Food Chain Magnate - Is it... Monopoly? 

*big hug*

What a lovely and well-written comment! I discovered the world of modern board games a year ago. Perhaps even more amazing to me than the games themselves is the calibre of board game reviewers. Not only do they produce high-quality videos and podcasts, but they generally seem like decent human beings. It's no exaggeration that knowing these people exist, and that there are other people who appreciate them and fund them, has partially restored my faith humanity. I consume a lot of board game content, and it's hard for me to pick a favourite, but Efka and Elaine are certainly among the best in their class.

I found this channel through SUASD and I am enjoying it thoroughly. As you mentioned you were a fan of SUASD and of video games ( although for very good reasons not as much now) may I recommend SUASD sister channel Cool Ghosts. It's full of great reviews and the last three vids have been masterpieces , a real elevation of what is possible in a RU-vid video. I apologise to NPI for hijacking your comments about another channel, but it is criminally under viewed.

I actually lost a job like that once... family thought it was just a line. You know, the company saying that instead of explaining why I had failed or whatever. Then the owner closed the doors and left the country with the books.

Accurate

theONLYfudjud Same! I thought it was so interesting! The way it was compared to monopoly really sold me on getting it some day, seems like it is a perfect replacement for an old, horrible classic 😜

Thank you, that's an incredibly lovely thing to say.

Wow you are one lucky person. I have trouble getting this game out to my bg group and now looking to sell it.

Some good ol’ Mandela effect there.

Thanks Joel!

@@NoPunIncluded He was ordering his burger c'mon man.

It absolutely is.

This is the comment I came here to make. Loved it.

I think these are all good points, but The Landlord's Game was an absolute sensation at the time. They weren't paying her $500 on a punt, this was at least an obsession of an entire decade.

​@@NoPunIncluded Let me pause real quick to say that this is a cool video. I appreciate creating new discussions about board games, so thank you for that! I see now that I took that part of the video as a more complete view of the history than it was intended. My bad. While she created the version depicted in 1904, she sold the patent in 1935. I'm having a hard time finding the details I'm looking for regarding the history of the game (though I'm admittedly fighting a mild post-work headache lol). Did she sell copies of her own during that 20-year period? In either case, I think it's still important to acknowledge that getting $500 for a board game patent in the middle of the Great Depression is not nothing. It's slightly misleading to an audience that is accustomed to 21st century dollars, and "capitalism" (without much clarification or nuance) seems to get bashed quite a bit in board game circles.

Steven van Lijnden Do you thing Ste(ph)ens are safe?

Being Friends We had an emergency meeting about this and additional security is being considered.

GeekUp bit bowls from the BGG store

They're nice, but you can very easily just make them yourself with a "button gun" (don't know the real name, I just made it up) and some felt. I got a gun with 400 buttons and 40 sheets of felt on Amazon for a pittance (like 20 bucks total?). Then I found out the felt was too thin, but I just used two sheets to make dual-colored, more rigid trays! Here's some pics: [NOTE: You have to add manually before those, since youtube ate my URLs! Don't include the signs anywhere! ]

If you're watching this video, you're probably already part of a self-selected group that the statement is meant to apply to. It's quite clear that when Efka says that, he's not talking about the entire population of Earth, because the majority of people simply don't care about any games at all. I think that expecting to horribly lose your first game is the standard for any game worth its time. It's just that today's culture of a market flooded with games, where some people actually play games only once or twice to then move to a newer one, has lead to a growing expectation among many that a game needs to be perfectly accessible on the first play-through. But for that to be true, the game needs to lose something, and that tends to be the very reason for its existence (for games like Power Grid or Agricola, not Fallout or Tainted Grail) - to flex your wits in casual competition with friends. There's for sure a fine line to walk between how much commitment a game requires before it starts to be too demanding... but I would never expect a good game to allow me same odds of success on my first play against someone who's played it 10 times already. That's a sign of it being too shallow.

Obviously we're not talking about all people, just those inclined to watch this video. I still will wager the vast majority have never even played FCM. I will beat someone new at Castles of Burgundy 10 times out of 10, but even while doing so the other players still get to fully interact with all of the game's systems. Horribly losing can be expected in a first game for most people, sure, but if a game requires you to not make certain early mistakes or you stop being able to actually play the game, and then are held hostage for hours due to "no player elimination", that's the sign of bad game design. Period. Agricola is my favorite game of all time and one of its strengths is that it avoids this trap. Yeah, you might get a garbage score, but no matter what you do you'll still be able to play a card or two that makes you uniquely powerful, build up your farm and take resources and maybe make a kid or two. In Power Grid (and I assume FCM) an incorrect start means that eventually you just sit there and don't really get to do anything. I don't understand how anyone could think that's good design. Once you've locked getting to participate fully in the game behind a skill barrier, you've crossed the line into being too demanding to be considered good design. Even heavy, dense, complex games like The Gallerist avoid this. Just because it features in some games that are popular (Puerto Rico, Power Grid, apparently FCM) doesn't mean it's required or actually good by any real metric. What kind of jerk do you have to be to want to force your friends to possibly play a game where you get to do a bunch of cool stuff in it and they don't get to do anything at all because they didn't know exactly the right moves to do right at the start?

