Junta

You see, senor, in the beautiful Republica de los Bananas, life is cheap and times are hard. Each player controls one of the great families of the nation, and the important government jobs -- El Presidente, Minister of Internal Security, and the leadership of the three army brigades, air force, and navy -- are shared out among them. The ultimate objective of the game is to have the biggest Swiss bank account at the end; each turn, El Presidente draws a fixed number of bills from the money deck, and announces a budget for the coming year.

One of the joys of attending a convention like GenCon or Origins is encountering wonderful games that you might not ever see otherwise. That was my experience in 1979, when I came across Vincent Tsao's Junta, a little two-color game packaged in a plastic bag in which you played one of the leading families in a nation subject to coups and ruled by a junta.

Not many years later, I was running game development and publishing for West End Games, and we acquired the rights to Junta; Ben Grossman, with help from Eric Goldberg, reworked the game to turn the somewhat dry first edition into one that drips with color, so much so that players often find themselves speaking with phony Spanish accents.

You see, senor, in the beautiful Republica de los Bananas, life is cheap and times are hard. Each player controls one of the great families of the nation, and the important government jobs -- El Presidente, Minister of Internal Security, and the leadership of the three army brigades, air force, and navy -- are shared out among them. The ultimate objective of the game is to have the biggest Swiss bank account at the end; each turn, El Presidente draws a fixed number of bills from the money deck, and announces a budget for the coming year.

Bills are printed with 1 to 3 million pesos each, so only El Presidente knows exactly how much money has filled the coffers of La Republica this year, and he is free to share them out -- or not share them, as he wishes. However, any budget must pass through the Chamber of Deputies, and players may use various voting cards to support or oppose the budget; if it fails, El Presidente keeps the cash, but this creates a "coup excuse," and in such a case, the army brigades are likely to leave their barracks and converge on the Presidential Palace.

Meantime, each turn, the Minister of Internal Security may be attempting to assassinate an enemy of the regime (or, for that matter, El Presidente, if the Minister feels it's high time for a shift in power), while others may also be attempting assassinations through the play of cards.

The trick, as El Presidente, of course, is to keep enough of the other players in your good graces to rack up as much money as you can before you are, inevitably, deposed. And indeed, quite often someone who has never served as El Presidente will win, by being useful, and perhaps the second big earner, to a succession of regimes.

Junta is thus a very funny boardgame -- but unlike many humorous such, it's also a game where strategy makes a difference -- as does diplomacy, since this is very much a game of persuasion.

In Junta, each coup is a mini-wargame; the army brigades are powerful, El Presidente controls a small but potentially important presidential guard, the Minister of Internal Security controls four widely-scattered police units, and other players may use cards to have units spring up on the board -- striking workers, middle-class militias, rioting students and the like. And, of course, the air force and navy commanders can bring in air strikes, or shell the city; indeed, since the navy commander is the weakest position in the game, the player who fills it is almost always on the outs with El Presidente, and coups usually begin with what we always referred to as "the ceremonial shelling of the Presidential Palace."

Which brings us to perhaps Junta's major flaw; each time a coup occurs, it can take perhaps 15 minutes to resolve, and in principle, there can be a coup every turn. Too many coups produce tedium. As a consequence, I recommend playing Junta with a house rule: If the outcome of a coup is obvious, at any point, forgo playing out the rest of it, and simply go to the execution of the rebels.

There are games where I've had more fun than I had playing Junta -- but not a lot of them.

It's out now in another edition from West End Games (an entirely different company, with different ownership, from the company I worked for, having gone through two bankruptcies); it's the same game as the one I worked on, but suffers two minor lacks by comparison. The new cover (seen above) is no where near as good as that of the previous edition, and the designers are not credited, something that understandably irks my buddy Eric Goldberg. Still worth playing, of course.