Tag: Economic

Economic games encourage players to produce, distribute, and trade various resources.

It’s a Wonderful World

| OTSG Staff

In It’s a Wonderful World, you are an expanding Empire and must choose your path to your future. You must develop faster and better than your competitors. You’ll carefully plan your expansion to develop your production power and rule over this new world.

It’s a Wonderful World is a cards drafting and engine building game from 1 to 5 players. Each round, players will draft 7 cards and then choose which ones will be recycled to immediately acquire Resources, and which ones will be kept for construction to produce Resources each round and/or gain victory points.

When a card is fully built, it’s added to the player’s Empire to increase the player’s production capacity for each round. The mechanical twist being that the production phase works in a specific order. You’ll have to plan your constructions carefully!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 5 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.30

Istanbul

| OTSG Staff

There’s hustle and bustle at Istanbul’s grand bazaar as merchants and their assistants rush through the narrow alleys in their attempt to be more successful than their competitors. Everything must be well organized: wheelbarrows must be filled with goods at the warehouses, then swiftly transported by the assistants to various destinations. Your goal? Be the first merchant to collect a certain number of rubies.

In Istanbul, you lead a group of one merchant and four assistants through 16 locations in the bazaar. At each such location, you can carry out a specific action. The challenge, though, is that to take an action, you must move your merchant and an assistant there, then leave the assistant behind (to handle all the details while you focus on larger matters). If you want to use that assistant again later, your merchant must return to that location to pick him up. Thus, you must plan ahead carefully to avoid being left with no assistants and thus unable to do anything…

In more detail, on a turn you move your merchant and his retinue of assistants one or two steps through the bazaar, either leave an assistant at that location or collect an assistant left earlier, then perform the action. If you meet other merchants or certain individuals at the location, you might be able to take a small extra action. Possible actions include:

  • Paying to increase your wheelbarrow capacity, which starts the game with a capacity of only two for each good.
  • Filling your wheelbarrow with a specified good to its limit.
  • Acquiring a special ability, and the earlier you come, the easier they are to collect.
  • Buying rubies or trading goods for rubies.
  • Selling special combinations of goods to make the money you need to do everything else.

When a merchant has collected five rubies in his wheelbarrow, players complete that round, then the game ends. If this player is the only one who’s reached this goal, he wins immediately; otherwise ties are broken by money in hand.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • 40 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.59

Isle of Skye: Big Box

| OTSG Staff
Isle of Skye: Big Box

Isle of Skye: Big Box

Get the full load (minus 4 expansions) of the modern classic tile-laying game with the Isle of Skye Big Box! The Big Box contains the award-winning Isle of Skye base game (Kennerspiel des Jahres 2016), the Druids expansion, and additional scoring and tunnel tiles. A new addition is the mini-expansion Randgebiete.

In the game, you embody one leader of each of the five traditional Scottish clans. You create your own small empire in order to gain the necessary victory points. But in each game only four of the included 24 score cards are in play. This makes each game different and requires different tactics and strategies.

In each round you can buy one of the tiles of a fellow player. Face down, all players simultaneously set the prices of the pieces they offer. A high price can lead to prosperity and much needed money. However, if no buyer can be found, the seller must add the tile to his empire himself and give up the money he has invested. In the end, the player who has scored the most victory points wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Auction/Bidding
  • Economic
  • Set Collection
  • Tile Placement

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.00

Furnace

| OTSG Staff

Furnace is an engine-building Eurogame in which players take on the roles of 19th-century capitalists building their industrial corporations and aspiring to make as much money as they can by purchasing companies, extracting resources, and processing them in the best combinations possible.

Each player starts the game with a random start-up card, the resources depicted at the top of that card, and four colored discs valued 1-4.

The game is played over four rounds, and each round consists of two phases: Auction and Production. During the auction, 6-8 company cards are laid out with their basic sides face up. Players take turns placing one of their discs on one of these cards, but you cannot place a disc on a card if a disc of the same value or color is already present. Thus, you’ll place discs on four cards.

Once all the discs are placed, the cards are resolved from left to right. Whoever placed the highest-valued disc will claim this card, but first anyone with a lower-valued disc on this card will gain compensation, either the resources depicted multiplied by the value of their disc or a processing ability (exchange X for Y) up to as many times as the value of their disc.

Once all the cards have been claimed or discarded, players enter the production phase, using their cards in the order of their choice. Each company card has one action — either production or processing — on its basic side and two actions on its upgraded side. During the production phase, you can use each of your cards once to gain resources, process those resources into other resources or money, and upgrade your cards.

