Food Chain Magnate - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

you gotta make a mistake hey are you ready with my uh lunchtime egg no i'm not gonna eat a lunchtime egg i'm getting my hamburger why because you're not a twerp ah big day today we are looking at food chain magnate shut up and sit down's first ever splatter spelling game and this is a dutch publisher famous for making board games with the training wheels taken off and the roads filled with oncoming traffic this is a game for two to five serious gamers that'll take two to four hours we think it'll take even longer and yet some connoisseurs say that dutch publishers jorus versinger and jerome doman make the best board games in the world well what do we think i'll tell you what it's on to a great start with this theme players in food chain magnate control competing fast food chains in a tiny town the winner is the player with the most money when the bank runs out and you're going to be doing this by controlling more and more complicated hierarchies of employees and that's about as far as this game can get before it becomes very weird very funny and has this sort of whiff of organized crime your employees show up to work when you ask you pay almost none of them people even when they have a desire for something are fickle and can be filled with a desire for something else and if they don't have the chance to get what they want they just won't leave the house and rightly so because i think if they go to the wrong restaurant in this town someone's going to break their legs for all the talk about food chain magnate a gamers game it's really not that complicated i mean you start out by choosing your staff for the day which all get revealed at the same time in this gigantic pyramid but to begin with you've only got one member of staff the ceo that's you then players taking in turns to perform all of the actions of the staff in their pyramid and the ceo to begin with just hires one person so you just hire one person but who can i hire well you've got this wonderful menu of all the people you can buy and all these people on the far left you can just buy and you get them and then you put them in your little pile to one side like you're playing dominion matt you don't buy them you hire them i buy what i want here's a pyramid i made earlier and the cool thing about this is all of these things happen at once you don't go well i'll do this one then you do that one you just sort of go it's my turn now business so we've got the ceo hire a person recruiting girl let's me hire another person suddenly i've got quite quite a lot of staff bought and then i've got my marketing trainee that lets me put a billboard somewhere to sell things to people an errand boy who will go and bring me one drink of any type i choose and a kitchen trainer who's gonna make me a burger or a pizza and these management that allow me to sprawl out bigger and bigger and you can just have incredibly large corporate structures that shouldn't make me excited but it does best of all all those people will work for you for free probably because you know where their families live however it's worth advancing up the careertree to the point where you do have to pay people because they're so ruddy powerful and that is where trainers come in trainers are completely excellent people as our coaches and gurus and they're going to train your employees so you can swap that card for a better card problem is the card you train can't be at work when you train them and this is so much of food chain magnet trying to figure out precious seconds where you have time to hire someone or train them or you know knuckle down and actually make some food for once the other vitally important employee i want to cover now is marketers if marketers are in your pyramid then they go off and market something you take a mail on a campaign or a billboard you put that on the board and you advertise for example coca-cola and then that house wants coca-cola thing is that house's desire for coca-cola can be fulfilled by anyone as soon as anyone markets anything you're essentially creating a watering hole in a pack of lions and now before we move on to the bitty gritty of exactly how food is sold and fulfilled i just want to spend a bit more time talking about how absolutely awesome this employee hiring mechanic is we're so used to games where players take interns to get a reward of their choice and i get this and now you get something food chain magnet is that but instead of being in the passenger seat you're in the driver's seat you can hire as many of these cars as phone calls you can make you can train as many people as trainers will squeeze in to your office and that's great because you're not just trying to make an engine by yourself this game you're playing it's all about reacting to what your friends are doing to this board and it's so satisfying and so liberating and while it is liberating to not have to jostle and fight and block each other for this wonderful selection of employees most of the time it doesn't mean it's easy you have to watch what other people are doing this street level map of the city is constantly changing and you need to be building a path for the future of your business that that no one else can follow steering off in directions quickly so everyone else can go oh i can't really benefit from that because business is business and business is notoriously cold and cutthroat and mean and let's just say that you do manage to instill this absolute unbelievable desire for hamburgers everybody in the city wants hamburgers an uncontrollable lust for meat well that's all very good but when you're making all of that money maybe people will leave you alone to make all of that money or maybe somebody will go well actually i think i'd like a slice of that hamburger apple pie suddenly you've got a price war two or more people nudging down the costs until one person is selling all of the burgers because everyone wants burgers somebody's gonna sell them for cheap goddamn it or maybe that's not what happens maybe what happens is somebody changes the demand people want burgers do they well no actually they want burgers and beer everybody wants burger and beer and because all these people are so silly and flippant they now don't just want a burger they have to have a burger and a drink but they can't sell any drinks which means they can't sell any burgers and they all go in the bin and all these people are unhappy and miserable but the person that you're up against doesn't make any money so you feel great and that's the vital thing about this game every transaction is binary customers either buy it all yep i'll have a burger and a beer or they buy nothing are you having a beer i don't want a burger and if you can't fill this demand then their wants just keep stacking up on tuesday they want a burger on wednesday they want a burger and a beer on friday they want two burgers and a beer or as we call it the unhappy meal there are so many different ways to play you could hire a crack marketing team or you could get pricing managers and discount managers lower your prices wait till your friends give up and then jack the prices back up again or you could hire loads of managers and loads of tip generating waitresses until your restaurant resembles a ponzi scheme where if people wander in by chance then you might be able to sell them a lemonade so it's been a really strong business yeah for business we our projector heads are much higher than projecting we've got a business structure which is now set in place and uh we've got some other just in here we've got some of the paperwork that's the wrong suitcase um what did we sell uh we sold one breakfast egg for how much uh eleven thousand dollars here's another bit of strategy for you you can control the real estate market of course you can because you control everything placing a real estate person in your tree allows you to place a new house a new house with a garden and just like in real life if someone has a garden their life can contain five desires instead of just three and also they paid double for all of their food i wish i had a garden do you have a garden get in touch in summary as the old adage goes if you can't beat them just get the hell away from them and hope they can't produce enough burgers to infringe upon the small niche you've created unlike with euros this interaction between players isn't just for seasoning it's baked into the very core of the game the game of food chain magnate is always played on the board rather than in your hand and i personally love that because it keeps the game fuzzy stops you from retracting into your shell and getting lost in a world of efficiency and numbers foon chain magnate is a complex machine but while long-term strategies still remain key round by round play is done by feel rather than fractions you can sit and stroke your chin about optimizing profits if you want but food chain magnate is willfully ruthless you aren't just dealing with a spanner in the works you're dealing with your machine being declared obsolete by a man as he pours buckets upon buckets of spanners down your trousers you are making like a spider sweat of red tape so you can load the money food chain magnate interactivity is what makes it so good for us it has all the joy of the very best engine management games where you're working over this enigmatic puzzle and having realizations and satisfaction from it the whole time but because the variables involved are your friends and they're trying to break your machine at every turn you get this much more playful satisfying and more to the point complex puzzle you're not just mapping out how to build an efficient empire you're trying to react when your friend trains a marketing guide to a campaign manager to a brand manager to a brand director who suddenly shows up on turn 30 puts down a radio campaign and overnight the whole town becomes alcoholics uh still keeping the puzzle interesting is the fact that there's going to be a randomized town every single game we've got the rest of the town cards back in the box but there are loads of them and then most importantly of all are these milestone cards which we haven't talked about yet which is quite some feat milestones are massive rewards given to restaurants that achieve them first if you market the first burger you're the home of the original burger you get that you're gonna be selling burgers more for the entire game now this absolutely sort of categorizes food chain magnate as that gamers game it was talking about because as part of a rules explanation you have to point out to people how good some of these cards are and they're worth lunging for the upside is you're going to end up with different ones in any given game of food chain magnate changing hugely what strategy you have to shoot for but also having more of that sweet huggable kissable interactivity because what your friend's lunch for changes what you have to launch for for a game that's unapologetically long the pace of this is actually surprising you spend two hours or more carefully fighting over scraps or puffing up your chest to make big clever businesses but nothing really happens and then suddenly bang it's over and it's not over in the way of going oh did you just take the last card i think i took the last card oh well i guess that's over kind of manner it's in a kind of you make just how much money how am i flippa duck how much money do you just make that that is that all of the money that's more than all yeah you've won you've won kind of manner that's a better kind of manner because the thing is it's kind of in a way the antithesis to monopoly rather than having you being slowly crushed by the cold uncaring fingers of late-game fully fledged capitalism this is about companies starting out small things jostling for a chance at the big time you all simmer around preparing your plans and then bang like a rocket somebody takes off and they take off big time and they make all the money and they leave and they've won one advantage to ending this game with a financial bang is that oh you've got to be kidding i've forgotten that i have to collect all the pieces of flavor no so one of the advantages of food chain magnate ending with a financial bang that's rubbish is that players who are losing don't often have the time to realize that they are losing uh and also players can just come back from the end if they manage to get in on those last few turns if on that one turn that no one chooses to bring their pizza chefs to work you sell luxury pizza which is the same as regular pizza but it makes you more money and they have gardens and there's just a cash explosion that's good there was something else the other thing we need to point out is that this satisfaction all the way through a game of food chain magnate only works with relatively equivalently skilled players if you're not much of a system thinker obviously because there's no random chance and so many systems in this game you might realize you're very much out of your depth and flounder like a like a fish in a pocket so it should be clear by now that we absolutely love food chain magnate it's interesting it's different it's different with how many people you play it with we've played it with a bunch of different people it's fun for different reasons and it's played in different ways depending on the size of the board the size of the competition what you're up against and you know what it's nowhere near as heavy as we were led to believe that's true there's a lot of stuff to keep track of and you know a ridiculous amount of space used just for all the things you can have but it's quite simple once you get the hang of it absolutely which isn't to say it doesn't have problems it does have problems weird problems really weird problems like onion rings dipped into milkshake weird props ah no so one of the weird problems which is actually a cool mechanic but also a weird problem is everyone gets these three reserve cards with a hundred two hundred and three hundred dollars printed on it and you all select one and you put it into the bank and then halfway through the game you reveal it and all your cards added together is how much money gets added to the bank which is nice you don't know whether to go for short-term profits or long-for-term infrastructure but also you don't know how long the game is going to be when you sit down to play it it could be that everyone else has voted for a really short game and it's a two-hour game everyone else has voted for a game that's going to go in for four and a half hours yes which is nuts it's a hell of an investment to make and obviously it should be clear that this game is cutthroat and that's why we like this game it's brutal it's more interesting than just having a sort of humanless puzzle yes having this kind of basically bashing your brains against other human brains trying to solve how to win the money without any luck without any dice is fantastic but you do need to think about how your friends are going to react to that because let's just say they made some marketing for some pizzas yeah and they've had a pizza chef and they called them antonio yeah and they're going to make so much money they're having so much fun they've got this machine then of course you come in with some kitchen boys you cut the prices and you gouge them you sell all the pizzas they make zero money they have to throw all of their pizzas in the bin and they don't have any money i can't pay antonio antonio can't get paid which means antonio gets fired you gotta think how your friends are gonna react to that because some people will go that was good whereas other people will go how long is this game it's completely true nonetheless shut up and sit down recommends don't believe the nonsense this is it's good it's great and so not that heavy especially compared to something like forbidden stars you know yeah it's good anyway i'm going to go and enjoy the unique exciting interesting lifestyle uh of a man who partially owns a garden but i don't have a girl you don't have a garden do you no i've got a i partially own a garden i'm gonna go and be in my garden i'll see you next time thanks for watching bye i'll see you soon i'll see you soon bye so you

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 301,979

Rating: 4.9475985 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, Food Chain Magnate, su&sd, game, review, game review, boardgame review, board game review, Jeroen Doumen, Joris Wiersinga, Splotter Spellen, Economic, Strategy Game

Id: jHSxnRS2g0o

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 09 2016