Merchants of Culture

Return to the 19th century for the glorious birth of the novel!

In this game take the role of a new book publishing house, seeking to sign quality authors and publish their best works. By publishing best sellers and creating a diverse library of works you can not only make money, but achieve the trust and confidence of the bookreading public.

Note: Due to parts shortage, temporarily using yellow dice rather than the green ones shown in the photos.

Mechanics

Employing innovative dice placement mechanics, the game sees players overcome difficult dilemmas in a framework that avoids complicated rules and analysis paralysis.

Each turn begins with a die roll. Where this roll matches the players' dice, they activate, bringing in authors, books and money, or moving books further along the publishing pipeline, earning sales along the way. (This is akin to games like Machi Koro, but here the player gets to decide what the matching number is, and over time the numbers erode.)

Activated dice always reduce their value by one, and are eventually removed, so the player's holdings and situation are always in flux. Players must constantly evaluate where they stand and decide how best to place their new dice, not only with respect to their own tableaus, but also those of the opponents.

Players interact, not merely competing to create the best selling books, but also by signing away others' authors, and even their books.

Other features

In the end the winner is the player who not only made the most money, but also the one with the most best sellers and with the widest stable of authors, giving players additional fodder for their decisionmaking.

Along the way players can remember the wonderful novels they have surely enjoyed over the years, each card bearing a delightful original illustration of its storyline. They can even learn a little bit about the publishing process along the way.

The game has been extensively developed and tested so as to complete by the 45-minute mark when there are up to four players. It comes in a small package that is easy to take along as well.

If you want to understand better how the game works, open up the teaching script that you'll find elsewhere on this page.

Published 2023 April 26.

The Golden Age of Story Telling

The Victorian Age saw remarkable changes in English daily life. Railroads spread. Industry grew. More and more people worked away from their homes. Books were no longer the exclusive province of the wealthy. London, with a population of over four million, became the world's largest city. As the reading populace expanded, the demand for reading material grew apace, and “shilling shockers” (“dime novels” in America), “yellowback” novels, and magazines including fiction were produced in copious quantities.

Despite notable early achievements such as

• The Ingenious Gentleman
• Don Quixote of La Mancha
• Robinson Crusoe
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Tom Jones
• Candide
• Tristram Shandy

it was the 19th century that really brought the novel to the fore. It was an exciting time for readers as novelists essayed books in a wide variety of new styles, creating classics that have millions of readers even today. Behind all this is a story of how publishers overcame innumerable tribulations and hopeless odds to flourish in the increasingly industrial and democratic society that finally made it all possible.

Books that explain more

• The English common reader: a social history of the mass reading public, 1800-1900 by Richard D. Altick
• The British Book Trade in the 18th and 19th Centuries by Koichi Yukishima
• Richard Bentley and the British Empire: Imperial and Colonial Publishing Connections in the 19th Century (History of the Book) by Mary Jane Edwards