Food Chain Magnate - Is it... Monopoly?

ah bear with me on this one you might be a seasoned cardboard pro having bitten more times than you can chew you don't need me to tell you what food chain magnet is or how it tastes but you yes you the other you you might just be making your first flip into this lewd illogical dip and you need some salsa to explain this under salsa in this analogy and you are I think maybe it's just best if I tell you what food chain magnet is and then we'll go from there first published in 2015 by an obscure Dutch publisher splutters Belen food chain magnet immediately became a critical and fan favorite sending out multiple print runs and climbing - currently the space of 28th best board game in the world according to the podium geek a database with over 90,000 entries and millions of users think what you want about bgg and aggregate ratings but if you don't like this game you're in a very small minority really this game this game with artwork that looks like it was made on microsoft word 97-2003 guarded there must be something very special cooking under the hood so let's look under the hood in food chain magnet like in any economic simulator you will win the game if you have the most money by the end of it to get money you need to hire staff put up billboards or other advancements create demand for junk food hiya chefs to cook junk food or delivery people to collect bottle drinks navigate a hellish corporate structure and eventually hopefully sell a stupid burger let's start at the very top when you begin you have only a single card CEO that's you I do you have one and only one measly ability to hire one person you might think that's somatically inaccurate but let me tell you MPI is already in its sixth year and it is only since November that we actually managed to hire officially a second person so as far as I'm concerned this is a pretty accurate description of what it's like to start a business who can you hire well guess what there's a whole pamphlet depicting a web of potential employees like waitresses trainers hiring girls kitchen trainees and other professions you can later train them into like brand managers yeah you try and say that without it sounding filthy the only thing I don't understand is why they had to put it all in this odd unwieldly shaped pamphlet oh it's a mini here's where complications begin so your first action is to hire someone great you think I'll hire a kitchen trainee they can make a pizza or a burger my choice and if I do that I will immediately get rewarded because of the game's milestone system the milestones are the beating heart of food chain magnet a cornucopia of powerful game-breaking rewards to anyone who achieves their criteria first and only to the people who achieved them first let's say I was the first person to run a billboard ad great now all my adverts will run forever whereas other players adverts will expire they can acquire that same achievement if they also run a billboard on the same round but because all our choices of what to do have been done secretly and revealed simultaneously that's not something they can react to only into it if they haven't that achievement will be gone forever back to the kitchen trainee who was our original first choice now that it's round 2 we can finally send them to work under our newly established corporate structure every round you will select which of your employees you'll want to send to work your CEO can manage free people under them but if you're CEO manages the managers then who manages the managers managed by the managers no one that's not a situation in the game it's just your CEO managers and then the staff underneath them don't try and get fancy anyway each round you will secretly create a hierarchy of employees in the form of a pyramid that you'll be sending to work simultaneously reveal them and then they will all do what they do best backs around to our CEO can hire someone they'll do so but it's not important who food this example meanwhile our kitchen trainee made their first Pizza they could have made a burger their choice either one is great because either one would net as a milestone for the first pizza or burger produced and that means that we get our first pizza or burger cook for free now that cook can't actually work this round but we can send them to do things from the next round onwards and then we'll realize that we have to pay salaries and cooks needs salaries how much money do we start the game with none what happens next will fire the cook we can't even fire anyone else because by the game's rules we can only fire people that require a salary and in this example the only person we have that requires a salary is the pizza cook and if we could fire someone else next round we'd still have the pizza cook who needs the salary therefore making us fire someone and meanwhile our friends have been doing things that are actually useful to them managing your dirty burger Empire is only half the battle food chain magnate lives in the world of advertisements corporate price wars and maintaining your little efficiency puzzle wire like ours is just not going to cut the mustard when you've got ruthless competition burning your buns food chain magnet plays of our cards but it plays out on the map the tiles form a neighborhood with restaurants houses or even houses with gardens and in this world if you have a garden you're willing to pay extra for junk food if you acquire a marketing trainee or other advertising cards you'll be placing billboards mailing out leaflets flying an airplane with an ad banner or even transmitting through the waves the need for Pizza speed each house reached by an ad campaign that for the sake of example is advertising beer will suddenly develop an insatiable craving for beer and nothing else will do if your restaurant can undercut the price and distance traveled and offer something better than your competitors they'll come and eat in your joint and you'll be making the money and now imagine a system that lets you do all kinds of shenanigans if you're blasting a house with adverts for Coke burgers and beer then they will only go to a restaurant that stocks all three of those in this constant struggle to undercut your opponents you instead have the flexibility to double your price make sure you're selling something no one else can deliver and then rake in the dough dough being both food and money that's a food chain magnet in a nutshell it's ruthless and unforgiving it doesn't just punish in experience it's a swimming pool filled with minds including the one I described earlier that you could step on on your very first turn inevitably losing you the game whether this box is a cutthroat gauntlet or an experiment in game design is a question for a different video and not one I will make or entertain because unlike our other videos this is not a review oh no this is a video called food chain magnate is it monopoly right okay I know some of you might be mildly angry because I'm trampling on sacred ground here but just trust me for a little bit by the end of it even if you don't agree with me you won't be upset I promise it is a very drastic comparison after all one of these is an iconic example of bad game design lazy mechanisms and an incredibly long playing time and the other ones monopoly I'm kidding I'm kidding I just wanted to see your face when I said on the surface comparing these two games is ludicrous first of all the designs are literally a century apart and in one of them your create complex corporate structures and get rewarded for intimate knowledge and outmaneuvering your opponents in the other you roll dice to see how far you can walk your top hat and wonder how Christmas took a wrong turn so suddenly but here's my argument regardless of what you might think of the pedigree I propose that not only do both of these games try to achieve the exact same thing but that food chain magnate consciously or coincidentally spun out of monopoly first let's look at some of the more obvious parallels like artwork monopoly had many different versions but the one we associated with the most is this pastiche of 50s American white-picket-fence ideal you don't need to look at FCMs cards long to spot the same ethos on its characters and even