Bohnanza
designed by Uwe Rosenberg
Rio
Grande Games/Amigo
Spiele
Economists do not good bean counters make. My friends and
I arrived at this conclusion after a game of Bohnanza
(Bohn being the German word for bean), another one
of those charming Eurogames.
Players, or bean farmers in this case, plant and harvest
beans — cutesy cards that won't look out of place in
a teddy bear's paw — for gold. The player with the
most gold at the end wins. They can also trade or donate
cards — a necessity because you have to play the cards
in your hand in the order that you drew them, and sometimes
the card you want to play is stuck behind cards you just
can't use. This is because most cards are cards you can't
use — there are 11 different types of beans in the game,
but you only have two fields, and you can only plant one
type of bean in each field. To further complicate things,
you can only harvest them after you've accumulated enough
of the same bean. For instance, you can exchange seven wax
beans for two gold; eight wax beans get you the same reward,
but keep that field in wax bean production until you get
the ninth and you'll get three gold.
Not all beans are created equal: Each has a different harvest
schedule, and the more scarce can be cashed in for more
gold. You can mass low-value beans quickly, or collect rare,
but valuable, beans in a more measured way. Because you
can't trade before planting your first few cards, the choice
of strategy at first depends on what you're dealt. After
that, you should decide based on the beans left and the
types of beans that have been planted or harvested.
The drawbacks of each strategy soon become clear. Rarer
beans like cocoa, of which you can trade four for four gold,
may sound like easy money. They aren't — there are
only four of that card in the entire game. If someone has
planted coca beans and you only have one, then setting aside
an entire field for cocoa isn't quite as easy to justify.
The more common cards are less exacting in comparison: you
only need 12 of the 24 coffee beans in the deck to nab the
maximum four gold.
So there we were, brash, young and confident: a cozy circle
of office clerks huddled on the floor when everyone else
was out for lunch. Economists all (or at least economist-wannabes),
we quickly saw that the game would severely test that most
basic of human skills, trading. We primed our game
theory appendices; each of us ready to outwit, outplay
and outlast everyone else, with a Nash
equilibrium if possible.
Too bad. Economists do not good bean counters make. Humans,
one might have thought, being rational and all, would surely
swap a bean they don't need for one they do; or even give
the bean away since they would incur costs keeping it.
If only.
Instead, my friends and I took perverse pleasure in sabotaging
one another — or, more frequently than not, a certain
person named J who had introduced us to the game, and who,
we correctly surmised, was more experienced. Whenever we
didn't need a bean, we'd rather donate it to someone else
than exchange it with J for one we did need. It came to
the point where we made an elaborate show of the whole thing,
pretending at first to agree to the trade, before smiling
and, waving the bean before his eyes, drop it in someone
else's lap. Indeed, there were times when we played it as
we did Citadels,
a game where you can sic an assassin on another player,
and for which we'd point to that unlucky soul and pronounce,
nostrils flaring, voice gravelly deep: "You are dead." Bohnanza
had become an exercise in humiliation. Sell out the target
of the day (or settle your own personal vendetta) with as
much as panache as possible, and, in the end, in the chaos
of the free-for-all, if you emerge as the winner, well,
that's just the icing on the cake.
The secret of this, as "behavioral"
economists would have it, lies in how our goals aren't
always simple and quantifiable — the rational man of
classical economic models is passe; usher in the new, complicated
picture of modern man — and how, more specifically,
wherever trust in another person is involved, our hearts
start pumping. We feel more uncertain when risk comes from
not from nature but someone else; behavioral economists
call this "betrayal
aversion."
This explains why my friends and I delighted so much in
upstaging each other; and indeed, why these adult board
games are so popular. They are adult not in the sense of
smut, but in the sense of no-holds-barred dealmaking and
betrayal. It's real life contained in a nice, sealable box
with bright colors. It's living on edge, except you can
run home at the end of it all to Mummy and Daddy; it's dicing
with death, except carefully apportioned and packed in a
box, scheduled in your daily planner and cushioned, at the
very bottom, by the reassuring reminder that it isn't for
real, that you're still in control, no matter what. Oh and
they're your friends, so you can rib them mercilessly about
losing the next time you watch DVDs together.
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So much for the economics. Coming perhaps a little late in
the day, there's another very compelling reason to head out
for a game of Bohnanza with your beer buddies: It's
unbreakable. Bohnanza is still fun even if you are
piss-drunk and trade your cards at the wrong time. As with
other games, do play with close friends, or at least the same
group of friends, since that makes for more unrestrained backstabbing,
and hence more fun. Bohnanza's also cheap and, as my
example has shown, eminently replayable. Just don't try it
on your boss.
— Yongming Han (hanyongming at gmail dot com)
