Tycoon game explores the highs and lows of marijuana business

The popular Tycoon games have a loyal following, and the latest instalment takes gamers into some uncharted territory.

Once you’ve grown your product, you need to get it to potential customers across the city — all of whom have different needs.

According to popular culture, being a drug kingpin is a one-way ticket to money, beautiful people, power and hedonism on a scale Roman emperors could only dream of.

According to the law as it currently stands, being a drug kingpin is a one-way ticket to spending many years detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure in a concrete room with no internet, on account of drugs generally being illegal.

Of course, one of the great things about video games is you can do things that would normally be illegal in a safe virtual environment — whether it’s reckless use of automatic weapons, driving spectacularly dangerously, playing with magic, or selling hallucinogenic drugs to people for fun and profit.

The latter is the focus of Weedcraft Inc, developed by Vile Monarch and published by Devolver exclusively on Steam for PC — and it does something few games manage, namely combining an intelligent political discussion on a topical issue with a decent (albeit uncomplicated) tycoon game.

Some of your business partners, associates and rivals can be quite … colourful.

The name of the game is to become successful growing and selling marijuana in America, a country where some states have legalised it for recreational use, others have legalised it for medical purposes and other states still have it on the verboten list.

At its heart, Weedcraft Inc is a solid tycoon game covering several aspects of running a business. You must grow your product, selecting strains your customers want, making sure it has all the right nutrients and care, then you must find a way to get it to buyers, all while keeping off the police radar (assuming you’re breaking bad and taking the illegal route).

It’s not particularly complex — we’re not talking about Victoria II or Master of Orion-levels of number-crunching and spreadsheet simulation here — but there ends up being quite a bit going on, especially later in the game when you can research your own strains of product to create unique-effect combinations to appeal to specific markets.

There are two scenarios included at launch “Growing Up” and “Highs and Laws”. The first one casts you as an MBA student who returns home after your dad dies of cancer and discovers your sibling has been growing marijuana illegally as medicine. The two of you decide to turn it into an actual business — legal or otherwise. The second casts you as someone who has just got out of prison after a lengthy sentence for drug-related activities and is getting back into the game — now legally — as a way to make a living and use your skills.

Maintaining the perfect conditions and quality control for your plants is a big part of the game.

One of the surprising aspects of the excellent 2005 book Freakonomics is most drug dealers make approximately no money and are often living with their parents, and this is reflected in some aspects of Weedcraft Inc. Sure, you might have a good crop and make some money selling it, but then the power bills, wages and research costs arrive, and suddenly, you’re hoping that low-effort, low-grade plant matures soon. I was surprised how easily wage costs (even at low levels) caused expenses to skyrocket

The game gives you the option to play 100 per cent legally as well — you can buy a licence (medical or recreational, depending on the setting) and be an upstanding businessperson, paying taxes (the government takes a cut of every sale) and having access to new markets including medical patients. It’s even possible to lobby for the law to change so recreational use is legalised, allowing you to work totally openly and above board.

You can handle all aspects of growing and selling your product yourself, or you can hire staff to help. Researching new strains helps introduce new effects that will appeal to different customer bases — some want a tropical taste, while others prefer pine, and some want a floral taste, others want something to help them sleep, another group wants more energy, a third wants to be creatively inspired … you get the idea.

You can influence the conditions for your plants by acquiring different equipment for your growhouse, which again raises questions of whether you want quantity or quality — each piece of kit occupies the same space as one plant.

As your business expands, you set up shop in different cities as well, and by the latter stages of each campaign, you’ve got business in two or three cities, and juggling them all can be quite a challenge.

You’re not the only one trying to get into the marijuana sales market either, with competitors also vying for the top spot.

What’s frustrating is that your rivals frequently find ways to mess with you (demanding money, increasing their competition, messing with your stuff, damaging your brand etc), but you don’t have a readily available way to retaliate. You can’t refurbish your dispensary to increase price thresholds, you can’t demand they give you money or else, you can’t tell them to back off and stop pushing their product in your market, and you can’t send hired goons around to break their plants and equipment with baseball bats and crowbars.

If you network and invest enough time getting on the right side of the police, it’s sometimes possible to ask for a favour and have the police raid one of your opponents, but even if you eventually manage to drive a rival off, someone else shows up eventually, and you’re right back where you were before.

Some of your customers will have special orders, which are harder to fill but have big pay-offs.

Your employees are an ingrateful lot too — sometimes they’ll come to you and say they’ve been approached by a rival and ask for a better offer to stay, and you’ll go “Sure, here’s six months’ salary in one lump sum”, and they’ll get offended and storm off in a huff.

The game lacks some polish, but I was impressed about how it tackled a complex subject in a mature way without resorting to B-grade stoner comedy or sanctimonious finger-wagging.

It has some quirky humorous elements to it — one of the characters you encounter is a marijuana streamer who uses the persona of “The Duke of Weedchestershire” — but is careful to avoid descending into parody or satire and generally plays things straight, reflecting the idea it is a business simulator and not Towelie And Friends: The Computer Game.

It’s worth noting throughout the game your character is never depicted smoking their product, and the sales are all to adults, and it doesn’t take long before the “Tee hee, I’m a Weed Tsar!” element wears off and you’re thinking “OK, I’ve got 350g of Maui Wowie coming maturing this week which I can sell in the party district, and the week after that I’ve got 210g of Reggie for sale through my licensed dispensary at the hotel, and that experimental strain of Tropicana Delight should be ready at the start of next month, so we’ll see how that goes at the market — but will that keep us going until the next lot of bills is due?” — in other words, it’s all about business.

Unless you’re absolutely and 100 per cent opposed to marijuana, Weedcraft Inc provides a different way of looking at tycoon games and offers some intelligent discussion starters on a complex topic.

The two scenarios will keep you busy for a while, and although this isn’t likely to be a “forever game”, if you’re an adult who likes tycoon or strategy games, it’s well worth making the time to play, especially if you’re looking for something a bit thought-provoking.