The result is a keen balance between expansion, development, and tycoonism. You can even manipulate surpluses or shortages (using hackers, if you pay them). There is a dynamic market price for everything. This leads to a deliciously uneasy equilibrium: players with an excess of resources want to sell them into the market, but by doing so risk lowering the commodity price to a point where other players can buy it more cheaply than they could by producing it themselves. The corollary to this is that if you don’t have enough resources to build something, you can maybe buy them.** After all, this is a market-based economy. That means that if you have enough resources to build something, and you have an available claim, there it goes. The key to Offworld Trading Company is that there are no building dependencies. In between, you build structures on a hex grid and monitor their output while keeping an eye on the commodity market, and another on stocks, and a third on your neighbors. I assure you that last part is in the hypothetical backstory. The game progresses through stages, as your colony gets bigger and bigger, until you can build the rockets that send your spoils off to the bazaars of Io and Titan. But Offworld Trading Company actually paces you through a tense competition for the ability to market your goods to offworld customers. That all sounds like a pedagogic presentation of the mundane reasons ExxonMobil makes you pay so much for gas. Upgrading your colony gets you additional claims. Buildings require power, and colonies require food, and even though you might really want to build a glass factory right now, it might not make sense if you don’t have a way of getting silicon and oxygen (the precursor resources). that really just limits the number of buildings you can build. The latter is a mechanic a bit reminiscent of M.U.L.E. Your limitations are money (due to historical accuracy) and claims. Your tools are buildings, each of which extracts or produces different things.
The idea is that after an intense, intrigue-filled sci-fi backstory that for simplicity’s sake doesn’t appear anywhere in the actual product, you land on Mars to found a colony and exploit its resources. In doing so, it takes the detailed simulation of an economic sim and covers it with something that I’m not sure what it is. Because like Flying Labs’ streamlined masterpiece, it’s all about where to build, how much to borrow, and when to upgrade. In fact, it feels like a lot of things other than a real-time strategy game.
Soren Johnson must have been working on the railroad, because Offworld Trading Company, his re-imagination of a 30-year-old boardgame* about space mining, sure feels a lot like Rails Across America.
Sadly, the market for boardgame fusions wasn’t that great at the time, and developer Flying Labs moved on to try their hand at piracy MMOs. This de-emphasis of micromanagement made the game ideal for multiplayer, and the combination of a real-time map interrupted by cardplay made the whole thing feel like a smooth-flowing boardgame fusion that could only be realized digitally. There was a lot going on under the hood with passengers and cargo and switching stations, but you dealt with it in a very general way. Designs that reject a genre’s fundamentals are like counterfactual history: what if things had happened this way? Rails Across America was just this kind of gem: a brilliant streamlined rethink of the rail tycoon genre that encouraged bold expansion, dirty tricks, and wild gambles, all because it focused on the broader decisions of rail empire building (where to build, how much to borrow, when to upgrade) rather than just how many barrels of peat moss and ochre jelly you could fit onto your 4-4-2 Iron Duke steam engine.
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