Food Chain Magnate - First edition, fourth printing (2016)

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It requires that you be able to observe or anticipate what others will be doing. You can’t go into this route by playing solitaire. But then again, this game is highly interactive, and you’ll be ignoring your opponents are your peril. Food Chain Magnate is a challenging strategy game about building a fast food chain. The focus is on building your business using a card-based (human) resource management system. Players compete on a variable city map through purchasing, marketing and sales, and a labor market for key staff members. The game can be played by 2-5 serious players in 2-4 hours. Theme(s) On the first turn, each player places one of their three restaurants on the board, adhering to a few simple constraints. Sometimes, something unexpected happens: time comes to a stand-still, and all of a sudden the demand for transportation is completely different... but you cannot let this happen too often, as the time-space continuum will rupture and the universe will collapse, thus ending the game. Turn 2: Hire a Management Trainee, Train him into a Junior Vice President, and get the First to Train milestone so you don’t have to pay that salary.

Find a location close to customers– Being closer to your customers decreases the amount of effort you need to put in to generate a sale. Rather than spend time hiring Pricing Managers and making sure you have space in your org chart for them, you can focus on higher priorities like finding other ways to undermine your competition. One good approach to take is to gun for Guru or Coach. These guys allow you to tech up and catch up to anyone who’s got their engine going. Here’s how you do it: Within this Trainer-first paradigm, there are two branches that you can conceivably take. Use the Trainer with the goal of getting a Guru or CoachFood Chain Magnate is the first breakthrough hit for Splotter, a two-man operation from the Netherlands known for their economic games. They have released some of the most intriguing games in the genre like Roads & Boats, a love-letter to logistics, and Greed Incorporated, a game about taking companies down from the inside for personal gain. There is a myth that it is a complex game. That isn’t really true – the rules of the game are actually very straight-forward. It is however difficult to reliably win against equally experienced players, but that difficulty comes from trying to predict the strategies and actions of the other players.

One aspect of Food Chain Magnate I particularly enjoy is that it’s deeply satirical. From the design to the illustrations, it paints a cynical picture of the fast food business and the mid-century American culture that gave birth to it.Response: This becomes more of a cat and mouse game where you need to out-think and outmaneuver your opponent. Maybe you purposely leave some spaces in your org chart empty so you go last and see what others are doing. Maybe you spot a weakness from your opponent’s side and start bombarding the demand landscape with something you know your opponent can’t produce. The board is randomly created by the players from a series of neighbourhood tiles, with the number of these tiles being determined by the number of players (more players = more tiles). A common critique aimed at the game is how plain these tiles look. True, the graphics are minimalist, but this actually avoids any confusion when choosing where to place restaurants etc. as the game develops. Unlike other games, who provide us with a steady supply of customers, we have to get them ourselves. We need to hire marketing agents to induce demand, plastering houses with billboards, bombarding customers with publicity campaigns and blasting them with radio commercials. But the demand created through publicity can be fulfilled by any player. Food Chain Magnate is an indie game and hence does not have the production values one might expect from large publishers. And by that I don’t mean that its components are poor, but that the priorities behind them are different.

Un côté impardonnable où la moindre erreur se paye cash et empêche de revenir dans la partie : j’ai vu un joueur s’ennuyer durant les 3 dernières heures de la partie car il s’était planté durant les 10 premières minutes !!! Alongside all of this player and employee action, there are a set of milestones. A given milestone can only be claimed in a single turn. More than one player can get the milestone if they all get it in the same turn. After that turn, the milestone is removed. Each milestone gives a one-off. (e.g. you immediately gain a pizza chef who makes lots of pizzas but costs money to keep employed.) Or a permanent boost to the player that achieved it. Your radio marketing campaigns generate twice as much demand for a product as normal. Some of these can be extremely powerful (you get a CFO who increases all cash you earn by 50%) so they are an important element in the game.If the heavy upgrade path isn’t for you, you can try going for early food or drinks. Of the paths, this one will get you some early income. You’d hire and then upgrade a marketer in round 2, figure out what you’ll market at the start of round 3 and then bring on a food or drink producer and lay down some mailbox campaign that will fire off a bunch of demand. Benefits of early food/drink sales strategies Of the openings, Recruiting Girl is my favorite. That is because Recruiting Girls allow you to recruit, which in turn, allows you to respond to threats that materialize on the board. The key to this is the “First to Hire 3 Employees” milestone. It gives you 2 free Management Trainees which allow you to accommodate all of the new employees you’ll be bringing to bear. What a fourth-turn Recruiting Girl Strategy should look like. Benefits of the Recruiting Girl Opener If you have a highly competitive playgroup who are willing to play the game multiple times and develop their own strategies over time, then it will be very rewarding and you should buy it. Turns are resolved in a series of phases, roughly following the activities of a fast food business. This is a great game but is definitely not for everyone. Firstly, if you like direct and aggressive competition where you are trying to out-think everyone else every turn, this game could well be for you. If you want a co-operative experience, look elsewhere – this is about as far as you can get from that.