Way back when I started this blog, I was making a list of my favourite games. Weirdly, that list is still the same two years later, so I'm going to finish that series. Starting today, with :
#4 - Bohnanza
Negotiation is a remarkably difficult game mechanic to get right. Co-operative and team-based games bypass it completely, since the rules force players to work together rather than fluidly bringing them into and out of alliances through play. That leaves competitive games, but since most have a single winner, opponents have little incentive to help each other. A good trade implies value for both sides, which makes trading a bad idea in situations where competitors want to win at all costs. Conversely, if a deal is truly equitable between participants, then nothing has changed and it may as well not have happened. Game designers seeking to encourage negotiation have to offer opportunities for deals where players benefit unequally but each individual thinks they themselves came out on top. It's not easy.
Bohnanza may as well be a blueprint for how to do it right. The game consists of a deck of cards, each representing a bean. There are about a dozen different kinds, from the commonplace Wax Bean to the unfortunate Stink Bean. Players are farmers, trying to plant, grow and sell their beans as efficiently as possible to make the more money than their rivals. The ridiculous premise hides the depth of the system underneath. Every element of Uwe Rosenberg's design pushes players toward arguing over exchange rates, undercutting prices and dangling future profits in front of each other. You've never heard of such cutthroat bean farmers.
The first aspect Bohnanza's genius is the most unintuitive. Usually in card games, players instinctively order their cards the second they pick them up: spades go next to spades, numbers go in ascending order. Bohnanza forbids this. Every card stays exactly where it was when drawn. The order is important, because the first thing a player does each turn is “plant” the rightmost card in their hand. But each player only has two fields in which to plant and each field can only fit one type of bean at a time. If I've got Red Beans in one of my fields and Garden Beans in the other, but the next card in my hand is a Stink Bean, I've got no choice – that Stink is going in the ground. That means I sell either my Red Beans or my Garden Beans, which might be fine, except beans are worth more money when sold in large bunches of the same type. I'd like to get a lot of Red Beans planted all at once to make a bigger profit, but because I didn't manage my hand well, that errant Stink ruins my plans. This constraint on player action – fictionalized in my mind as the world's most intransigent bean seed supplier – means that different beans are coveted by players differently depending on the situation. I don't want this Stink Bean, but maybe it's exactly what one of my opponents needs.
The second step of each turn emphasizes that variation in perceived value. After the forced planting is done, the active player flips up two cards from the deck. These must get planted by the end of the turn. If nobody wants to plant them, the active player is forced to. Here's where the trading comes in. Player's can use any cards from their hands to trade for the two flipped cards, or for any other cards the active player wants to trade. The luck of the draw may determine how those deals play out. To go back to the earlier example, maybe I flip up two Red Beans, plant them myself and smile because everything's coming up Thomas. But maybe I flip a Wax Bean and Blue Bean, which I have no use for. Hopefully, someone else already has a few of those beans in their fields, because of Bohnanza's other unintuitive rule: traded beans don't go into players' hands, but instead have to be planted by turn's end. People will rarely be interested in trading for something that they aren't already invested in, meaning that often I may be stuck with two beans that nobody, including me, wants. Then the bargaining gets really interesting, as players start offering troublesome beans for free or even paying others to take them off their hands. Cards from anywhere in a player's hand are also eligible for trades, so this is the opportunity to expunge unwanted beans that interrupt the flow of a cash crop and potentially get something of value in return.
This intersection of uncertainty and constraint is what makes the negotiation in Bohnanza work. Players' are constrained by the order of cards in their hands, by the beans already planted in their limited fields and by the need to plant cards that they flip on their turn. Those limits define which beans hold value and which don't, but they define them differently for each player. So two players can make a deal where each comes out ahead, because what was trash for one of them is treasured by the other. Knowing what beans everybody has planted offers some insight into what each player wants. But nobody can ever be certain that they made the best deal, because of the uncertainty of which cards will be flipped up later. Maybe I sold my Soy Beans early to make way for a sweet crop of Green Beans, but two Soys are revealed next turn and it turns out I made the wrong decision. Constraining players to push them toward different goals, offering them a hint of information about what their opponents want but keeping who's actually winning uncertain – these are the key ingredients to the perfect negotiation game and Bohnanza's bean salad has them all.
Now, could somebody please take this Stink off my hands?
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