At the end of four rounds, whoever has the most money wins.

Furnace also includes capitalist cards that contain unique effects, and if you want, you can choose to deal one out to each player at the start of the game. For an additional challenge, you can require players to create a “production chain”, with each newly acquired company card being placed somewhere in that chain and locked in position for the remainder of the game.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.32

Funfair

| OTSG Staff

Can you build the best theme park in town?

Choose and build an exciting mix of attractions in your very own theme park. Upgrade them to match blueprints, or just to stack up towering rides that pull in the crowds and make the most cash. Hire staff members and build super attractions to maximise your park’s strategy for the win!

Funfair is a standalone game in the Unfair universe. It’s a lighter and faster introduction to Unfair’s ludicrously modular theme park building. With fast setup and gameplay, and only positive player interaction included in Funfair, it’s a fun family-friendly game. However, new goals, new cards, all new build strategies, and tight combos will give experienced gamers and Unfair fans plenty of challenge.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.12

Blue Skies

| OTSG Staff

The year is 1979, and the U.S. government has just deregulated the airline industry, opening it to competition in terms of fares, routes, and the airline companies themselves. You represent a new airline that’s trying to set up business in the U.S., but you have an entire country open to you, so where will you set up shop and how can you profit more than the other newcomers to ensure that you survive?

In Blue Skies, the game board presents players with thirty airports in thirty cities. Each airport has four gates, with you using 2-4 gates depending on the number of players. To set up, draw airport demand cards from the deck to seed airports with passengers. Whenever you place passengers on the board, draw from a bag that initially contains 100 red cubes and 25 green cubes; for each airport, continue drawing until you draw a red cube, then redistribute passengers at the open gates of that airport as evenly as possible.

(Note that at most the first five airports drawn will have an open gate, and even those will start with only one open gate run by a local airline. All of the other passengers are just bunched up at the gate waiting for you to serve them!)

Each player starts with three demand cards in hand, and they take turns choosing two gates with a purchase price of at most 6. Players adjust their income from 0, with their income being set to equal the number of passengers now waiting at their gates, then the game begins.

On a turn, each player in turn buys new gates at airports of their choice, spending at most 6 points and adding any unspent points to their score. You can buy out a local airline, set up gates in new cities, or purchase multiple gates in the same airport to try to dominate that area.

Each player in turn then plays a demand card from their hand, drawing passengers form the bag to place one or more passengers at that location. Then demand cards equal to the number of players are drawn, and more passengers are ahead to those airports. The game board lists the number of cards for each airport, so you somewhat know the odds of where passengers might arrive.

Players adjust their income to account for the opening of new gates, the redistribution of existing passengers, and the arrival of new passengers, then they add their income to their score. If a player now has at least 100 points or has placed their twentieth and final gate, the game ends immediately; otherwise, you add a local airline gate to each airport with passengers but no open gates, pass the first player marker, then start a new round.

At game’s end, score the seven regions of the United States based on the player’s dominance of those regions. Each airport has a scoring value, e.g., ORD is worth 4, and each gate you have in Chicago is worth 4 for determining dominance in both the Midwest region and the Central region. (ORD is one of four airports in two regions, with the others being JFK, LAX, and DFW.) If you have the most dominance in the Central region, you score 13 points, whereas second place is worth only 6 points. Whoever has the most points wins.

Game Mechanics:

  • Area Control
  • Economic
  • Hand Management

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 5 Players
  • ~45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.14

The Bloody Inn

| OTSG Staff
The Bloody Inn

The Bloody Inn

France 1831: In a remote corner of Ardèche, the little village of Peyrebeille sees numerous travelers pass through. A family of greedy rural farmers is determined to make its fortune and has devised a diabolical stratagem to achieve this goal: Invest in an inn so they can rob traveling guests, getting rich without arousing the suspicions of the police! Whether or not their plan will work out, one thing is certain: Not every guest will leave this inn alive.

The Bloody Inn is a card game in which you play one member of a family of greedy, murderous innkeepers. At the start of each round, cards are placed face up to fill the inn with guests. Each card carries a cost representing how many cards a player must discard from her hand in order to take an action related to that card. Certain guests have an affinity for particular actions, so those cards return to a player’s hand after being discarded. Cards also show how much money, in francs, each guest possesses. A round has two phases in which players take one action each, in turn order. Players choose one of the following actions:

  • bribe a guest into becoming an accomplice (take a card from the inn to their hand)
  • build an annex (move a card from their hand to their player area; it now represents a structure under which a victim may be buried)
  • kill a guest (move a card from the inn to their player area, awaiting burial)
  • bury a victim (place an unburied victim card under an annex card and take the money from the victim’s pockets)
  • launder money (players may only have a certain amount of cash on hand; excess must be converted to 10F checks by the local notary)

At the end of the round, if any room of the inn contains one of the police, then they conduct an investigation; if a player has any unburied victims, then he must pay 10F per victim to the local gravedigger to hurriedly — and quietly — bury the bodies! Lastly in the round, any cards (accomplices) in each player’s hand must be paid 1F each. After the guest deck has been depleted the second time, players take a final round, then tally their francs. The player with the most money wins!

