Food Chain Magnate

You know Gary, after all the years of trying to set up a game with you via email or live on vassal, a proper game, a man's game, a war game, only to have defer with lame excuses like work, family and career, to see that you are eager for a on line game of flipping burgers is somewhat disheartening.

Now I'm not mad at you son. I'm just a bit disappointed.

Oh I wouldn't worry, this probably won't happen either.

Gary I'm into it. I think boardgamecore is async isn't it?

Taught myself the rules this evening with a 2 player introductory game solo. Seems pretty fucking good. I think what's always impressive about Splotter games I've played is that they highlight one or two parts of the market system, turn them up to 10, and pound away at them. In this case it's the idea that food preferences are, in part, endogenously created by marketing that tries to convince you that you want it. The pricing/distance model along with waitresses means this could be cutthroat as fuck, some potential race to the bottom pricing going on.

I obviously only grasped the surface part of it---create demand, generate food and drink and sell them while keeping your prices lower than your competitor. Based on the million more specialized employee types, there's a lot there.

I played without the milestones since it was introductory. To be honest, I think it's the part of the game that makes me most suspicious of it. I kind of loathe games that have a 100 targets that create special powers or give bonus points, especially when they aren't obvious ones and you have to artificially craft your strategies around them.

The key is to get the first $100 CFO, and to play the $100 reserve. Makes for a quick game of run the bank.

Thinking about trying a waitress strategy...Who needs food? Just an army of Alice.

Been playing this without milestones yet as I ramp up complexity with my spouse. Going well, game is an easy teach and easy to learn but really insidious in play. Thematic as hell. We finished our third game and my wife was like "this game should be longer and you should have to pay these more powerful people" and I said "yeah, we're playing the short intro game, both those things will be true if we play again." So mission accomplished.

I'm skeptical of the milestones even though I know the game is designed with them in mind. On the surface, they really feel like a module from the expansions baked into the base game. They definitely up the complexity a lot with exceptions.

Even thinking about playing this game had me crack my physical copy and refresh the rules. I forgot how cool the economic systems were and how weird and chunky the milestones were. I guess if we played again I'd include the milestones, I just hate them conceptually.

I think the Milestones are a key part of the game and are needed for its balance. While it seems there are a lot of them, the important ones are very easy to remember:

3 Milestones giving you +5$ for each food sold. Try to get one.
First to Train allows you to pick up trainer on turn 1 and start training away.
First to Hire 3 People allows you to build a large organization from early on.
Errand Boy Milestone makes them much better than its competition and without training!
First Radio is incredibly powerful.

The rest have minor effects or can be understood as needed.

Yeah, I can see how they'd be fundamentally important. They inject a lot of financial opportunity on top of the base supply/demand engine.

Sornars and I had a great time with this on tabletop simulator. Still no milestones since it was a learning game, ha.

The FCM w/expansion TTS module is pretty good except for some truly bizarre lock points.

This game was pure brilliance. I'm excited to try again soon with the milestones, I feel like they may naturally guide players into different strategies and corporate structures which means an even greater need to pay attention to each other's boards and anticipate each other's moves. I am very glad we played without them though, the rules are straightforward but understanding the different employees and the "one turn ahead" planning structure is enough to take in for a first game. Adding the info dump of milestones might've been a bit too much for me.

The pricing race to the bottom, with blind decisions about how someone could *possibly* change their prices, is absolute nuclear war deterrance level. You can easily be left with heavily reduced prices for absolutely no reason other than that you don't know if the other player will commit their pricing managers to their structure and you cannot afford to make no money by getting skunked.

I just want to bump this, because Not Sure, Sornars and I are constantly playing it. It really is a great game that grows in my estimation. It is a game you can easily lose on the first move and when you are getting beat and outcompeted it leads to humilitating losses. There's no "have a little fun from running your engine!" part.

"Have fun running your engine" is followed by "WHEN I STOLE ALL YOUR FUEL BY $1, SUCKER!"

It's a very harsh game, and unlike something like Antiquity where you lose on the first turn to the game, in FCM you lose Monopoly-style, where you see all your money disappearing directly to someone else.

There's a lot of tricks and levers to pull, but straight brinksmanship can be so key to the game. And initial placement, because Splotter likes to let you lose before you even play so that you learn to pay attention to openings.

Somebody quipped on Discord that every subsequent game of a Splotter is a reaction to how you/everyone else fucked up last game. Playing with the same group repeatedly really drives that point home which makes this a great game to really dive into with a core group.

We started thinking the radio milestone was broken but this game I claimed it to deny my opponents; I can't even leverage it for my own gain! We all thought that the Guru was super powerful when it blew us out of the water but then two of us tried to go for it and through some turn order jujutsu Not Sure took it from me which meant I had to completely pivot my strategy to get back in the game. I ended up exploring a totally different branch of the org chart and it seems to be paying off. It's so tempting to dismiss the game as imbalanced or broken after a single play but only repeated play shows the subtle ways that the different roles balance against one another, depending on the map at hand.

Repeated play also reveals how important the map is. I initially thought that the choice of end game cards before the game really starts was a somewhat arbitrary choice but now I'm able to plan out the possible end states of the game based on the individual configurations and initial placements. I placed my initial restaurant last and guaranteed a price war which meant I could guess that the bank would deplete at a certain rate, etc. There's so much depth to this game and each play I learn something new. The flipside of the variable map is that some permutations are clearly optimised for certain strategies and those strategies may just blowout the competition. I think the likelihood of this happening is higher at 3p and I continue to believe that 4p is the sweetspot for this game (despite only playing it once; anyone who wants to join us for next time should chime in!).

To Not Sure's point about Monopoly, when you're losing there's a clear point in time where you know you're losing but haven't lost. A concession doesn't even address this as it kind of falls into a king making problem for the other players so the losing player has an obligation (particularly in async) to keep the game moving quickly despite not having a lot to do. That means you really need to play with people that are good sports but that's good advice in general.