Indonesia from Splotter is one of my favourite games. I had not played it for many years. Recently in a chat with fellow game designer friends Jon, Cedric and Chee Kong, we mentioned this game, and I said I have a copy and we should arrange a time to play. So we did. I checked my records and realised that the last time I played this was more than 10 years ago. So much for "one of my favourite games". Now I don't sound sincere at all. We set a Sunday afternoon, and we did a 4-player game - the best player count for Indonesia.
Indonesia is a heavy eurogame and an economic game. You start businesses in Indonesia producing goods or delivering them to cities to make money. You can be a producer or a shipping company. Producers need to pay shipping fees to have the shipping companies move their goods to cities. How much you have to pay depends on shipping distance. The most important mechanism in the game is the mergers between companies. You can do hostile takeovers. You can also force others to buy your companies at a steep price. Our game lasted about 4 hours, but we were fully engaged throughout and time just flew by.
This is the tech chart. You use markers in your player colour to mark which level you are at in each of the technologies. To be able to own and operate multiple companies, you need to have the necessary technology. Otherwise you will always be stuck with just one company. Every round, turn order is determined through a single-round bidding. One technology in the game allows your bid amount to be multiplied. At the highest tech level, every rupiah you spend can be treated as 400 times the value. This is a hint at how important turn order can be.
The large square tiles are the companies you can start. At this point we had just entered the second era out of three eras. The game is played over just three eras. In the first era you can only start rice companies, spice companies and transport companies. In the second era, rubber companies come into play. Rubber is a more profitable product.
When you force two companies to merge, they must be of the same type. For example a rice company can only merge with another rice company. A shipping company can only merge with another shipping company. There is one exception. A rice company can merge with a spice company to become a microwave meal company. In the photo above, yellow is rice, green is spice, and red is microwave meal. They are different goods and they do not compete with one another. Cities accept all types of goods, but in limited quantities for each type. Once enough of one good is delivered, that good is no longer accepted. Later in the game, that rice company on the left merged with a spice company to become a microwave meal company. This resulted in competition with the older microwave meal company on the right. Turn order became important for them because whoever delivered first would get the deal done. The other might not have any more buyers, or the buyers might be far and incur a high shipping cost. In Indonesia, you must deliver goods to buyers if you can, even if it means losing money on the transaction due to shipping costs. Your shipping partner is not necessarily your friend.
Chee Kong was orange. His tech in managing companies was at Level 4 now, which meant he could own and operate four companies. I was green. My merger technology never developed, which meant I never proposed any company merger. I could only join in the bidding if someone else proposed a merger. I could not initiate any attack.
This was the third era. Now we had oil companies. Old is the most profitable product in the game. However in our particular game our third era was quite short. The oil companies did not have time to grow big. Instead it was the rubber companies from the second era which managed to grow big and become highly profitable. One decisive play in our game was when Jon initiated a merger and bought my large rubber company. At the time I did not have as much cash as he did. I bid the maximum I could afford, but it was not enough. I was forced to sell my rubber company to him. He went on to win the game. His winning score was slightly above 1500 rupiah. I was about 50 rupiah behind him. Oh my condom company!
We had several important mergers in our game, which is expected of Indonesia. There were big shifts on the board. Cedric became the king of shipping. He had two large shipping companies spanning the archipelago. I had both production companies and one shipping company. The shipping company was somewhat profitable, but more importantly it helped me save on shipping costs because my production companies could make use of my shipping company. Left pocket right pocket.
This was the situation at the end of our game. I must say Indonesia is tedious to manage. If it weren't such a great game I wouldn't be able to forgive this level of fiddliness. So many small pieces to lay down, to flip over, and then to flip back again. One sign of a good game is you are still thinking about it and discussing it afterwards. You can trace back to the decision which caused you to lose the game, or to win the game. You find that you can only blame yourself and no one else. You can't blame luck. It feels great to be able to play Indonesia again. I can truly say this - after 10 years, you are still as beautiful as I remember. The game does not feel aged. When I play it, I understand better why I like some of the games from that era, and why I dislike some of the newer popular games. Oh no... I am becoming that grumpy old guy.
From left: me, Cedric, Jon, Chee Kong.
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