Game Mechanics:

  • Economic
  • Hand Management
  • Open Drafting
  • Tableau Building

Game Specifications:

  • 1 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.37

Art Decko

| OTSG Staff

Art Decko, first released as Promenade, is a light strategy game for 2 to 4 painting collectors in which you try to create a valuable deck of gold and painting cards over the course of play. These cards — gold and paintings — both count as currencies in the game, and you can use them to purchase more paintings, acquire more gold, and pay for exhibition space in a museum. Your long-term goal is to manipulate the market value of certain styles of artwork, while also earning points by placing paintings in the museum.

The game includes paintings from five styles of art — Art Nouveau, Pop Art, Renaissance, Surrealism, and Impressionism — and you start with five random painting cards in your deck. Each art style starts with a value of 1 gold for a painting. You also have five starting gold cards in your deck, with the cards being worth 1 or 2 gold, with some cards having a special ability on them.

To start the game, shuffle your deck, then take five cards in hand. Fill the four galleries with 2-3 random paintings each, then place two random 3-gold cards (each with a special power) in the bank, along with the deck of 5-gold cards. Paintings in galleries cost 1-8 gold, while gold cards cost 5 or 8 gold. On a turn, take two actions from these three choices, repeating an action, if desired:

• Haggle: Discard a card from your hand to draw two cards from your deck.
• Acquire: Pay the acquisition cost of a painting or gold card by discarding cards from your hand, then place that card in your discard pile. Increase the “market rating” of the painting’s art style or gold by the value listed in the gallery/bank. As the market rating of an art style increases, each painting in that style is worth more gold, effectively increasing its buying power; that art style is also worth more points at game’s end.
• Exhibit: Pay the exhibition cost for a gallery, then place a painting into that gallery that matches one of that gallery’s invitation markers. (A gallery might want, for example, 2 Impressionistic paintings, 1 Renaissance painting, and 1 painting of any type.) Mark that painting with one of your ownership tokens, then place the related invitation marker on the highest available victory point (VP) space, scoring those points for yourself immediately. That painting is now removed from your deck.

If you use the special ability on a gold card instead of its listed numerical value, remove that card from the game.

At the end of your turn, discard any number of cards from your hand, then refill your hand to five cards. If a gallery has no paintings in it, refill all of the galleries with 2-3 paintings, then replace each empty gallery’s cost token with the next highest one available. When at least twelve paintings are in the museum, the painting deck is empty, or an art style or gold reaches a market rating of 70, finish the round, then proceed to final scoring.

The value of gold depends on its market rating, with its value ratio ranging from 6:1 to 1:1. Each painting in your deck is worth 1-7 VPs depending on the market rating of its art style. Each exhibition space in the museum also has a random bonus that was revealed at the start of play, and you can earn additional points through these bonuses. In the end, the player with most VPs wins.

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.31

ArchRavels

| OTSG Staff

Experience the colorful and crafty world of fiber arts with ArchRavels! Play as one of four characters, each with their own unique crafting specialty. Hit the Yarn Bazaar to build up your stash. Follow the patterns to make cuddly bears, warm blankets, and cozy scarves. Along the way you’ll get some unique special requests. Turn in your completed items to master a pattern, complete projects, and score points. When the project list runs out, the crafter with the most points wins!

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 30 – 45 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 1.92

Adventure Mart 🟢

| OTSG Staff

From dank dungeon entrances to magical market squares, Adventure Marts magically pop into existence wherever they are needed. Busier locations require more than one store, and each one needs a manager — that’s where you come in!

Outsmart your competition and serve a fantastical array of adventurers as you battle to make more gold than your opponents! Adventure Mart is a fresh new take on deck-building games with added twists and plenty of player interaction.

The life of a store manager is brief, but glorious. Can you become “Manager of the Week”? Or will you be banished to the abyss?

Game Mechanics:

Game Specifications:

  • 2 – 4 Players
  • 45 – 60 Minutes
  • Difficulty Weight 2.40