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The Storehouses of Huánuco Pampa
Four years, four days of road, and a harvest that will not tell you its size until it is in.
Huánuco, around 1500. Five hundred stone storehouses on a hillside above the road from Cusco to Quito, a valley that grows more than it can eat, and a puna three days above it where the nights are cold enough to make food that lasts. Relief is a loan, and it comes back in a good year.
How it plays
Call up the mit’a
Labour was owed in rotation, and the state fed those performing it. So a workforce is an appetite as well as a pair of hands: summon more than you can feed and the storehouses empty into the people carrying from them.
Carry, before it spoils
The surplus is in the valley, the frost is on the puna three days above it, and the storehouses are between them. A caravan carries so much, so far, in a season — and the harvest does not wait for the caravan.
Decide what will still be food
A storehouse full of potatoes in March is not a reserve. Once a year, in the frost and nowhere but the puna, you choose how much to put beyond the reach of a bad year you cannot yet see — and how much to leave with people who are hungry now.
The real thing
This game is about a real place and real people. These are objects they made, photographed by the museums that hold them — not our drawings of them.
An Inca kero, the paired drinking beaker used to seal an agreement. Two were always used at once: hospitality was how the state made an obligation binding, and that is what the storehouses paid for.
Kero (beaker) — Inca artist(s) · 1400–1535 CE · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 2004.212 · CC0. See it at the museum
An Inca tunic. Cloth was the empire’s most valuable manufactured good, stored in quantity and given as payment — one of the commodities the player moves.
Tunic — Inca artist(s) · 1400–1535 CE · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, 2017.674 · CC0. See it at the museum