Food Chain Magnate Beginner Strategy Plus Ketchup

food chain magnet is a strategy board game that fascinates me i am itching to explore the strategies in this game but i know that it's a game that has pitfalls for beginners so before i play i want to know what the pitfalls are so that i don't walk straight into them teachers you need to make sure us beginners have a good first experience of the game [Music] welcome to unfussy board games i'm terry o'neal you've heard of chess openings right that's different ways to begin the game of chess like the sicilian defense in this video i'm going to show you a couple of ways to open the game of food chain magnet a couple of ways to begin this is so that you have less chance of crashing and burning like i have done many times and as well as that i'm going to talk about the ketchup expansion and show how it tweaks these openings it's really interesting so do take a look at that and as well as that i showed the game food chain magnet to some real life fast food workers so if you want to see their reaction keep watching uh don't forget you can support the channel by hitting subscribe but let's crack on and have a look at these two ways to begin a game of food chain magnet all right fujian magnet has got three main elements to it one element is this technology tree different with its different branches that you can go up and explore and that's just um cards the cards for each one of these um squares on the each one of these squares on the player it represents a deck of cards on the table and you can pick which cards that you want to add to your management structure the second element is these rewards milestones which you get for being the first person to go up a certain branch of the tree um and then finally of course there's the board and the kind of spatial element to the game with this uh we're going to talk mostly about this technology tree gamers love the technology tree and with its different directions you can explore and as you go further up the tree towards the right the cards get more powerful which is a lot of fun and yeah so uh one big issue is as you collect the cards you can see that wad of cash symbol in the bottom right hand corner that means that if you have that card you need to pay a salary at the end of each round to keep the card and this is one of the big potential pitfalls for beginners because on the player read you can see the little wad of cash in the bottom right hand corner of a lot of the squares too if you go up the tack tree and you have those cards and then you um become short of money then you end up having to fire the workers that you have and your sort of game engine starts to collapse in on itself um so uh if you notice on the left hand side at the bottom of the tree those cards do not cost anything so the first strategy for a beginner to try is perhaps using those cards to build up their engine and avoid salaries start an alternative strategy is to go straight up the um tech tree using a discount on salaries that you can get and those are the two strategies that we're going to discuss all right so here is strategy one this is the recruiting girl strategy uh what you do is in round one you play your ceo you have no choice about that and it hires one person you're gonna hire a recruiting girl um in round two then you're going to play the two cards that you have and that gives you two hires um what you're going to do is you're going to hire another recruiting girl and you're going to hire a marketing trainee the marketing trainee a goal here is to try and start making some money as quickly as possible so that we can pay staff and um what's gonna the way the game works of course is that to make money you have to sell stuff but before you can sell stuff you have to create the demand hence we started we're getting a marketing journey so um round three we're going to play all of the cards that we have and we have three hires and a marketing trainee uh here we've sort of hit um a barrier another potential pitfall is that we have used all of our slots we don't the ceo can manage three people and we have three people so why are we hiring more people what we would need to do now is hire more management so that we have more cards that we can play um that's how the game works but thankfully we've just hit a milestone the first to hire three and it's going to give us the management that we need for next round uh just as a freebie so we still have our three hires to use so it's time to start thinking about how to make that money we're marketing let's say we're marketing drinks this round so then next month we're going to want to produce drinks so let's hire an errand boy let's hire a marketing trainee so we can do this all over again and uh next round and then a trainer we can get a trainer because now we can start training people if we get some money together next round um we've also from playing our marketing trainee this round we've got a bunch of really good milestones which are gonna help us help us build our engine okay uh round four in round four we're gonna play all of our cards our new management has allowed us to do that gives us the potential to play more cards and what we're going to do is uh now we've got three higher so um this round because we've played the errand boy we're going to produce a drink and we're going to sell it from the demand that we created last round so we're going to have some money so that means now we can hire somebody and train them so this is a great point that we have reached a point in the game now where we can get our engine up and running and start to make some decisions um about how we're going to where which direction we're going to go with this game the playing iron boy hopefully will have got us the milestone which will give us an extra drink which we might have to throw away and then we'll give us the um the fridge so we see here in round four we potentially have five milestones which if compared to the guru strategy um you know it's a it's a lot more milestones and this is a great way to try to begin your game a great opening for a beginner in fujian okay i just mentioned the uh guru rush strategy it's an alternative to the recruitment girl we're going to have a look at it right now so in round one you hire a trainer in round two you play both your cards and now you can hire and train somebody we're going to hire a management trainee and we're going to train him straight away to junior vice president now you can see he has that mod of cash he needs a salary um the