An Infamous Traffic: Second Edition

Explore the dramatic rise of the opium trade in 19th-century China in this cutthroat business game from Cole Wehrle, the award-winning designer of Root, Pax Pamir, and Arcs. 

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The Argument

An Infamous Traffic is the next chapter in our series of games on the British Empire. With these games, we’ve explored the rise of the British Empire from a variety of vantage points. Pax Pamir examined how imperialism was often shaped by local political realities. John Company looked at the institutional and social dimensions of empire and how non-state actors such as the East India Company incubated some of the worst imperial excesses of the modern period.

An Infamous Traffic focuses on the entrepreneurs who built their fortunes by evading the wishes of the world’s most powerful empires, sparking a massive drug epidemic, and shifting the currents of global commerce in ways that are still felt today. 

The game begins in the 1820s. Opium has been illicitly traded in China for centuries for both recreational and medicinal use. The drug is one of the only effective painkillers available, and, in response to global demand, the East India Company has begun monopolizing its production in India. With a new supply of opium established, free traders see the possibility of lucrative profits. 

At this time, the drug is strictly prohibited within China. Early discussions about its regulation and taxation have yielded increasingly draconian enforcement policies. However, the Qing government has grown dysfunctional under the Daoguang Emperor. The southern coastline is rife with pirates and smugglers. Though the East India Company dare not trade the drug directly within China, it’s clear that others might be able to do so without provoking a response. That’s where the players come in.

In the game, you take the role of an enterprising merchant, eager to take advantage of the clear demand for opium in Qing China. To do this, players will travel between London, India, and China, and work to build a global network of business contacts who can supply and ship the drug. 

The opium trade caused social and political instability on a catastrophic scale, putting players on a collision course with Qing officials like Lin Zexu who were tasked with policing the trade. Historically, the blowback from these enforcement measures sparked British outrage that led to the First and Second Opium Wars and the broader opening of China. But players will be able to explore other possibilities as well, from a successful Taiping state to a strictly regulated opium trade backed by a resurgent Qing government.

An Infamous Traffic offers players a clear-eyed assessment of a difficult period of history that saw a huge range of people engage in the opium trade, from well-meaning philanthropists and scholars to cutthroat drug dealers. Most of the firms represented in the game are still operating in some way, forming the foundation of some of the largest commercial fortunes in the world today. This is a period we haven’t left behind, and it’s incumbent upon us to understand the consequences of our connection with the past. 

Gameplay

An Infamous Traffic is a deep, interactive historical game. The design harkens back to old-school business games, with a straightforward set of rules that gets out of your way. The game is easy to set up and can usually be completed in under two hours.

Over the course of the game, players will develop a network of business connections and a portfolio of enterprises to profit from the demand for opium in China.

The game is centered on creating supply chains. Each region of China will have some amount of demand, indicated by the sum of the dice in that region. In order to profit from this demand, players will need to fill supply chains in the region using their enterprise tiles.

Each tile has a value, indicating how much profit the tile will bring if the supply chain can be completed. A chain is complete when all of its spaces are full and the total profit is equal to or less than the demand. If players overshoot, they will have to spend time adjusting prices or finding other ways to increase demand.

It is often impossible for one player to complete a supply chain alone, so players will need to work together. But you’ll have to be careful too. Deals are rarely equal, and if you get too greedy, your rivals may attempt to undercut your position.

Of course, it takes money to make money. All of the work of setting up supply chains requires capital. Players will need to carefully manage their company’s line of credit. Ideally your profits will cover the debt you took to secure a foothold in Canton, but as the game continues, you’ll find other obligations threatening your bottom line.

Each decade you’ll compete in the London Season with the other players, securing lucrative offices, a house in a fashionable part of London, and maybe a wife from a prominent family. But all of those things cost money too. With each decade the expenses will pile up and your new domestic obligations will shrink your business tableau.

But in the end, all of your wealth is only a means to an end. What matters is the status you’ve secured back home.

The first edition of An Infamous Traffic was released over a decade ago. We have been working on the second edition for years and, at this point, the game has enjoyed nearly a year of active testing. We are currently in the final stages of balancing the game’s cards and adjusting the event system for historical fidelity and strategic depth.

Because of the game’s subject matter, we are unable to print the game in China. Instead, we will be printing it in Europe and relying on multiple partners to supply the hard components. This extra logistical complexity means that we want to minimize risk where we can and are coming to Kickstarter a little later in the development process than usual for us. We anticipate that the design will be finished this winter and be produced early next year.

This extra time has been good for the game’s solo mode. Once again, we are joined by the amazing Richard Wilkins, who has been working on a fully featured design that will allow players to experience the full scope of the game. This element of the design is in active development, and we will have more to share in the coming months.

Play Now

As with our previous releases, we provide robust print-and-play support for our games during development and after their release. Check out the links below to find the rules and play the game on a range of platforms.

With An Infamous Traffic, we are continuing our commitment to creating games that are free and widely accessible. All of the print files for our historical games are available under Creative Commons license BY–NC–SA 4.0. Anyone can use, remix, and share the game, so long as they do not use it for commercial purposes. 

A New Edition

The first edition of An Infamous Traffic was designed for Hollandspiele’s print-on-demand publishing model and was only ever available in the United States. This new edition will be produced and assembled on a large scale and will feature numerous upgrades to each and every component, including turned wooden pawns, a double-sided mounted board, and deluxe wooden tiles that have been doubled in size for easier handling and readability.

