Board Game Analysis: Portobello Market

This week, we were assigned to play and analyse another board game, we chose ‘Portobello Market’.

‘Portobello Market’ is a two to four player strategy game. The goal of the game is to have your market stalls placed in the most profitable places as possible. This goal is achieved by placing market stalls in alleyways visited by as wealthy people as possible. The game ends at the end of the round the first player places her final stall.

Core Mechanics

The player verbs are; chosing stopwatches, placing objects and moving the bobbin.

The objects are; stopwatches, stalls, customers, and the bobbin. The stopwatches relate to the stalls and customers, by deciding how many of them can be placed. The customers relate to the stalls by affecting the score they provide, the bobbin relates to the stalls by indicating where they are allowed to be placed, as well as the stalls decide where, when, and to whom the bobbin causes players to lose points from their score resource.

The resources are; score and a temporary score, individual for each player and alley, the score being held by stalls before they have been multiplied and collected through the placing of customers.

Stopwatches

Each player has three stopwatch objects in her possession. Each stopwatch has a number on it (a ‘2’, ‘3’ and ‘4’), this property indicates how many objects (market stalls or customers) the player can place on the board each round. Each round, the player chose one stopwatch to use, allowing them to place that number of objects. once a stopwatch has been used, it will not be usable again, until they reset. Every three rounds (when all stopwatches have been used), the stopwatches reset to their original status, making them available to use again.

 Market Stalls

Every player receive a number (decided by the players) of market stall objects at the beginning of the game. Stalls are placed in alleyways on the board. Alleyways are divided into blocks, In order for a stall to be placed in an alleyway, the bobbin must be present in the alleyways associated block. Alleyways have varying amounts of stall slots,  each with a numeric property, indicating the score provided from having a stall in that specific spot. all alleyways have a crossroad in each end, to actually gain the score from the stalls in the alleyways, there must be a customer placed at each end.

Customers

The customer object comes in three types; commoner (grey), upper class (pink), and the mayor (black). The type property affect the score gained from stalls in adjacent alleys through a multiplier (see photo). When an alleyway have two customers at each end, the players with stalls in that alleyway add together all number beneath their personal stalls, then multiply that variable with number assigned to the specific customer combination. When a player makes to choice to place a customer, the picked customer is random from a pool of five grey and five pink. When all customers are used, the mayor will be placed in the final free customer slot.

Bobbin

The bobbin indicates which block players are currently allowed to place stalls in. The bobbin’s behavior, is that it can be moved between adjacent blocks by choice of the player who’s turn it currently is. this can be done an infinite number of times, however, the player commanding the bobbin’s movement must sacrifice one point from her score resource, for each uninhabited alleyway the bobbin passes over, and the player will lose a point to every player who holds a majority of stall spots in an alleyway the bobbin passes over.

Interesting mechanic

The bobbin system is what I find the most interesting in this game. The actual scoring system might have some more interesting mechanics on a “technical” level, but what makes the bobbin system so interesting is the effect it has on the rest of the game. First off, it make players compete against each others. If players could place stalls where ever they wanted, most games would probably end up with players not even building close to each other. However, now, when it is expensive to move the bobbin to another block, players rather just stay in one block for as long as possible. This open doors for competitive strategies, were players have to think about where other players might put their stalls, and plan their strategies around that.

We also noticed that this system could provide with some interesting events in the beginning of a match. Since score is required to pay for the boffin’s movement, you had to place a few stalls and two customers before you could move the boffin. One of our players used this to his advantage when most of the rest of us decided to try a tactic were we placed a lot of stalls, and saved the customers for later. He then managed to lock players into blocks without any empty spots for stalls, and they did not have any score to pay for the boffins movement. this could of course be resolved by using your next actions to place some customers, and there is usually somewhere to place them that grants you some points. However, it can still hit hard against a player if she is not prepared for it.

Positive

The best thing about this game is the strategy involved in it. Players are usually building in the same block, and available spots for you to place your stalls is entirely dependent on where the other players placed their stalls. This intense interaction means that you always have to adapt your strategy to your opponents. This makes for diverse and competitive strategies, thus interesting gameplay and replay value.

Negative

Ironically, the biggest drawback of this game is really the same things that makes it so great. If you prefer to play games as mindless pastime rather than a session of intense strategic mind games, you might enjoy this game, as long as you play people with the same intentions as you. I believe that it would be nearly impossible to win, or even enjoy the game as a “casual” player, facing a serious player with intentions to win. There are so many ways in which you can sabotage enemy players and use their actions to your own benefits. I actually witnessed a player being lapped two times on the score counter (that means he had 500 points more than the other player). I bet it would be that fun for the tactical player either, when your opponent doesn’t even try to figure out your plans. This is somewhat mended when you play a game of four players, though I think it would be almost as frustrating to be the only “casual” player among four elites, as being one casual player versus an elite.

Another bad thing are the aesthetics of the game, it does not look like they have tried to actually make the game feel like a competitive game. Instead of actually making money in the game, you just gain “score” from placing your stalls tactically. Also, The box art (although not really part of the game) suggests that this is an easygoing and friendly game, which is not right at all. The game is all about becoming the most successful street market… Uh… Person, but the developers do not seem to think so.

Target Group

The box says eight years+. I am not so sure about this, the gameplay is fairly simple, though I think it might be difficult to actually tactically around this game at that age. For instance, in ‘Risk’, the basic idea is quite strait forward, you want to have as many soldiers in as many countries as possible, by attack enemy countries. then of course, you can dig a lot deeper into more advanced tactics, but the basics are there. However, in ‘Portobello Market’, you have got a lot more complex system, where you have got different score on different stall slots, you need to consider placing customers, and on top of all that, there’s the multipliers from different customer combinations. Maybe I am just underestimating the average eight year old, but I can at least see my own little brother getting very frustrated by the complexity of the rules.

On top of that, there is the scoring system requiring the use of multiplication, and I do not even know if kids begun to learn what that is at that age. On the other hand, If it would happen to be the age they start to learn it, this game might be great for teaching math to kids.

From the look of the game, I would say it is also marketed towards children, or at least children included. Maybe this is a bit off topic for a game analysis, but I must bring up the horribly misleading box art. This game is obviously about competition and

In any case, I would suggest this game for an older audience than the box suggests. I would say strategists would enjoy this game the most, even though the box art does not really suggest this.

Conclusion

All in all, I believe that this game has a lot of interesting gameplay features. However, it does not look like the developers have marketed it properly. The aesthetics that the developers seem to have aimed for, is a stroll down the market street a Saturday afternoon. That is not at all the feeling you get from actually playing the game. As I play the game, it feels very abstract, it does not feel like your setting up market stalls strategically to get more of the customers than the other players, it just feels like placing markers in different patters to gain score. I believe this is because the developers have tried to get away from the feeling of playing as a greedy businessman for some reason. However, that is what you are playing as, so all they do is breaking the fantasy.

If you manage to immerse yourself despite these things, then this is a very fun game with some rather unique mechanics.