Played Panamax tonight - a friend’s copy, thankfully, since I didn’t like it. He had felt the game would be up my alley because I’m such a fan of Vital Lacerda…and I can sort of see why. It’s definitely a thinky, but thematic Euro…the problem, for me, was that I felt like carrying out the basic activity of the game (shipping goods profitably across the Panama Canal) and actually winning the game were barely connected and the path to victory was both difficult if not impossible to internalize and fighting my every instinct about how to play games of this sort. This is because most of the financial gain and loss in the shipping happens to your company funds, but your company funds have no direct impact on your victory. Only your personal funds do. And you mostly get those from stock dividends, which you may not be getting from your company and which your company’s actual performance impacts very little unless it’s so broke you can’t pay said dividends. But also if you’ve ended up in a position where you want your company to do poorly because you aren’t the primary shareholder and it’s not benefitting you…well, you don’t have much control over that either.
It seems like a smart, tricky design but it just is absolutely not one I enjoyed engaging with.