Reviews, guides and articles of economic games such as Railroad Tycoon, Terraforming Mars and Brass.
No one’s born with an appetite for beer and hamburgers but once billboards surround your house and menus flood your mailbox you might start thinking otherwise. Splotter’s latest title, Food Chain Magnate, puts us into the cutthroat restaurant business and takes us on a satirical fight for riches, publicity and hungry stomachs.
The 18XX series has a reputation of being some of the most difficult board games you can play. Fortunately, it’s not true. Like all games by Francis Tresham, the rules are extremely simple. The difficult lies, not in understanding how to play, but in knowing what to do and how to use the tools provided by the game to your advantage.
In this guide, I’ll explain how to approach the series as a beginner and how to tackle its challenges part by part.
How do you win a game without taking a turn? This question lies at the heart of German Railways, the second entry in Winsome’s Historic Railroads Series. Like Chicago Express, it’s a simple, fast-playing game of investment and route-building but also one of the most counter-intuitive games I’ve ever played.
I did not expect to like Pipeline. Games that mix elements from economic and baroque eurogames have always felt like a compromise to me. But building an oil refinery was an appealing topic and the challenge ended up grabbing me.
Wealth of Nations is the only game where my degree in Commerce has felt like an advantage. No other title I’ve ever played does a better job capturing classical economic theory, from supply and demand to lesser-known concepts such as the bussiness cycle.
As representation of economics through play, Wealth of Nations has few rivals. As a game, though, I’m not as certain