the much maligned and loathed map tiles perfectly emulate the hospital green squares with black lines look of monopolies board and the tiles for gardens of an actual white picket fence then there's game lack and much has been said about how monopoly isn't just a miserable time it's also a very very long miserable time well guess what foo Qing magnet is also long and the more people you play it with the longer it gets was perfectly manageable at two or three it becomes cumbersome before and ridiculously protracted with five it would be even fair to say that game length is directly parallel to play account in ours which makes the six player module in the catch-up mechanism expansion ever so questionable you might say that that's an issue with play account specifically but I've got news for you play Monopoly with two all free players and you'll probably finish it quicker than a game of FCM and you might say to me Africa that's fine games can be long it's whether you're feeling engaged throughout that matters food chain magnet undeniably rewards familiarity and skill creating disparity at the table it is not entirely uncommon that one player will dominate all the proceedings and you arrive at the same two conclusions hours later that you had at the ten minute mark one Stephens going to win yet again and two Stephen the difference of course is that in one of these the runaway leader is created by a carefully crafted plan and masterful execution and in the other one we brought some dice and it bears mentioning that the ketchup mechanism expansion offers the titular ketchup module why is it called the ketchup mechanism oh you got me again the manual tells us is a catch-up mechanism only in theory but in practice will let more skilled players abuse the system further to create even stronger choke holds if again since the irony in FCMs design choices you're barking up the right tree once again just like monopoly it's laden with humor poking fun at capitalist structures each round you'll be choosing which of your employees will sent back to work and which won't if they work they are part of that CEO pyramid I showed you if they don't and I'm not kidding you they are on the beach which might seem nice to anyone who's not been under a zero-hour contract it won't take you long to remember some of that same type of humor in Monaco man game even now we take it for granted also monocle man game doesn't have a manner in the monocle anymore I'm just not sure how to feel about that this is a system we're getting out of prison is literally achieved via a pass card that you could even purchase from an opposing player literally calling in a favor to circumvent the law it's worth reminding here that monopoly was originally designed by Lizzie magie and known as the landlord's game a critique and teaching tool for the consequences of land grabbing the version we know and love now was plagiarized later by a man and in both versions were sold to Parker Brothers Lizzie got $500 for her patent and whilst Parker Brothers did do a print run of her version it is now known as one of the rarest board games published in the 20th century meanwhile the monopoly version was printed over and over again eventually producing countless branded variants and spin-offs the ultimate irony here is that it didn't even matter that Lizzie magie got there first or that she held multiple patents for this game she just didn't have enough financial clout and someone with more influence came in and boxed her out and thus we arrive at the only point of comparison that matters food chain magnet just like monopoly is a pastiche of capitalist structures but one where the scope of play strangely mimics the history of Monopoly remember milestones achievements that reward you for being the first person to do something in the game not only is the nature of this system emulating capitalist strategies of establishing a foothold and then boxing everyone out but all so remember that turn one trap I told you about with the kitchen trainee well da perfectly illustrates what happens when you try to swim the shark-filled tank with nothing but a Free Willy t-shirt to defend you and if you survive that gauntlet and achieve success you'll then proliferate your strategy continuously until no one can stop you frequently conversations spring up about board games as art our board games art people will ask which is a dart question with an obvious answer what's more interesting is asking what board games odd what makes them artistic and more importantly different from other forms of art I always fall back to Alan Moore and his response to why he doesn't want his comic books adapted to film he he draws a parallel between the two mediums they're both visual and narrative based at the same time but ultimately a comic book should be a comic book because it has to be a comic book it can do what no other art form can and if it was meant to be a film it should have been one to begin with so what can a board game do that other forms of art can't well my answer is that unlike a book or a film or what have you you can program your brain to think feel and act in a moment Steve you bastard that's my spot get off of that is something we've all shouted in the game more than once sure a song could make you move it could make you dance it couldn't even make you sing but it cannot put you in the headspace of your subject it won't let you emulate the thoughts and processes that is the realm of games alone I think board games achieve this in two different ways some emulate the fun of an activity if you're playing captain sonar you get to pretend you're in a submarine I mean it's not an actual representation of a submarine at no point will your actions lead to a nuclear meltdown with no chance of escape and some games emulate a more abstract idea like resource management or counting probability dressed up in theme but more and more a different kind of game emerges instead of carefully crafting its systems to make sure you're having a good time it small concern to force you into situations less comfortable a great example of this is our earlier reviewed packs premiere second edition where you play as Afghani warlords constantly switching allegiances between foreign powers for personal gain a subject that is never easy and you'll never really sure whether you're the hero of this story I guess looking at it from a narrative perspective is helpful in some games you are the cheerful protagonist going on a romp and in others you are put in the shoes of a person you'd never want to be in real life I think that puching magnet Falls very much into the latter which brings us to the ultimate question if he forced me to answer whether food chain magnet is monopoly at the start of this video I would have sheepishly been forced to admit that no it isn't but without the context of the multitudes of parallels and similar goals none of the rest of what I had to say would have made any sense food chain magnet isn't monopoly because unlike monopoly it succeeds at its goal it's a critique of capitalist systems but instead of taking you along for the ride it puts you into the driver's seat the fact that the seed is inlaid with sharp metal spikes is another matter all-together and I guess I have one final admission to make I don't actually enjoy playing food chain magnet which is a testament at how good it is at what it does I don't like monopoly because it's tedious whereas FCM I don't like it because it reminds me too much of my dad who in real life has constantly taken the turn one trap without ever learning anything from his previous attempts and I can't think of any other game that does that which is not an indictment it's praise finally I have no idea whether the designers of food chain magnate had any of this in mind I'd argue that some of this is obviously evident and some of it is probably my own conjecture which shouldn't even really matter you could read everything that Shakespeare wrote in less than a year but you couldn't read everything that was written about what Shakespeare wrote in your lifetime ah it's personal and our response to it should be personal to paraphrase what we get out of our is up to us I'm just glad that there are games these days that provide us with so much

