I recently lucked into a copy of Freemarket.  All I knew about the game before reading it was that it was created by Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen, that it was sold in a box, that prints of it were rare (and therefore expensive), and that the game contained considerable amounts of jargon.  That last fact I gleaned from an old talk that Vincent Baker gave about Apocalypse World, in which he said that the discussion on the Forge surrounding Freemarket informed his decision about how much jargon to include in his own game.
 
With that handful of facts, I approached the game.  From the box cover, I gathered that the game had something of the cyberpunk aesthetic, as it presented a futuristic cityscape teeming with people and neon signs.  Within the box is a landscape-oriented manual, 150 pages long and in vibrant blue, yellow, purple, pink, and green.  There are 6 individually boxed decks of card, five identical “challenge decks” and one thin “technology deck.”  There are four thick cardboard sheets, each with eight round tokens to be punched out.  There are four completed character sheets on glossy 8x10 paper, a pad of full-color character sheets, and a pad of paper labeled “MRCZ and Backup Profile.”  All this fits snugly in the quality box, and together they give the box considerable heft.

​Now a look at the fictional content of the game. The setting is the “Stanford Torus-style space station parked at the L5 lagrange point of Titan and Saturn” (4), commonly known as Freemarket.  The station houses roughly 80,000 people, though it was originally built for 10,000, reconfigured to fit 40,000 comfortably, and then modified once again with state-of-the-art technology to its current build.  The station is packed, but no one goes without. In fact, Freemarket is a utopia, an anarchic one at that. “There are no laws in our society, yet there is no crime and no death” (4).  A computer with artificial intelligence, named The Aggregate, runs everything smoothly and efficiently, maintaining not only the physical space, but monitoring the physical needs of the inhabitants, known as Freemers, as well. Each Freemer has a “key”: “a nanological digital interface implanted into the nervous system,” allowing “communication with the station and other users.”  Moreover, “it monitors your health and your flow.  It runs all the software you need to interact with station technology” (5). You see that mention of “flow”? That’s the currency aboard Freemarket.  On the station, there is no money, and every Freemer gets food and a bed to sleep in. The economy is not financial, but reputation-based, a kind of social capital.  When you make friends, give gifts, and find other ways to demonstrate you are an asset to the community, The Aggregate increases your flow.  When other Freemers complain about you, cease to be your friend, or you act destructively toward the community, you lose flow.
 
You can use your increased flow to better your reputation, but to improve your living quarters and your access to station resources, you need to team up with others. Like-minded individuals can form a group with a defined purpose.  Once that group registers with The Aggregate, they are assigned some basic equipment and room to operate.  As you prove that you can do what you set out to do, and that you can provide services to the community, and that you are attractive to other Freemers who then want to join your cause, the Aggregate will award you more space and more resources.  Those organizations at the top tier can have as many as 256 members, individual living quarters, and top-of-the-line equipment to work with. If you want to live a more luxurious life than the common Freemer, this is the only way to do it.  These groups are called Multiregional Cultural Zones, or MRCZs, pronounced individually as “mercy” or collectively as “mercies.”
 
Obviously, the world of Freemarket is placed in the future.  We know from the manual that Mars is settled (mostly in underground facilities), that there is a base on the moon called “Liberty Station.”  We have regular access to “nanological” material (called “smart” material), which allows us to create body enhancements that interface with computers, like the “key” installed in each Freemer.  Bodies can be built from scratch, and living creatures can be “printed” from this smart material.  Even our memories can be broken into data, and new “memories” can be constructed entirely from data without the need of an experience.  These advances make death lose its meaning.  The Aggregate keeps a backup of your profile, and if you die, your body and profile can be reestablished.  Another advantage of being in a top tier MRCZ is that more of your profile is backed up, and it is done more frequently.
 
That’s the fictional world that the game is set in.  My summary may be long for a review, but it is short for an RPG with a specific setting.  Crane and Sorensen developed the setting to the exact extent it is needed in order to play the game they wanted to design. Once they set those hard parameters, they leave everything else to the players. You can probably tell just from reading my summary of the setting what characters consist of and what they do during play. Each player creates a Freemer, and the play group together creates a MRCZ. You can make that MRCZ about anything you want: you can be a team of negotiators, a team of cultural influencers, a team of farmers, data hackers, singers, or artists. There is no limit to the kinds of stories you can tell as long as you play within the utopian construction of Freemarket.
 
