Created by award-winning Portuguese designers Nuno Bizarro Sentieiro and Paulo Soledade and published by Quined Games, Movers & Shakers is a strategy game set in India during the latter half of the 19th century: ‘In Movers & Shakers, you become a powerful railway magnate operating in Bengal during this pivotal era. As the industrial age booms, you’ll compete to fulfil contracts, transport essential crates across the region using your own or rival trains, and invest your profits to grow your empire. You will have to transport goods from Benares to Calcutta, and vice versa, and organize your transport as efficiently as possible.’
Playing the Game
The aim of the Movers & Shakers is to maximise points through investments, fulfilling contracts and making deals with regional agencies, all of which you do by transporting products across the country, making service improvements along the way to increase your shipping efficiency.
Players start off with 2 contracts and 8 action cards (4 load cards and 4 movement), as well as 4 freight cars (2 small, 1 medium and 1 large). They also choose a setup card (which provides some initial bonuses and determines how later ones will be gained) and an asset tile.
The game consists of 2 turns, each with an action phase (where all the interesting stuff happens) and an administration phase (where the results of those actions are converted into money and investments). Why 2 turns? It does feel like the game could be over and done in 1, and maybe the designers simply thought that was too short, so decided to make players go through pretty much the same thing twice… But then, why not 3 or 4?
In the action phase, players take turns to place a card from their hand into a slot on their player board—6 slots means that a whole turn has 6 such rounds. Playing a card means taking two separate actions: first of all, those printed on the card—as mentioned earlier, there are load and movement cards, thus the card selection determines if you’re adding cargo to your freight cars or moving loaded cars along the circular track. The card can be placed in its slot to reveal either the upper development action of the slot or the lower logistics one, each of which provides different parameter/resource value increments or actions, thus choosing the slot and how to place the card is as important as choosing the card. This leads to more variability in the game as well as requiring more strategic and tactical thinking.
Load actions can only occur when you have freight cars at the cities or loading ports, and if you have goods to load on them (which come from the contracts waiting to be completed). Each crate must be loaded onto a different car, and the car needn’t be one of yours—i.e., players can end up carrying each other’s goods. When all the crates have been removed from a contract, that contract is deemed complete and you gain its bonus as well as select a new contract (with associated crates). Some load actions allow freight to be added to ships, which provide other player benefits—there are sufficient different interacting variables in this game to give players a good mental work-out!
Before talking about move actions, I need to say something about the track: it comprises a sequence of spaces which can hold trains of 3 small freight cars, 1 medium and 1 small, or 1 large. Some tracks are a single train space wide, whereas others—referred to as junction segments—are 3 wide, where players can split and join small and medium cars into different trains. A complete move action typically involves several move operations, where a single operation will take 1 train from its current space to the next clockwise, and trains can only be split at junction segments, thus the whole train (no matter who owns the freight cars—or the freight, for that matter) moves as a single unit in the single-width parts of the track. Furthermore, if the space you want to move into is occupied, you push the train in that space into the next one—this means it can be advantageous to arrange your trains such that other players will be forced to move them on their turn. When a train arrives in a city, its cargo is unloaded into warehouses, where it will contribute to the final score. Arrival in a city also moves the owners of the cars along a performance track, leading to various bonuses and scoring opportunities.
Note that you are required to take all of your actions (except in a few exceptional circumstances), meaning you can’t, for example, choose to not push another train forward by ending your move sequence early.
On the topic of mandatory actions, an interesting aspect of the game is how money is handled: you accumulate it via certain actions and need to spend it during others. However, as soon as you have 10 ‘Rupees,’ you’re forced to convert that to an investment token, thus resetting your available money to 0—i.e., gaining too much money suddenly can compromise your ability to pay for subsequent actions. Of course, you’re not losing everything, as investment tokens do have value, as will be explained shortly; you just have to take care to optimise the use of your money.
After everyone has played their 6 cards, the administration phase starts. Players gain deal tiles based on how much cargo they have on ships; these deal tiles contribute towards final scoring. The number of crates on ships determines the order of play in the second turn, too. Players also collect money from cargo in warehouses (scaled by its market value—one of the many parameters that can be manipulated during actions) as well as smaller amounts for freight still on trains. As money comes in, players will accumulate more investment tokens, which can then be used to place markers on the investment grid, leading to more scoring points.
At the end of the second turn, assets, deals, investments and position on the performance track are all converted to points, and the winner is the person with most.
An automa-based solo mode is also available, in which you compete against a deck of solo cards known as Major Banarjee, either as a beat-your-high-score game or competing to beat ‘him’ on a set of challenges. There’s a multi-game solo campaign too, where your performance in earlier games affects the goals for later stages, though there’s no sense of the game becoming more challenging as you progress.
Final Words
Movers & Shakers is a simple-looking game which hides a lot of thinkiness. While there isn’t a lot of variability in the load and movement cards, the slot bonuses and interactions between players add a lot of variety, making this a very playable game. And, as noted earlier, there’s a complex web of interactions between the game’s many parameters, making it an interesting puzzle to choose the best option at any stage.
It’s also rather pretty, especially the deluxified components—though, of course, you don’t need those at all! The campaign page includes a section comparing the retail edition to the Gamefound versions—no pictures of retail components, though, just text. But probably more important than the deluxification is the release date: the crowdfunded versions will be available in November, while retail went live in February. There’s also the price aspect, with retail being cheaper, and don’t forget that’s the recommended price only, not necessarily what you’ll pay in a store, not to mention additional postage fees and potentially taxes if you choose the crowdfunding route. As with all crowdfunding projects too, there’s less risk if you wait for retail. But for anyone who needs time to think, late pledge is open until March…
Finally, if you want a feel for how the game plays, it’s available on BoardGameArena, and much more information can be found on the Gamefound page, including a link to a draft rulebook.
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
