Board Game Review – Food Chain Magnate

Overview

Quick Facts

Designer: Jeroen Doumen, Joris Wiersinga
Genre: Economic, Manufacturing
Players: 2-5
Time: ~45 minutes per player

It’s the 1950s, and fast food is the latest craze.  Nothing gets the families of small-town suburbia out of their houses like the promise of hot food and cold drinks, served almost instantly.  You can see this new market starting to form and decide to start up your own restaurant chain, planning on making bank selling to hungry (and lazy) people.  However, you’re not the only one with this brilliant idea, as several other competing chains have started up in your very same small town!  Now, you must out-produce, out-advertise, or out-price your opponents out of the market and make your way to the top of the food chain!

Food Chain Magnate is a very heavy strategic game where players build up a fast food franchise starting with just one restaurant and a CEO.  You will then need to hire more employees to begin producing food and drinks, advertising your products, and selling to the customers in town.  The player who makes the most money by the end of the game can truly call themselves a food chain magnate!

Culling the Collection: The Whats and Whys

Today I finally got around to updating my Board Game Geek Collection, which basically means that I went to Ethan’s BGG profile and copied the ones I was missing from his to my own.  I paused before I started, staring at the number of games it said was in our collection. “500?!”  I gasped.  “There are five hundred games in our collection!  I tell everyone it’s about 300 or so!”

“Well, the promos and expansion are listed too.  Let me see if I can filter it to just the base games.”

After a few clicks on his computer, Ethan figured out we actually only have 366 (!!!) unique base games.  There was a discussion on the BGG Facebook group a few weeks back on why people have so many games, but I won’t get into all the details here on how and why our collection is this way.  What we have begun doing, however, for the first time ever, is getting rid of games in our collection.

It all started with attending Gaming Hoopla in Gurnee, IL, where Ethan signed up to do a math trade.  How this works was, Ethan put a bunch of games that we’re willing to get rid of on a list.  Then, other people put what they’re willing to trade on a list.  Hey, person B has a game I want, but I don’t have anything they want.  But, I have something that person C wants, and person C has something person B wants, so we go around in a circle.  Do this with a few dozen (or hundred) other people, and we have a math trade!   Doing this allowed us to get some games that we didn’t play out of our collection and gain a few new games and promos we were interested in.

The main factor in doing the math trade was there was games in our collection that we don’t play and didn’t plan on playing again.  We traded off Canterbury, Nightfall and a few expansions to go with it, as there were other games in our collection that filled those needs..  We were able to trade off a few promos as well for games we don’t have and aren’t planning on getting, which was pretty popular with a few people in the trade.  This opened up this thought to us, that our collection doesn’t have to keep growing bigger and bigger; there is opportunity to trade things out!

Moving forward, I see more opportunity to keep doing some exchanging in our collection.  There are games that just aren’t for us or aren’t for us anymore.  What about your collection?  How do you manage the games that you have?  Or does it matter to you at all the number of games in you collection?  Let us know!