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 61,027

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, npi, boardgames, boardgamegeeks, brettspiel, brettspiele, jeuxdesociete, tabletop, games, juego de mesa, gamenight, 2019, food chain magnate, splotter, ketchup mechanism, expansion, monopoly, hasbro, landlord's game

Id: CQ4z900WFj4

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mr0santan]

I liked this video a whole lot. This is a board game critique in the artistic sense; comparing and contrasting two works, noting common themes and influences, and analyzing their relative success in evoking a similar emotion, feeling or concept. It's great to see people taking our hobby seriously.

I am very happy that there are professional board game reviewers who can deliver content beyond the "I liked it" level.

[u/SeraphymCrashing]

Huh, I thought this was a really well done and thought provoking video. I'm surprised at all the people annoyed by it.

[u/theincrediblejerred]

So, the cardinal issue that I take with this video is the "artistic license" approach it tries to narrate.

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Monopoly has been historically proven to be a pointed criticism of capitalism in broad sweeping strokes. Yes, the irony that it is one of the most commercially successful board games while having been designed to criticize commercialism and capitalism in general is delicious. But the point here is the artist's intent. Which is illustrated by the fact that Lizzie Magie designed her game with two rulesets; the one very comparable to what is in publication today, and the anti-monopolist rules.

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Contrast that with FCM, a game by a company with the self-admitted goal to focus on putting mechanics at the forefront of their designs. In their "About Us" section, the second sentence makes it a point to say they "are famous for making deep, complicated strategy games." Does FCM have certain bleak, cynical jokes in it, poking fun at the retrospective commentary of 1950's Americana? Of course it does. And do those jokes connect? Broadly, yes. But to say that Splotter's artistic goal of this game was to put the ideas of capitalist criticism on display is somewhat disingenous. They have been quite candid with their goals in the past; to make challenging, difficult games for a minority of gamers.

[u/lesslucid]

Wow, what a great critique. The title is kinda clickbaity, but I think the analysis actually justifies its use, and the point about what games-as-art can do that other artforms can't was excellent.

