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Venture Angels is a bluffing and half-secret bidding game, a genre I had already given a try fifteen years ago with Corruption, a game about building contractors, and to a lesser extent with Vabanque, a game about casinos. Both were relatively simple games, but Venture Angels is even more minimalistic in both rules and components. In games in which most of the action takes place in the players' minds, there's no need for much complexity on the game table.
Each player is a billionaire who tries to invest in various ventures that will yield even more billions. There are three suits, i.e., three domains in which to invest: space, computers, and biology. The game lasts three rounds. Every round, several projects are drawn and players secretly bid tokens, with values of 0, 2, 3 or 4 billion dollars, on the projects they want. When bids are revealed, players first check which projects succeeded or failed. All the ventures for which the sum of all players' bids is lower than the funding goal fail. The single one with the most money invested also fails as some clever guy left with all the money...
The original idea in Venture Angels is the funding goal, an idea I obviously had when pledging for games on Kickstarter, something I do a bit too often. If there's not enough money bid on a project, all the money has been spent in vain. This rule is fun and logical, but it had a pernicious side effect of encouraging players to focus on the two or three most ambitious projects. This is why I balanced the design with a second rule: The project that receives the highest total funding also fails. This makes for really interesting dilemmas since players must diversify, but not too much, while always trying to check their opponents.
Of course, the game was first called "Kickstarter: The Game", and the categories were technological gadgets, video games, and board games. Among the latter were "Cohen the Barbarian", "The 7th Incontinent", "Cards Against Humidity", and "Exploding Mittens". Unfortunately, the crowdfunding game didn't work that well since a Kickstarter campaign is not really an auction with one winning bidder. I had to change the theme while keeping the core funding goal idea, and the next idea was Silicon Valley billionaires.
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A first game of the Venture Angels prototype in Seoul, with Kevin Kim, Vincent Dutrait, and Yohan Goh;
well, I think it's his back in front of the picture — if one can see a back in front
I brought a first version of Venture Angels with me to Gen Con in 2017. Publishers were interested, but nothing was firmly decided. A few weeks later, I spent a few days in Seoul and showed a more developed version to Kevin Kichan Kim of Mandoo games, who almost at once decided to publish it. The development was fast and easy, consisting mostly of adding catch-up mechanisms so that all players can still win until the third and final round. Players in the lead must now play their first tokens face-up, and there's even a small bonus token for the last player in the last round. My prototypes used cards, and the publisher replaced these with poker-like chips, which make the game really feel about money and bidding. Ian O’Toole's art, as minimalistic and light as the game, fits perfectly.
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Kevin brought the very first copies to the SPIEL '18 fair and, for once, I almost look tall in the picture.
Bruno Faidutti
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