Food Chain Magnate (2015)

How to Play Food Chain Magnate

Suitable for 2-5 players, Food Chain Magnate is all about making the most money by the end of the game. There are only two ways to make money in the game – either from waitress tips or from selling your fast food products to the ever-hungry public. Most games will be won by the latter.

Setup the Game

The board is randomly created by the players from a series of neighborhood tiles, with the number of these tiles being determined by the number of players (more players = more tiles).

Place a player turn tracker near the board, along with a tile for each of the players. These tiles will indicate where each player goes in the turn order. The initial turn order is randomly determined and the tiles are placed on the tracker so that everyone knows the order of play for the first turn.

Place a number of chits of various sizes that represent various types of advertising (postal, billboard, airplane banners, and radio) and extra customer houses and gardens next to the board.

The two-hundred chunky wooden food and drink components are sorted into piles. Sort the 18 different milestones and the 32 different job role cards into piles and place them where everyone can reach. The Bank is created, with the amount available in the bank being set by the number of players.

Lastly, each player receives three tiles to represent their restaurants, a CEO card, three bank reserve cards, and a highly thematic player menu.

On the first turn, each player places one of their three restaurants on the board, adhering to a few simple constraints. Once the initial restaurants are placed, each player selects one of their bank reserves cards. The selected cards are then all revealed at the same time and the total of the revealed cards sets the reserve funds possessed by the bank.

After that, you are all set and ready to play!

Gameplay

Turns are resolved in a series of phases, roughly following the activities of a fast food business.

All players first choose which of their employees (represented by employee job role cards that they have acquired in previous turns) will go to work and which will take a day off. Some cards (including the CEO) are managers.  They can have other cards reporting to them.

Each player then creates a hierarchy of employees, starting from your CEO at the top, including all of those employees that you have sent to work.

The order of play is determined by the number of empty “slots” in the hierarchy (i.e. places that you could have put an employee card but choose to leave blank).

Players then take turns working through all of the abilities on the cards that they have put into their hierarchy. These might allow you to hire more employees, make pizzas or burgers, send lorries out to buy beer, lemonade or pop from third-party suppliers…

Once everyone has completed all their employee abilities, your hungry customers start to appear.  Demand for fast food in the game is purely driven by marketing. Marketing campaigns can become incredibly powerful, controlling the demand in large parts of the board.

If more than one restaurant can provide the required product, the distance from the buyer to the restaurant and the price per item will determine which restaurant actually gets the sale.

Every product sold gives you cash, which is the proxy for your score in the game. If you train employees, they upgrade to more powerful variations on the same theme. But once upgraded, you may also need cash to pay them a salary each turn.

Food Chain Magnate Review

"There is a myth that it is a complex game. That isn’t really true – the rules of the game are actually very straight-forward. It is however difficult to reliably win against equally experienced players, but that difficulty comes from trying to predict the strategies and actions of the other players.

This is a great game but is definitely not for everyone. Firstly, if you like direct and aggressive competition where you are trying to out-think everyone else every turn, this game could well be for you. If you want a co-operative experience, look elsewhere – this is about as far as you can get from that."

board-game.co.uk

"Food Chain Magnate is a difficult, thinky, ridiculous, silly, and immensely clever game. It has a certain audacity that I don’t see very much in board games. Maybe the benefit of being a small in-house publisher is the ability to take risks like this. I don’t know how they managed to make the milestone cards work so well while being so powerful. I can’t think of any other game where the players secretly and collectively determine how long the game is going to be right at the start."

thethoughtfulgamer.com

The content of this article is originally from Board Game Geek and board-game.co.uk. For more information and a better understanding of the game, you can watch the videos below.