenlit 🟣’s attack in Bombay. It was a rousing success, enriching 🟣 by £4 and earning them a 2VP trophy. I also had an officer in the attack, so I received £1. The President of Bombay was surprised to get none of the spoils; he clearly wasn’t paying attention when I was the President of Madras and greenlit an attack there.
Then came the crucial part of the round: trading in Madras. £5 for 4d6 (there was a market across a border line). Three previous attempts to trade in Madras had ended in failure, what were the chances of it happening again?
It happened again. We have coined this run of bad luck “The Curse of Madras.”
Trading in Bombay was successful for £15, but the writing was on the wall. We had had too many terrible trading attempts to continue. The company folded. Normally, the stakeholders (I had three) would be blamed for the collapse, so there’d be -1 VP per shareholder. But a lucky draw from the losing deck held the board blameless, so I still got VPs as if the company hadn’t folded.
With three trophies from war, a workshop and a family member resting comfortably in a swanky retirement home, 🟣 was the winner. I managed to tie for third.