An Infamous Traffic will be illustrated by the award-winning illustrator Bella Han. Bella’s illustrations will help create a unifying aesthetic based on period artwork. Her work will be supplemented by Janek Lipiński, who did the iconography and portrait illustrations for John Company and was instrumental in developing the look of that game. Of course, we’ll be using lots of period illustrations as well! 

The second edition of An Infamous Traffic has been built from the ground up to provide players with a richer tactical and strategic challenge, while being easier to teach and play.

The game still uses a simple action system, but players must now contend with the central logistical challenge facing any business in the age of sail: you can only be in one place at a time. Each round, players take turns from left to right on the action row, and they can only take actions based on their current location. So, if you spend your years developing a ship-building network in England, you’re giving up time in China making lucrative deals. 

However, you will need to choose when to travel carefully, as traveling will change the turn order. Traveling away from London toward India and China will make you go later in the turn order, but if players are already in the place you’re traveling to, you will go after them.

Players now sculpt their strategic position over the course of the game by cultivating a tableau of business contacts. Each player starts with one of 12 identities—you might play as disaffected ex-writers of the East India Company, a banking family based in Baghdad, powerful scions of Indian merchant families, or upstart Brits looking for the next opportunity. Over the course of the game, you’ll expand your business network. You might curry favor with a young William Gladstone or entreat the Jagat Seths to invest in your fledgling firm.

The second edition features a dramatic new treatment of the event system, which is resolved quickly and features a much more robust picture of Qing China’s internal politics. Players may find the Daoguang Emperor amenable to a heavily taxed opium trade or limited enforcement. The Taiping Civil War now receives a full portrayal as well. It might spring to life in the remote provinces and topple the entire regime, or simply fizzle out. 

First Impressions

Campaign Events

Over the next month, we’ll be sharing lots of videos, podcasts, and streams about our work on the new edition of An Infamous Traffic. All of our videos will be featured on both the Buried Giant and Wehrlegig YouTube channels, and we’ll be linking to our media partners in this section. Take a look at the schedule below to see what’s on the horizon. 

Shipping

This Project is Customs Friendly: Wehrlegig covers the duty payments and customs fees for backers who receive our games in the US, EU, UK, Canada, and Australia (mandatory VAT and shipping fees are still applied after the campaign in our BackerKit Pledge Manager). All other countries or regions may be subject to additional customs fees upon delivery. 

Our fulfillment partners for this project are Quartermaster Logistics, Fulfillment Europe, Spiral Galaxy, and VR Distribution. All orders to Asia will be fulfilled from Fulfillment Europe. 

Retail Pledge: If you run a local game store and want to support this project, head over to buriedgiant.shop/wholesale to sign up and submit your wholesale request. We’ve consolidated the Wehrlegig wholesale backend into Buried Giant’s retail portal. You may need to make a new account, but we’ll be offering all our games directly through Buried Giant moving forward. Feel free to pledge during this campaign if you want to follow along, and we’ll be sure to credit your wholesale account after the campaign if your wholesale account email matches your Kickstarter account email. Feel free to email Drew if you have any questions about our wholesale terms: support@buriedgiant.com

About Us

At Wehrlegig Games our objective is simple: publish beautiful games with historical themes that treat their subjects and their players seriously. These are games that make arguments and encourage discussion. They don’t shy away from difficult subjects.

We know the audience for such games is limited. In order for us to produce games up to our standards, we rely primarily on a direct sales model. Our games are not designed for traditional distribution or retail channels. The vast majority of copies produced will be sent to Kickstarter backers or people buying through our store. This means we can spend many more resources on the game’s physical production without having to worry about retail viability.

This year, Wehrlegig joined up with Buried Giant Studios. We still exercise total creative control of our projects, but are now able to deepen our support for our existing titles and take on even more ambitious projects.

Cole Wehrle is a game designer and researcher who also serves as the Creative Director at Buried Giant Studios and lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Outside of his history games, he is best known for designing Root, Oath, and Arcs. Before working in the board-game industry, Cole earned his PhD at the University of Texas, where he worked on nineteenth-century novels and the British Empire.

Richard Wilkins is a British board-game designer (Deckers, Renegade) and collaborator often engaged in designing and developing solo rules (Pax Pamir, John Company, Molly House, and most recently Oath). You may better know him as Ricky Royal from the Box of Delights YouTube channel, where Ricky has been demonstrating how board games play for the past 15 years, predominantly to a growing community of solo gamers. As well as a hobbyist in the board-game industry, Ricky is a graduate of Computer Science and a software professional of 30 years, with a love for the countryside, his family, and dog (though not necessarily in that order). 

Bella Han is an illustrator based in New York City. Her work is known for intricate linework, expansive compositions, and imaginative visual storytelling, often drawing inspiration from nature, history, and fictional worlds. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, Booooooom Illustration Awards, and the World Illustration Awards. Through densely constructed scenes and subtle narratives, she creates fantastical yet grounded worlds that invite viewers to slow down, look closely, and discover stories within the details. You can see more of Bella’s work by following her on Instagram.

Janek Lipiński is an illustrator and designer based in Warsaw. Janek designed the family portrait illustrations and the game’s icons for John Company, and worked with Cole to establish the game’s visual look and much of its graphic design. While working as a front-end developer, Janek’s work extends from graphic design to watercolor painting. You can see more of his art on display here.

In addition, this project will be amply supported by Wehrlegig co-founder Drew Wehrle and the broader Buried Giant staff. Pati Hyun will be serving as lead graphic designer and art director. Joshua Yearsley will be providing editorial and usability support. Cardner Babakitis will be shepherding the title through its complex production. And the whole team will be helping with the game’s development and playtesting.