Business games

[dougo]

Jonathan Degann recently posted another article in his excellent Journal of Boardgame Design, this time about business games, specifically Settlers of Catan, Power Grid, Goa, and Scepter of Zavandor. It meanders a bit, but there's a lot of good analysis to chew on. He uses some jargon he came up with in previous articles, like "bomb", "nervous system", and "story arc", so you might want to start with those previous articles (linked from the journal home page). For more of this kind of detailed game design analysis, check out shannon_a's grand unification theory of auctions.