I mentioned earlier that the art on the box had a cyberpunk aesthetic, and there are indeed several cyberpunk elements, but the game is certainly not cyberpunk. One of the key elements of a cyberpunk story is oppressive and competing corporations that our heroes fight against. When Freemarket is called a utopia it is not ironic. The rules state specifically that The Aggregate cannot become an oppressive actor with an agenda of its own. Printers can’t create human-animal hybrid monsters. Characters who do not contribute positively to the world will find their flow zeroed out and are likely to be voted off the station, never to return. No, this is a utopia for real, and you are playing to find out how your PCs and their MRCZ can fare in this world.
 
The rulebook never actually says what you are “playing to find out.” I’ve borrowed that phrase, of course, from Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World. Apocalypse World and Freemarket were in development at the same time and were published in the same year: 2010. It may just be a coincidence, but the mechanics in both games create a similar play experience, which makes me think that the designers or both games were trying to accomplish similar design goals, each with a vastly different approach.
 
While both games are set in the future, the worlds couldn’t be more different. One is a utopia, while the other is dystopic. One is a world in which all your needs are provided for, while the other is defined primarily as a world of scarcity. But after that, both games lean in similar directions. Both games, for example, attempt to create extended campaign play that is driven by the desires and actions of the characters, rather than by the machinations of the GM. Freemarket achieves this goal by using MRCZs as a way to ensure that all the PCs have shared interests and ambitions.  Through character creation (and MRCZ creation), the players must come to an agreement about what this particular game will be about. Then, once everyone is on the same page, the GM (called the “superuser” in Freemarket) starts introducing “trouble” for the characters to respond to. The system for creating that trouble is neat. At the time of character creations, players give their characters a number of long-term memories and one short-term memory. Each memory must have three of the following five elements: “a person, a MRCZ or group, a place, an object (or piece of technology), or an action” (20). The superuser takes all these memories created at the beginning of play and takes one element from a memory of each player and brings them together in a new event.  So, for example, I might take character A’s uncle from one of their memories, and join it with character B’s pet monkey from one of their memories along with a stage performance taken from one of character C’s memories.  Using these elements, I can start play by having A’s uncle approach the group hoping to borrow B’s monkey for an upcoming talent contest.  The NPC has something they want from the PCs, and the NPC’s interest necessarily involves at least two and up to all the PCs. Sessions begin and end with the making, erasing, and utilization of memories, so the players can always shape what will be a focus of play by curating what elements their memories provide.  The superuser, meanwhile, can’t and needn’t make big overarching plans, forcing them to always construct events and play from what is happening right now.
 
Freemarket’s mechanics are tightly constructed. Each gear of the machine has its place and interacts precisely with its neighboring parts. Conflict is resolved using the decks of cards I mentioned earlier. To explain the ins and outs of conducting these “challenges” would take me more space than my summary of the setting, so I won’t go into any detail, but the challenges consist of drawing cards from your challenge deck and scoring points; the player with the most points at the end of the challenge wins. On your turn, there are a variety of moves you can make, letting you draw more cards, or turn non-scoring cards into scoring cards, or removing your opponent’s cards, or drawing from the special technology deck. The challenge process uses strategy, but not so much that it would be offputting to someone who prefers non-strategic play. In the process of playing out the challenge, every part of your character on your character sheet influences your options and your final outcome. As I said, it’s a tight design and well thought-out.
 
For all the sharpness of the design, I don’t find myself inspired to bring the game to my friends for playing. Part of it is that the world isn’t particularly exciting to me. When I look at the range of different stories we can play out, I don’t feel my blood rise in the heat of excitement. Another thing that falls flat for me is the narrative side of challenges. As a card game, challenges are cool. As a narrative-building moment in the game they are less interesting. In the end, the only part that really matters is the outcome, so the narrative back and forth that gets stapled onto the card play runs the risk of being uninteresting or unimportant, or both. The third aspect of the game that dowses my enthusiasm is the vagueness of what it is that we’re playing to find out. The cycle structured by the rules is that you push to improve your MRCZ tier so that you can improve your accommodations and resources as you become a greater part of life on the station.  That progression smacks of the expand-or-die aspect of capitalism, ironically.  True, you can just stop expanding, and you won’t die—but the game will.  Without the quest for expansion, there is no unified desire driving your group and making them a team. The trip along the way may be exciting, but where we’re going is not.
 
There’s a lot about the game that I didn’t get to touch: the economies of flow and data, the 14 experiences and the types of stories they suggest, the use of memories in character development. If you have questions, I’ll be happy to answer them. If you have thoughts—either from your own experiences with the game or not--I’d love to hear them!