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Georgia Southern University history professor Robert Batchelor was doing book research at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library in 2008 when he came across a reference in a text to an ancient 17th century Chinese trading map.
He asked the curator of Chinese collections if he knew where the map might be, and soon they were unrolling a dusty document, called the Selden Map, that hadn’t been touched in at least a century and had long since been forgotten in the annals of early trade and globalization.
“Immediately I saw these routes on it, and I was really excited,” Batchelor said. “There were these systems of Chinese shipping routes written in ancient regional dialect more than 300 years ago.”
The find gained a lot of attention, especially among fellow historians, geographers and scholars, and is being toured around East Asia as the earliest surviving Chinese merchant map of that era.
The discovery not only illustrated East Asia’s critical role in early shipping but also became the basis for a
board game Batchelor co-created with his wife, Sari Gilbert, an interactive gaming design professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
“This map rewrites history, telling us a really different story about early globalization than we had known,” Gilbert said. “About a year after he found it, I said we should think about doing a game around it.“
From that discussion Gilbert and Batchelor ran a game design workshop at SCAD consisting of 45 people in five teams from which the foundations for Fujian Trader started to form.
Eventually the group dwindled and Gilbert began designing the game in earnest, identifying 24 of 60 ports on the map to use as strategic routes in the game. Working through the strategy and designing the components for play has been a three-year process, Gilbert said.
The object of Fujian Trader is for players to acquire wealth and build trading networks across the Ming Empire. To do so, players can sell rice, iron and silk from ports they control in return for silver and greater political power.
“In the game, the players take on the role of merchant Chinese families in the year 1628, and they send their ships out to get the best exchange rate in order to buy more ports,” Gilbert said.
Players must do this before the Manchu invasion of 1644, represented by a dragon piece, effectively ending the game and marking the end of the Ming dynasty.
There are also event cards that introduce challenges and obstacles, like a rice famine or a new trading emporium, as well as fortune cards with traditional Chinese signs, which Chinese merchants at the time would’ve used to try to make business decisions.
“It takes about two hours … and has aspects of Monopoly, Risk and Settlers of Catan,” Gilbert said. “It’s designed to be a gateway strategy game, so anyone who has played those games will be able to play this.”
Gilbert is no stranger to the industry, having spent more than 20 years in educational games and interactive entertainment. She began her career in California, developing the top-selling JumpStart educational games of the late ‘90s.
Gilbert said it was important to both of them to keep the game as authentic to the map and time period as possible, including references to fiscal and political turmoil of the era.
“We were really committed to not contradicting history,” Gilbert said.
The duo are currently trying to raise close to $40,000 on Kickstarter to manufacture a first printing of the game, but they have hopes of getting the game out to a wider audience, including educators and historians.
So far they’ve raised about 45 percent of their goal with eight days remaining. Gilbert and Batchelor say they’re also in talks with gaming companies and hope to eventually make the game into a digital version.
Besides being just fun to play, Batchelor said, the game shows the significant role that East Asia played in early globalization.
He’s even written a book on his research called “London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1689,” using the map to illustrate how London went from a regional to global trading hub thanks to these early routes.
Batchelor said Savannah is a logical place for this game to take root because it shares a cultural heritage as a port city, one which has the same latitude as Shanghai and was considered in the 18th century as a possible substitute for Chinese trade.
“What this game allows you to do is read a 17th century map that articulates a lot of the disputes and politics going on today,” said Batchelor, citing present-day conflicts over the South China Sea and Taiwan.
“As you play it, you learn this geography, you get a sense of the place and it enables you to engage in global events in a much more informed way,” he said.
To learn more about Fujian Trader, visit the Kickstarter page at kck.st/17geBzC