LogFAQs > #934917565

22. Food Chain Magnate (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Economic, tableau-building, area control
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 120 to 240 minutes
Experience: 6-8 games (mostly tutorial) with 2-5 players (2017-2019)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/80 (2018)

Summary - Each player runs a 1950s fast food chain, attempting to conquer an initially unblemished suburb. Each round, players can play out a hand of their employees, who (depending on role) can recruit other employees, train up other employees, market food and drink, produce food and drink, slash prices, open houses, and more. Then there is a dinner phase, where each house that has received sufficient marketing will look for the restaurant (player) who can supply them what they want at the lowest price (and closest distance) and purchase that food. Players then pay their staff with the money they've earned.

Design - Food Chain Magnate has one of the most ingenious designs. While it is among my heaviest games in terms of playtime, board complexity, and overall brain-burn, the ruleset is actually rather simple. Like Kemet, it overloads you with information at the beginning of the game - you have access to every employee type with a massive tech tree - but there's no card-reading afterward. The depth of FCM comes not from insane rules or powers but from the wide decision space. And intelligently, FCM is very emergent in terms of gameplay - because marketing is entirely player-driven, you have to play at least somewhat heads-up. Building your company by hiring lots of employees is satisfying, but intelligently fulfilling demand and slashing prices is the goal, and that is entirely context-dependent.

There are so many cruxes to the game - when do you market? How much should you train each marketer? Which goods do you want to specialize in producing, and are you still capable of diversifying after that? Do you slash or raise prices? Can you afford to open new houses/to fulfill their demand/to market to them? Can you overflood with demand to cause your opponents to fail to fulfill their orders? FCM tells you "just play a dozen employees each round and resolve their relatively straightforward effects," but because the board state is so dependent on others, it's never just that. Then there are the milestones, which multiple players can earn, but only if they attain it on the same turn. The ruleset is elegant, but the way it links together creates a clusterfuck of a puzzle that's just so deep and rich.

Component-wise, FCM is not particularly lauded for its art (though I enjoy the '50s-style cartoon-art). Its menu player guides, however, are brilliant - thematic, helpful, and pretty much complete as well. I also love the wooden food tokens, very intelligently used as both actual food and the demand that customers have. Then there are the modular tiles which can make every map different - huge fan of the different board states that they can create. The worst part, without question, is the paper money. It's thematic, but UGH.

One of FCM's greatest weaknesses is how punishing it is to mistakes in the early game. As far as I have been able to tell in my very limited experience, picking anything other than Recruiting Girl or Trainer to beign the game will cause you to lose. Trainer is the best opening for a new player, I find, because the milestone associated with it gives you the ability to avoid firing at least three trained employees - absolutely key in terms of keeping your head afloat and not having a miserable experience. Placing a bad restaurant location to open the game can also tank you for enough turns that, if the bank is small, you have zero shot at winning from the get-go.

The other possible weakness is the long bureaucracy. While it's exciting to see each restaurant fill its orders it's fun to maniuplate the wooden burgers, pizzas, and drinks, it's actually rather painful to do repeated arithmetic for five minutes each round, followed by another few minutes of resolving the marketing (and in order, too).

Experience - I'd been intimidated to try FCM for a long time, but in mid-2017 I finally got a chance at a semi-public meetup at a meetup member's apartment. We played a five-player game that took five hours including the teach, and it was fucking miserable. I actually came in third, but the players ahead of me were taking insanely long turns and agonizing over every decision. We also played a full, non-tutorial-length game.

I also could not stop thinking about the game. Given how expensive it was - in the $130 to $190 range at the time - I stayed away from buying, but the decision space of the game was so interesting that I kept turning it over in my mind for weeks afterward. Not many games get me to do that! When the game finally was reprinted and available for $90, I pounced on it.

Have I gotten $90 worth out of it? Not exactly. I've played it over five times since then, and each play has been decent, but FCM is the type of game that clearly demands you play kind of cutthroat to get the best experience. Like Kemet and Spirit Island, nearly every play of FCM I've had has had at least one new player and therefore a tutorial game (where we use the milestones, but not a full-sized bank). I still want the real meat of the game, and I want to be able to justify buying the expansion - at least the milestones seem fantastic.

Future - I want to play FCM with people that I like. It's too mean a game to play it with people I might feel bad about playing with. But getting those people up to speed requires a lot of time and commitment, and there's so much else out there, and I'm not trying to play it with two. It's an even longer shot than Spirit Island to get a ton of good wear, but I'm still holding out hope.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness