Food Chain Magnate | Shelfside Review

yeah hi would you like to join our company will pay you nothing just moved in how are you doing nothing have you ever won to start your own fast-food chain selling burgers and pizza to those hungry Americans well in food chain magnate a complex game by slaughter games you can do just that in food chain magnate or FCM for short you start out as a single CEO and build your fast-food Empire hiring and training staff and trying to get the most cash as possible on a variable board ok let's go back in time to a 20th century America [Music] number nine number nine large the number six extra tip one with cheese so here's FCM in a nutshell you start out as a loan CEO trying to get the most cash to win the game to do that your fast food company is going to be marketing producing and selling all sorts of products through the houses on the map every turn you'll be hiring people from this guide found in your restaurants menu I mean player aid and then training your employees to the next tier if you can't then you can activate your employees abilities like beginning marketing cooking grabbing drinks and even somehow forcing people to move into town okay now it's dinner time people of this American town only eat what they're told they just follow the directions of any marketing campaign that influences their house they're lazy so they just go towards whatever house is closest and cheapest and that's it that's a really simple explanation of the game you repeat hiring using your employees and then selling to the houses until the bank runs out of money for the second time when that happens the game ends and whoever has the most money is the best food chain magnate of this now terribly unhealthy American neighborhood so here are the pros of food shake magnate and Wow we found a lot of them first the components are definitely not junk all the employees are clearly defined with art that really has that mid 20th century American aesthetic okay it's unapologetically a little misogynistic which is irritating but the art really does have that old American diner vibe the quality of the hundreds of cards you get are amazing feeling super dense and will last the test of time and the wooden pieces for food are as proportionally chunky and stack really well when needed oh and the game doesn't just give you player aids they give you restaurant menus in the former player aids oh my god available in German and English but these are awesome because they explain almost everything about the game including the corporate structure and milestones wait milestones what are those well these are essentially permanent technologies for your corporation that are unlocked once you fulfill something like being the first to market burgers so you may be thinking wow that's a lot of milestones and yeah that's what ties into the grain amount of varied strategy that just emerges like besides the milestones let's look into the different combinations you can get in hiring alone you're thinking about who and how many people you want to hire each turn all while considering your combined salary costs oh do you want to reduce your salary pay oh okay well what about hiring the HR director or the recruiting manager there's a cool mechanic where you can't even train people at work so you always need to be mindful about giving them a vacation if you want them to ever get better at their job let's point out a couple more awesome abilities that you'll find in this stack of employees how about price manipulation there's a luxury manager that can make your stuff god-awful pricey if you want to export your customers or the discount manager to undercut other restaurants prices like the scummy son of a gun you are what about building on the board yep you can start to build new restaurants and even immediately teleport your existing restaurants oh and you can improve people's houses to make them pay you even more money or you can just build more houses in the town to get a bit more customers and it's a restaurant game so of course you have waitresses to hire now these are really cool too because they give you passive income every turn even if you don't sell anything yeah that doesn't really make much sense thematically but pay free money and here we have to talk about the marketeers now marketeers make on mechanic called marketing which is awesome your employees are literally creating demand in the houses for your products and there's so many different shapes and sizes of marketing tiles that's combined with four different marketing methodologies you can mark it with an airplane banner to a thick row of houses or you can just plant a radio station that blasts your marketing to nine tiles and the priority of marketing matters a lot in this game so houses can quickly get capped in demand as a game progresses since faster more elite marketing dominates late game oh and your employees marketing campaigns will end eventually meaning that you can constantly pivot to new strategies why may you need to pivot well see when you mark it those darn customers won't be loyal to your restaurants products they'll eat any ones so if you're not careful you could just end up marking your products and your corporate enemies could be selling to your targeted houses and getting all the profits we have to stress again that with all these crazy abilities mix in with these 80 milestones there's so many options and after the first couple of turns you'll be constantly using your M and milestones to adapt to your evolving opponent's abilities from their employees and milestones and you're allowed to adapt really well in FCM because of how the perfect information feels really fair you can almost always see what other people are doing as you costly try to outwit each other and the milestone cards count for everyone achieving that goal in a round so it never feels unfair that someone has a cool ability and you don't especially it during early game when you don't have much control over turn order if you really want a cool tech in this game you can probably find a way to get it the only unpredictability is when the bank breaks for the first time causing you to add in the rest of the money and that's where even more skill comes in see throughout the first part of the game you'll have to guess how long the game will be since the second bank is all based off of everyone's secret reserve cards selected before you even start the game so you can look at how other people are playing and then you can try to balance selling with marketing to make sure you synchronize your business strategy with the size of the bank another awesome thing we notice about gameplay the progression feels perfectly appropriate given the corporate theme everyone starts out as a low and CEO in the beginning slowly building up their management and beginning small marketing campaigns then the game will start to explode a couple of rounds later as people pay for better employees that can do stuff like cooking a burgers instead of one the fact that there'll be more and even stronger marketing campaigns in play means that customers are going to be spending more and more money in fact there's so much profit to be made late game that stragglers can naturally just win on the last turn that they can fulfill insane demand as the market starts to saturate in the game and all the companies have tons of goods to sell the price slashing begins in a way that feels thematic and the game doesn't always have to devolve into price slashing either you can place new houses or increase marketing in a way so only you can fulfill demand or just pivot to new products to keep margins high so it's up to the players whether or not the progression will slow with price latching on to replayability and this game has a lot of it the milestone mechanic allows you to discover different strategies since they all give you permanent text so in one game you have the refrigerators so you don't have to throw away food or in another game you can have a permanent discount on salaries besides the milestones every game will be different with the variable board there's really no shortage of how many times you can play this game and identified new milestone synergy with a new orientation of map so fruity magnate is clearly really thematic and this makes it even funnier when you try to imagine what's going on in the game it feels realistic in some aspects as players are creating demand that is satiated as you hire cooks and car operators to produce you're managing your company's cash flow as you pay salaries and engaging in a price war with two restaurants down the street so that all seems realistic and sensible but then wait suddenly one game you're yelling at your errand boys that grab you some beer because your marketing trainee just erected a billboard telling everyone that being an alcoholic is cool what the heck that guy just hired a regional manager and then just teleport his restaurant next door back at corporate your management trainee children all the point to your sanity oh but then under your trainees or your gurus HR directors Zeppelin pilots chefs and your brand manager actually most employees in this 20th century company are unpaid insurance apparently well that's great for your company and you never have to train them so you never need to pay them this game is just littered with tons of flavor to run your fantasy fast food corporation making it so easy to imagine recruiting girls calling people to join your company and all the more satisfying when you make tons of cash in a round okay now on to some logistics right out of the box the components themselves have good clarity of information the rule book is organized cleanly through bold text and is written straight to the point the board itself has that drab old cartoony style that is actually color coded very well with the houses drinks and carts for the employee cards they're grouped by color as well management cards are all black color the marketeers are all blue and fruit production is all green to tell if an employee needs to be paid just check for the cash symbol the products themselves are five different colors which also pop on the board okay let's wrap up with player count they did a good job of scaling setup for two to five players there's a different sites Maps and taking out certain copies of employees and tiles and smaller player accounts we do have to point out though that at five players you have to be ok with a lot of downtime and at two players you'll be missing out on a lot of the interesting multi player interactions okay so now after that heap of pros let's get to the cons to start off this game future magnate is the definition of terrible space management the game just doesn't sit on a table well at all you need a lot of space to play this game the milestones an employee reserved already take up a lot of space to start and while playing you'll quickly run out of space for everyone's growing management tree so for reference we have this three by five duchess gaming table that can barely just squeeze in ti4 but this table struggles with food chain Magni like what so while playing we had to use additional side tables for all the cards why is this such a big deal for gameplay well it's because you'll lose clarity while playing since if everyone's employees and milestones which are key parts you need to play around our heart to see that's really gonna hurt the flow of gameplay to fix this a center game board that shows which milestones are fulfilled and by who is a good start what we ended up doing is creating this accordion for the reserved cards to go inside this does take a while to make though especially to label the next headache with this game is that it doesn't come with any sort of insert for a game with so many pieces now you need a sort of system to organize this game since the milestones employees already take a while to setup so unless you want a foam core like we did be prepared to spend money on a third party insert now for the next con which is amusing because the rest of the components are such good quality is the paper money yes it's like what hoppily money what yep this is the paper money we all know it's terrible it folds and it flies across the table to fix this we've heard of people just using poker chips instead the designers could have also just put in a score pad if they wanted to save money and space okay let's get to scoring now now on to the scoring first the recomendar score which is how we try to evaluate the game as objectively as possible by weighing the pros and cons then we're gonna give you our personal scores which is just how me and Daniel feel about the game food chain magnate is going to be in eight out of ten from us it's overall a great game there's such an amazing fast food and corporation theme here that we wished more games tackled you're holding cute men used to read about working 9 to 5 and what rude order I mean who'd hire next round there's not really any other game out there with this clever management structure and marketing system so combine that with the permanent milestones employee training diversity and amazing replayability and we have results a heavy classic it's a fantastic game mechanically for the competitive fast food chain experience it's trying to be but it doesn't do a good job of being a board game see you'll have to do at least some type of modding to make it enjoyable including replacing the paper money creating an accordion to fit the reserved cards and buying the milestone dry erase boards sold on bgg currently the milestones are so hard to track then it may lend it to thinking that that mechanic is bloated we actually got a request on this but in actuality they're all achieved in very simple ways and tend to mirror each other so after a couple playthroughs you'll be comfortable about what they do so splutters intention was to have players be able to calculate everything in the game from achieve milestones what money is left in the bank and what employees people have but this is really tricky with a current set up of components that don't all fit on the table if you're ok with online play checkout board game core it automates all the bookkeeping and it's free as well now food chain is a really heavy game that requires a lot of thought and there's so much to take in from component sprawling overload that concentrated players can just keep thinking and thinking and grind the game to a halt so beware of extreme analysis paralysis especially at higher player accounts what could also make the game take longer than anticipated is the variable time length where the game could take two hours to four and a half hours if you want the games and quicker you could do a cartel house rule where you all agree on making a smaller second pink but that would ruin the fun and skill of predicting how long the other players wanted your game to take food chain is also the definition of a punishing experience so I guess you're probably getting exactly what you signed up for the demand FULFILLER will always take all the cash when selling to each house as others try to catch up the current leader can have an insane money buffer of a hundred or so dollars which in some games is a large fraction of all the money and they've basically want you see food chain can actually have a runaway loser thing going on there's no catch-up mechanics and the weaker players can ally in any meaningful way and interconnected map because you can't really tear down the winner without hurting your allies so who is this game for well it's for players who like as little to as no luck and their games as possible and love to constantly survey their opponents decisions this player enjoys punishing others and learning from their mistakes and thinking about the game for hours afterward he or she wants an experience that's rewarding in its variety of different strategies they can employ and they're always thinking about how to combine the various employee abilities foutch a magnet for this type of board gamer is that heavy classic they will constantly play but even if you like the theme a lot this game might not be for you for a couple of reasons if you get overwhelmed on having to calculate every single possible variable in the game like food distance management pricing everything else yeah you got to be careful about buying this and you got to be careful about the variable time length and turn down time if those are a deal-breaker for you so here we got to drop the big warning in this game players can get functionally removed from making mistakes early and if you think games like Agricola are really punishing for someone blocking your space fruit chain magnate can be just as bad you see your early game mistakes lead to your opponent's getting all the money for the next couple of hours yeah I mean I guess it's a business game and business can be really cut through oh yeah and if you have a small table good luck fitting everything in this game on it we will end with this food chain magnate is funnily enough the exact opposite of actual fast food FCM is like a fancy dinner that has been carefully designed with so many layers the price tag is ridiculously high but you'd be willing to pay it because the designers are just that top-notch while eating you'll need a slow pace that really lets you true through your decisions cutting through the game and different angles to find new waste out with your opponents but it is one hell of an expensive meal at $100 MSRP and constantly out of stock and we can't really recommend buying FCM without trying it first to see if it fits you and your group now there's one expansion for the same call to catch-up mechanism and other ideas so yeah as it says it adds a new mechanic that helps losers catch up it also adds a new set of milestones new types of bill things food employees and marketing types now we haven't read this game so we can't really analyze it but at a first glance the ads in kimchi sushi noodles in a twentieth-century America I mean come on where's my McRib give me my McRib anyways there's nothing in this bass game that really needs fixing in terms of balance and replayability so we've never felt that an expansion was necessary the expansion also costs 140 bucks MSRP like yikes this costs a hundred bucks MSRP so yeah manse water makes some expensive stuff okay so for what I would personally write food chain magnet I'd given a six out of ten it's an above-average experience for me this is another one those games where what I'm looking at him kind just like why is this even a board game oh and I mean all a food chain magnets experience is better represented digitally like no more insane set up way better clarity of information automated dinnertime at payday and and get this an actually functioning restructuring stage and then for my visual tastes the aesthetics of the game while simplistic and very cool lends to it looking a little a little bland on the table like at the very least if a board game has no real reason being a board game at least I should be able to fiddle around with the I don't know cool minis pretty artwork social mechanics you know like tangible IRL things but that's just not really here for me in food chain magnet don't get me wrong I really like the thoughtfulness and death that exists in this game strategy and it if Lee feels like you're in control of what's going on at all times but again the clarity of information this game is just muddy and that really puts a hamper on my enjoyment of the strategy which you know by the way is a big selling point of this game when everything takes twice as long to calculate thanks to a combination of a bunch of variables all having to be tracked in a analog medium and other than that I don't typically like open information games where the information horizon extends out super far there's very much reason why I don't find chess to be that fun but foutch a magnet on their hand definitely is a little more dynamism that makes counter play a lot more fun to me like that's what's super frustrating to me is that like everything is here for an amazing game I like to theme like a manifests in the gameplay but until I can feel like I'm actually playing food-chain magnet and not playing oddity and components the board game it's gonna be a trudge to play this game my personal score for food chain magnate is gonna be a six out of ten yeah above-average food chain magnate just completely blew me away though the first time I played it as the years went on this game just fell out of the spotlight cuz I didn't really want to spend all the effort it up and I didn't really want such a tense night with my friends but then when testing FCM during quarantine I was like oh yeah that's what this game is missing a computer see online at board game core almost everything is automated and I can see management trees and the reserve at the click of a button so now it's the same game made better with automation any shorter amount of time yeah I'm really starting to believe that I won't ever play this game in person again so on this gameplay I'm still constantly impressed on how well this game ramps up but it's a round like that maybe one and a half to two hour mark I feel like this game just drags on for me and I always actually off for a hundred bucks to put in the reserve to get the game done as soon as possible because looking at like that gigantic and messy game state late in a night is just it's not fun to calculate I get the feeling that this game doesn't really tickle my fancy too much because it's so tense that it doesn't let me interact with my friends in a way I'd like there's not really any hype moments about this game and while the theme is so fun to laugh about that laughing just kind of dies down as you get really engrossed and calculating and it's just a very serious atmosphere also just like Daniel I don't really like perfect information in my games but Wow the hiring and training mechanic FCM is amazing so if there's any game is out there with that sort of mechanic please let me know or if anyone wants to design a game that's like under two hours that has something like this feel oh my god I would buy that wait we have patrons making this possible now oh my god that that's so awesome thank you guys we have max B Clifford H and Bryan C making videos like this possible if you guys new Gummer's to the channel want to join us subscribe and also check out our patreon channel program patreon program hey boss

Channel: Shelfside

Views: 9,258

Keywords: shelfside, shelfside gloomhaven, board game, tabletop, shutupandsitdown, dice tower, boardgamegeek, no pun included, watchitplayed, every scoundrel ever, top 10 board games, board game review, prozd board game, board game design, tabletop games, dicebreaker, tabletop simulator, gloomhaven, settlers of catan, rahdo runs through, inside the box, 3 minute board games, tom Vasel, food chain magnate review, business board game, food chain magnate, heavy cardboard, strategy board game

Id: kyE8V6COjKk

Length: 21min 7sec (1267 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020