watercash in the bottom right hand corner um how is that going to work we don't have any money we're going to have to fire him immediately at the end of this round don't we but no with this milestone which is a discount on salaries 15 so now we can afford to have three trained staff what we're going to do is we're going to get as far up that tech tree as possible and try and get some powerful cards so what we're gonna do in round three we're gonna actually leave the junior vice president on the beach we're still playing just two cards um we're going to train that junior vice president further up the tree and we are going to use our hire to hire a recruitment girl i think it's time we got our engine started and try and catch up with that recruiting girl strategy the other person has taken uh so round four we're going to play both our trainer and recruiting girls so now we're going to use that trainer to train the senior vice president further up the tree and he's going to guru and that was the goal that this is our aim of this strategy now we have this powerful card that's going to it's we have built our engine because we can use him to quickly get all their powerful cards and this is going to be a lot of fun our problem is we can only he requires a salary so we've only got salaries discount for two other people so we're going to have to choose carefully because we need to make some money um so we also have our two hires we're going to hire a management trainee because we've got starting to get more cards now we need to have management to be able to play them and you might go for you might consider a pricing manager in order to make sure that when we arrive in the game we're able to actually sell something all right so round five we play all of our cards including the guru and this is decision time um we uh we are sort of arriving late into the game this is a long term strategy but whenever we arrive we want to make a big impact and we want to make sure that we sell something so we might who are you going to use your guru to get um oh by the way yes you if we play the pricing manager we even though we're not selling anything this round we might play it in order to get that lower prices discount which might be helpful it might just give us that edge that we need next round or it's actually round seven that we'll be selling anything round five uh yeah so what we could hire is a brand director um the reason for doing that is that we can set the agenda now whenever we arrive next turn and set the marketing on the board and perhaps go for a cart operator might be another option if we choose to sell drinks but this depends on what's happening on the board so from this point your strategy could go various routes but you need to notice that the guru and those two cards all require salaries so we've hit our limit so now next month we need to start um reducing demand and then we really have to start selling so next round hopefully we'll get these milestones as well and which will further boost our engine and that is the rush to guru strategy i'm just going to mention that there are some um alternatives to recruitment girl and trainer as a first hire uh one would be to hire a marketing trainee why would you do that uh that's to go just to get basically get the milestones that the other players were planning on getting and yeah to sort of like undermine their strategy and race up the tech tree before them you're not building your engine though but you might be um just messing with the other players so um not possibly not a beginner strategy but if you know what you're doing um it could be quite a clever move and especially if you can use the marketing to like maybe hit two houses if there's an opportunity on the board if you can see that then it would be a good move as your first hire but you kind of need to know what you're doing the another alternative even more bold perhaps is the errand boy where you know you've got to be producing a drink um and you won't even be selling it so this is a really wild audacious move but you might do that if there's a real shortage of a particular drink on the board um and then you might sort of with your first move the game sort of corner the market uh in a certain drink that nobody else can really get huh get get their hands on these strategies each lend themselves to um like a different a short game or a long game for example the guru rush obviously is a long term strategy so you want to be putting in 300 pounds for the reserve whereas the other strategies more short term this milestone is relevant there because if you're going for the short term you can try and snag this and really get loads of money out of the bank and rush the game to a quick end before that guru player can get his engine up and running one thing to discuss about the uh strategies that we have talked about is that which one are you going to choose actually you need to pay attention to what the other players are choosing right from the start for example if player 1 goes trainer then if you're in a three-player game there's only one guru available so if you go trainer then you're entering a race with that person for it so perhaps that's not wise then you might consider going recruiting girl instead so you see what you choose depends on what the other players are doing um another example would be if you were going marketing trainee um something that could happen would be the other players could both go recruitment girl then you maybe go errand boy you're getting a lot of um those milestones but then those other players could both go trainer and see they could both end up getting both of the other milestones which is um possibly quite daunting to be playing against people that have both of those things going on so um yeah so basically the message is you need to when choosing a strategy you need to pay attention to what the other players are choosing and further to that um just to mention that if player one went marketing training and player two went marketing training um then the recruiting girl strategy would be you know quite undermined because those player 1 and player 2 could really take a lot of the milestones and get up the tree and sort of take a lot of the power of the recruiting girl strategy so what each player the success of each player depends on what the other players this is sort of um second guessing prisoner dilemma kind of situation let's look at the expansion the catch-up expansion and see what it does to these um openings that we've been discussing right so the first