Again, Opium War, Again

When Cole Wehrle first unveiled An Infamous Traffic way back in 2016, it was a scrappy little devil. Not only was it Wehrle’s second design, it was also the earliest releases from Hollandspiele. As such, its constraints were stark: a handful of counters and dice, a paper map, and one of the worst rulebooks ever written. (That last one was included in the contract: “The designer will include a horrible rulebook that doesn’t explain the game in the slightest.”) Now a second edition is on the way. Much like Wehrle’s second stabs at both Pax Pamir and John Company, this is the work of a designer who knows what he wants to say. More importantly, it’s the work of a designer who’s spent the intervening decade learning how to use the curious medium of tabletop board games, simultaneously one of our ancientest and most recent arts, to paint a compelling and damning landscape of 19th-century business. Econ 101: supply chains. An Infamous Traffic functions as a prologue. To the single most…