I don't have much experience of pure trading games, mostly ones that have trading as part of the game, usually to manage resources in an open market (as in my old favourite Supremacy: the market indicators are at the top, with the bull and bear).
I was therefore at a disadvantage and tried to figure out the surprisingly complex and sophisticated rules. The first hurdle was the turn sequence. In each turn the first played picked which phase of the game in which they go would first. There are five phases to the game: Purchase, Production, Market, Innovation and Advertising. In a trading game, as in reality, you make a profit by buying low and selling high, this translating here into the Purchasing and Market phases. Purchasing was actually buying the resources to make the chocolate (milk, cocoa, sugar) and the overhead in production aggregated together into one price. The Market was when you sold the produced chocolate. You bought in one market and sold in another, which took a little getting used to. What governed the price you bought and sold at was also a bit perplexing: when you sold on the selling market, the price went down but there didn't seem to be a mechanism for bringing it back up again. This turned out to be Advertising, which generated demand and thus increased the price (you could "buy" the chocolate at a fixed price per unit). The price in the buying market was a table that depended on what kind of chocolate you wanted to make and increased in price with each purchase. This table then changed each turn to represent Fortuna. Innovation was a way of changing the chocolate-making machine to make more or different (more expensive) chocolate. This was done using an auctioning system, another market essentially.
It was quite a good game once you got used to the complexity, but might be easily dominated by someone who figured out an effective strategy and had luck on his side. Laurence was trying to aim the game at the family market, but it seemed too complicated for anyone who hasn't got good maths. Male gamers might not take it seriously because of the subject matter, plus there are more complex games like Power Grid, but female gamers might like it. Beer Trader might be more amenable to the men.
The second game was Good Juju, a voodoo based card game from Ben Neumann. At least that was the working title, as this was the first time it had been played:
Despite the lack of polish, it was quite a good game. Depending on the instructions on the Charge cards, you put a number of "bad" juju beads into a bag. At the end of the round, whoever had the largest number of beads won the round and got a Totem card. If he gets the art right (and he said he had an illustrator) it'll be quite something, although I thought afterwards the idea of an infinite reservoir of bad juju was a bit gloomy.
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