thing we mentioned is remember i said that if you um went marketing training then the other two players might end up um both getting the recruiting girl strategy milestones and the trainer so you could end up facing opponents that have both um the benefits of those both sort of branches of the tack tree which would be very daunting well in the catch-up mechanism it sort of removes that possibility so each player can only get one of the different avenues you know can couldn't have the benefits of both avenues which perhaps is would be very powerful to deal with um so i think i like this element and i'll be including it in my gimps now let's look at how the catch-up expansion changes the milestones right so remember the trainer guru rush strategy you can discount on three salaries check this out then in the catch-up one you you can hire as many tree and staff as you want as long as you don't have any money then you just don't pay any salaries so it basically that pitfall of having to fire your staff you never have to fear about that so it it actually makes it quite friendly to beginners so that's something really positive about the ketchup mechanism i really like that a lot and it's fun to go wild with your um strategy and that's what i've been doing i've been using this and going a bit wild with the guru strategy and to be honest making a total hash of it so that's making this video has really helped me get some ideas how to focus let's see what it does for the recruitment girl strategy so you got two management trainees before now you get a free executive vice president and you pay no salary from so instead of having those two management trainees you get this super powered management card again really awesome and uh but check this out the marketing um avenue uh it used to be that first billboard plus milestone that's what it was now you have the potential of getting all of these and you will not believe these milestones right the first one there is you get a kitchen training iron boy straight away so you don't have to waste a turn uh hiring them so it gets you speeds you up into the game uh even further uh the first market here used you can now get money for selling goods so it's just incredible you actually get money from marketing and you get distance negative two which is an incredible benefit so the um if the guru strategy and the recruitment goal strategies got a boost this is turbo boosted so now the marketing strategy has become a super good option uh even and it goes crazy when you look at um the milestones which you would be first to get your choice out of the first pizzas sold and so on it gives you a radio so they've really in the catch-up mechanism this option of marketeer first higher has become a much better option i actually i don't haven't won many games with this but i actually won a catch-up game of food chain magnet five player by starting with a marketeer okay i just want to give a shout out to the forums on board game cake and the um because i looked at some of the articles on there and it formed this video there really are fantastic things on here um max g about breaking the mold of the recruitment girl or trainer opening so talking about the other options david gibbs was really helpful and concise uh then there was another person brett m has written this fantastic article about just laying out the different ones he actually talks about this trainer into food strategy which is he recommends for beginners which is um which is i haven't even talked or looked into but yeah check out these wonderful articles that have informed this video on board game cake in 2018 i was at the essen board game fair and splatter were there they were offering uh opportunities to play test this expansion ketchup i got a spot at the table but then i realized i'd only played the base game a few times i didn't actually own it so i actually totally crashed and burned i think i even hired a market here as my first action and afterwards you know it was really embarrassing the splatter guy said to me uh why did you sign up to protest the expansion of a game you don't really know the base game of which was a good point i just said i just wanted to hang out with you guys all afternoon so we all had a laugh about it and they were really good sports and in fact they put my name in the rulebook so this is a company that i really respect and admire and they or they're always interacting on the forums and board game geek with fans and answering questions and fujian magnet is just one of their games they have designed and published many fantastic and interesting games for us to check out right he's talking about things like dungeons and dragons no but i remember we had a club in the school once i used to sit with them sometimes well um yeah i was probably in that club that's me i'm that guy okay so um when we have a new product coming out and they plaster it all over town and the bus stops and everything you just get people coming in asking for that specific new thing and all you see when you're working is 20 of those things coming down so everyone wants one it's on the bus it's on everything yeah we run out of it all the time you see that for real you see that marketing you just see the power of it like for real in real life yeah this game actually has a little bit of a reputation being like monopoly you know you're uh it can be a bit cruel monopoly the issue of monopoly is it's not a lot of fun really because it's about eliminating all the other players yeah which is kind of frowned upon in modern board games but this game's got a bit of a reputation because you can sort of go out of business and you end up having to fire all your stuff and it can be quite a miserable experience for some people well hopefully you'll be feeling a little more confident going into your next game of food chain magnet you can find the full video with fast food workers sherry and lee on the channel you can support the channel by hitting the subscribe button liking the video or sharing let me know what you think thank you for your encouragement and thanks for watching and i will see you in the next one you

Channel: Unfussy Board Games

Views: 1,131

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Unfussy Board games, splotter spellen, splotter, horseless, carriage, food chain magnate, strategy, heavy cardboard, dice tower, bus, antiquity, indonesia, the great zimbabwe, board game, essen spiel, beginner, watch it played, gaming rules

Id: jpHMv5sqArc

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2020