I had planned to post video previews of a couple of other SPIEL ’22 titles, but I botched the audio with no time available for a re-shoot, so here’s a written overview of one of these games. —WEM
World Exchangers from designers Smoox Chen and Romain Caterdjian and publisher EmperorS4 has a dirt simple core: In each of the game’s twelve rounds, you either buy a city card or sell city card, then whoever has the most money wins.
As you can imagine, that’s only the start of understanding the game.
Each player has three random starting cities, which determine your starting cash: $1,300 – the cost of these cities. You mark this amount on the left-hand side of your personal player board.
When you buy or sell a city, you subtract or add to your cash on hand, making a mark on your player board in the current round at the proper amount, then you draw a line that connects your previous amount and your current amount. If the line passes through a propaganda icon, move your token up a space on the propaganda board; if the line passes through a green, yellow, or blue icon, you receive a bonus for cities of the same colors that you have at game’s end; and if the line lands on a star, you receive a cash bonus at game’s end based on the total number of stars on your board and cities you own.
Each city has a price that you pay when buying or receive when selling, but many cities net you extra money when you sell them in particular months. In the image below, note that Vienna has blue lines under the price marked 2 and 9, so if you sell Vienna in round 2 or 9, you receive $200 instead of $100 — and if you sell Vienna in round 5, the red mark means that you draw a ring on your player board around your current cash on hand total, ideally hitting icons that otherwise would be untouched.
Once during the game, you can buy two cities and sell two cities during a round, although not in the same round.
In general, each green, yellow, and blue city has a city icon of the matching color, and you’re trying to manipulate your ever-moving cash line and city collection so that in round 12 you ideally have a nice set of city icons that match marked bonus icons of the same color. For each icon, you receive $100 per city of the same color, so if you have four blue cities and four blue icons, you receive a bonus of $1,600; if you have no blue icons, you receive no bonus. In either case, the cities themselves are worth their face value.
To this total you add cash on hand, your star bonus (if any), a bonus based on your position on the propaganda board relative to other players, and an endgame bonus (or penalty) if you met at least one of the conditions on the endgame bonus card.
Five cards are available in the shared market, and the market refills only when it gets down to two cards, so you’re somewhat at the whim of the deck in terms of what’s available for buying — but so is everyone else. Sure, you have a stake in a few things based on your starting cities, but they’re essentially raw material for you to use or discard as it suits you.
World Exchangers includes double-sided player boards, double-sided character cards (with different bonuses on them), and an assortment of midgame and endgame bonuses. I’ve played only twice so far on a review copy, both times with two players, so I’ve barely experienced the game, but I appreciate how it keeps throwing random ingredients at you and challenges you to mix them into a tasty (and valuable) stew.
I’m not sure what the wandering cash line is meant to represent. Maybe in the process of buying and selling, you’re making connections with financiers, politicians, and others, which is how you end up with propaganda and city bonuses. That explanation works, sure, but you could also say it’s just how the game works, so accept it and work the situation as best as you can. You probably can’t hit more than a third of the icons on your player board, but if you’re not planning, you’ll barely hit anything!
