You’d be forgiven for thinking that Container is less an actual playable board game and more a parody of the mundane, dryly economical themes adopted by the tabletop hobby’s more esoteric offerings.
After all, it’s a board game called Container, about shipping containers, with a drab image of a container-stacked boat on its cover. Those tightly-packed boxes leave little room for imagination. Its Jumbo Edition, released in 2018 for its tenth anniversary, breathlessly announces the “exciting” addition of an investment bank. You couldn’t write a finer satire.
But this is no Cones of Dunshire. Yes, Container is literally a board game about shipping containers. It’s also one of the most singular, thrilling gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
At the heart of Container’s masterful gameplay design is its player-driven closed economy. Unlike the effectively limitless supply of money in games such as Monopoly, which periodically inject money from a mysterious external supply, the cash in the hands of players and a central bank at the start of Container is all the money there will be.