[u/CthulhuShrugs]

I thought the Alan Moore quote was very interesting. It sums up why I love board games so much in a simple way.

[u/jbaird]

Betteridge's law of headlines

[u/MaltesePanda]

Enjoyed the video. As someone who was first attracted to the hobby by the ability for board games to force you to inhabit not only specific roles, but also to play as a specific ideology or even as an economic or political philosophy, I would love to see a video or section in the podcast about explicitly political games.

I’m new to the hobby so haven’t played many games, but Bloc by Bloc, Co2 or Wir Sind Das Volk...I would love to be exposed to more games that really try to address political realities. Any other ideas or recs?

[u/OmegasSquared]

So i've been giving this video a lot of thought since I watched it earlier. I've been reading the comments and reflecting on my own feelings. I'm very ambivalent on this video. For context, I neither like nor dislike NPI, and I have mixed but positive feelings regarding FCM.

I think my biggest issue with the video is that it feels needlessly inflammatory. Efka knows full well that comparing FCM to Monopoly will upset people. The title is flagrant clickbait. And the comparison between the two games is framed in a straight faced manner that's more likely to elicit a reaction than if he were to simply present the video as a straightforward review and bring up Monopoly as a point of thematic comparison during the review. Speaking of, the comment that the video isn't a review is, if taken at face value, patently absurd. And if taken as facetious, then it feels like a tool to dampen the impact of Efka's criticisms and another contributor to the trolly presentation of the Monopoly comparison. Like that "friend" who says something nasty about you and then claims it's a joke when confronted. Seriously, how can you tell your viewers to trust you and go along for the ride, that they won't be upset by the end of the video, and then immediately turn around and "joke" that FCM is bad, poorly designed, and overlong? Then monopoly comparison is so drawn out and in-depth that it's difficult not to accept it as wholly straight-faced.

My next issue is that the criticisms feel either shallow, uninformed, or misleading. Efka raises the very valid criticism that the game has unnecessary traps for new players, but fails to fully address and explore the issue. There's a lot to say on that topic about the base game vs the expansion, about the merits of Splotter's "You can lose on the first turn" philosophy, about strategic depth vs the illusion of strategic depth, about the scripted nature of the opening moves and the delayed capacity for unique strategic expression. Or the comment that FCM is as many hours long as the number of players, which is wholly untrue. Not only does it completely gloss over the nuance of player driven game length, but it's only accurate for first games or the truly drawn-out price war games. Which, again, the expansion addresses. FCM actually scales well for player count because the game effectively front loads all decision making in a phase of simultaneous play, so it doesn't extend the length linearly per player like most games. Finally, the frustration expressed for the game's cutthroat nature is handled with no nuance or depth. There's a lot to say about the game's divisiveness due to it's freedom for players to decimate inexperienced players and run away with the game, or due to the aforementioned traps. Instead it's expressed simply as a criticism. Though taken literally it's neither positive nor negative criticism, contextually it feels negative due to the numerous instances of ragging on FCM or moments where Efka expressed his dislike of the game.

I liked where the discussion of board games as art and the ability of games to use the ludonarrative and interactivity of the game to convey things other art forms cannot was going. But it feels as though it isn't fully formed, given the rather narrow scope it's presented with. And more importantly, it feels like a deflection for Efka's criticism. An obfuscation of the review, regardless of whether it's intentionally or unintentionally a review. I very much want to see that topic discussed. But it felt like this video raised issues without exploring them. There's another fascinating discussion embedded in the video regarding the narrative role of the player and how that can relate to the experience of the game and to the psychology of the player. A discussion on how in uninteractive media we sometimes want to witness the hero triumph against adversity and sometimes we want to gleefully enjoy a villain commit atrocious acts. Then exploring how that psychology changes in interactive media, when the viewer is asked to inhabit the role rather than observe it.

As i've watched amd rewatched the video while writing this i've warmed on the video a tad. But it still feels a little half-baked to me. A little confused. As a criticism it feels uninformed and vapid. As a discussion on board games as art it feels lacking. As an essay that FCM is thematically the modern day equivalent of Monopoly it's most successful. But that only accounts for maybe a third of the video's runtime. The other 2/3s are less successful, which is not a good ratio.

[u/TheNiXXeD]

I found this really interesting. I've actually made this exact same comparison before when talking with less experienced gamers. The main point I illustrate though is the change in game design with modern gaming. The premise behind both games is similar, to ruin the competition and get all the money. But the execution of it is way different. Many people have weirdly fond memories of Monopoly. But the memories are tied to the emotions generated. FCM will generate those too, but it'll be strategy and not luck. FCM is definitely one of my favorite games, but like my other favorites, I can't just play it with anyone.