@@ephemeraldisle I remember as a kid being beaten over and over by dad in chess because I made a mistake many turns prior that only became clear in hindsight. I certainly do not think he was a jerk for wanting to play with me or not taking mercy on me. Burgundy is a game of small efficiencies. It's the opposite of exciting, even if it lets you pull off clever combos at times. Power Grid and FCM are "If your turn doesn't matter much, why have it at all?" - games of betting all you have on a certain setup and either winning large or failing completely. More exciting, more volatile. And I disagree that Aricola or Gallerist are different from FCM in that they let you interact with the entire game even when failing. It's a fundamental difference in genre, where Agricola is mostly a series of interacting systems that use players as partial blockers. It then makes sense that you can keep interacting with all the systems, as systems can't react to you. The main thing that you interact with in FCM is *other players*, all the time, and the game's mechanics just provide the means for that interaction, which is so very different from Feld, Uwe or Vital. Even when on the losing end, you're still interacting with all players and a clever move may wreck their plans. That's why I think it's such a great game. The best games, imo, focus less on their own mechanisms and more on providing player interaction (El Grande comes to mind). That does gives more visibility to gaps in skill, sure, but I posit that you're not a jerk if you introduce new players to the game and don't hold back, you're only a jerk if you don't properly warn them what kind of game this is and give them any tips at the start - but I would think that to be obvious. Presumably you want those people to play with you again in the future.

@@B0rghalRantipole "I posit that you're not a jerk if you introduce new players to the game and don't hold back, you're only a jerk if you don't properly warn them what kind of game this is and give them any tips at the start - but I would think that to be obvious. Presumably you want those people to play with you again in the future." Exactly this. And I tend to do this in games across the skill spectrum. The secret is to get your friends-but-potential-gamers to the point where they *think* they might have a grip on the game - regardless of how badly they lost or how luckily they won - and then you're away, as they will keep coming back for more. I am quite happy to under-compete and hand out strategy advice in the first few games to achieve this goal.

@@B0rghalRantipole Chess is better for precisely the reason I'm saying - you lose because of a mistake you made and didn't realize until later. It obfuscates how well you're doing to keep you engaged the entire time. And being two player, there is no reason you can't forfeit when you've realized you lost minus a social power imbalance I guess. You could play FCM, Puerto Rico, or Power Grid two player but BGG users certainly don't seem to think that's where those games work at. It sounds like you actually do agree about Agricola letting you continue to fully play the game while losing - you attribute it to being in a different genre, I attribute that to being in the genre known as a well designed game ;) Agricola is absolutely a game about making plans that either win big or fail spectacularly based on what other people do. It's a game of reading your opponents, pulling off well timed blocks that force them to go with some far less efficient plan which alone might lose them the game in the end, while simultaneously trying to advance your own plans. It's definitely a game primarily about interacting with the other players within a system where your success or failure is determined by both how well you manage that interaction and how well you understand the system you're interacting in. That's no different from Power Grid or FCM or whatever at all. That's how all board games are, really. FCM wouldn't have traps like Efka described if the game was entirely about player interaction and not system interaction. In fact that's my point - if the system is brutal enough that your own mistakes, not someone else's clever plays, shuts you out of meaningfully engaging in the player interaction, that's a sign of a bad game. Some designers understand that you can't just design a game that's exciting and fun for the winner, but miserable for the losers, and if you are going for that type of design at least give the losers the sweet relief of being eliminated from the game. Monopoly is actually more successful in this regards. At least in that you get to walk away if you run out of money. If Agricola didn't have you feed your people at harvest but instead you had to pay one food every time you used them, the overall flow and balance of the game wouldn't really be any different for those who have mastered the game except it's now much harder and frankly much worse of a game. Now you've made it possible for a player to end up in a death spiral where you are stuck taking day labor just to do one thing a round and effectively getting shut out of making any progress. Sure, you can play kingmaker, give up on any chance of winning, and spend the rest of the game screwing over other people's plans, but a game that leaves losing players with nothing to do but kingmake has some major flaws. Maybe you don't find Feld's designs exciting enough, that's a fair critique of Castles, but at least his games (minus Year of the Dragon) generally keep all players engaged the entire time. The best games manage to be both exciting, where every turn really matters, and consistently engaging for all players. I think Agricola pulls this off. I know Power Grid and Puerto Rico do not - perhaps FCM does, as I've said I have no interest in playing it, but that's precisely because it has such a reputation of having that engagement issue. I was being a bit tongue in cheek about the jerk comment - in fact, I'd argue forcing your friends to play a boring milquetoast game where none of your decisions really matter might also be a jerk move. You can warn people, take it easy on them, help them out at the start, etc. and all that's great healthy social behavior. As long as everyone's happy with their experiences with a game it doesn't really matter what some internet stranger thinks about that game's potential to facilitate good experiences for all players.