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. One good approach to take is to gun for Guru or Coach. These guys allow you to tech up and catch up to anyone who’s got their engine going. Here’s how you do it: When you get to that point, you’ll be running such a high-octane operation that no one else can catch up. The key milestone that enables you to do this is the Salary discount milestone, giving you three employees who won’t cost you a dime, but will help you run hot. Placing your starting restaurant: Balance staying close to customers with being close to drink distribution centers. Being close to customers makes it easier to do business without having to fight on price. Being close to drink distribution centers protects you from competitors spamming drink marketing campaigns that you cannot fulfill. That’s because the game is complex, but the rules aren’t complicated. If you read the guide, it’s not even that long. But by showing you everything you can do and giving you no boundaries other than your hiring capacity, the game puts in you in a position of complete freedom, which can be daunting for players. It is easy when your turn is very constricted: roll the dice, move your meeple, draw a card, resolve some stuff. In this game, your turn goes like this: it’s a new day, you can hire up to X people and have up to Y working today, go. Will you hire more recruiters to increase your staff numbers further? Or will you train your existing staff to make them more efficient? Can you afford their salaries then? Without marketing, there will be no demand for your products, will you prioritize that? If you do, will your supply meet that demand? Do you have enough managers to even allow all your hired staff to work? Will you focus on putting waitresses to work, to get more tips? Or will you favour developers who will get more houses in the area, in an attempt to gain more clients? Your ultimate goal is to end the game with more money than anybody else, so will you raise the price of your products? If you do and the competition can provide the same products at a lower price, the customers will go to them instead, but they’ll be making less money per sale. You could always open a new restaurant closer to the houses your rivals often serve and try to undercut them. Decisions, decisions. Milestones

If you lay-out all of the cards, this game is definitely a table hog, but it certainly looks impressive. Food Chain Magnate is a challenging strategy game about building a fast food chain. The focus is on building your business using a card-based (human) resource management system. Players compete on a variable city map through purchasing, marketing and sales, and a labor market for key staff members. The game can be played by 2-5 serious players in 2-4 hours. Theme(s) Response: Hire and train a bunch of marketers to scatter demand for goods in one turn, then hire a bunch of people who can produce what’s being demanded. By the time your upgrading opponent can get things to work, you’ve already collected a bulk of the income. Understand the concept of islands– No customer is an island, but some customers effectively live on their own island with their own set of neighbors, all of whom are isolated from all of the other dwellings. So serving that neighborhood may prevent you from serving others. What this allows you to do is determine which competitors you’ll need to prioritize. If you have a highly competitive playgroup who are willing to play the game multiple times and develop their own strategies over time, then it will be very rewarding and you should buy it.With a drive-thru, customers that were previously 1 or 2 squares away may now wind up being 0 or 1 square away, respectively, all because they can now enter a new corner of the restaurant. Food Chain Magnate is a heavy strategy game about building a fast food chain. The focus is on building your company using a card-driven (human) resource management system. Players compete on a variable city map through purchasing, marketing and sales, and on a job market for key staff members. In 2019, Splotter Spellen released Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism & Other Ideas, an expansion to the main game. [3] Similarly, Food Chain Magnate does not take four hours to play. Once you are acquaintanced with the game, a match should not take longer than two hours. The extremely long play times reported by some are caused by not knowing the cards and playing in an extremely conservative manner. INDIE One aspect of Food Chain Magnate I particularly enjoy is that it’s deeply satirical. From the design to the illustrations, it paints a cynical picture of the fast food business and the mid-century American culture that gave birth to it.

Turn 3: Train that Junior Vice President into a Coach if people are starting to blitz the board with marketing, or Train them into a Vice President if you have time. But if you want to better understand why these are good suggestions and get some alternative pathways to consider, watch on. I’m assuming, of course, that you have a good idea for how to play Food Chain Magnate. Placing your first restaurant 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 (for example, the CEO has this ability), make pizzas or burgers, send lorries out to buy beer, lemonade or pop from third-party suppliers, train your employees to make them more effective, initiate a marketing campaign etc. These abilities drive the entire game and you shape your organisation’s hierarchy and employees to fit the strategy you want to follow. This allows for an incredibly flexible game and you are continually having to plan your own strategy whilst making adjustments to try and counter the emerging strategies of your opponents. Food Chain Magnate is designed, first and foremost, for clarity in play. The illustrations are nice but their main goal is being easy to recognize from across the table. The board follows the spartan principles of the 18XX series and seems empty in comparison with the detailed, but harder to follow, boards of other contemporary releases.Likewise, being close to drink distribution centers allows you to wield drinks as a weapon to catch your opponents off guard. Train some marketers to flood drink demand onto the board and any competitors without access to those drink distribution centers will be left high and dry, generating no income for the work they’ve done. 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 are also placed next to the board. Customers prefer to spend as little money as possible, including the cost of driving. Lowering prices and aggressively placing restaurants next to their houses allows us to undercut the competition and get their sales. The interplay between prices, training and our capacity for cooking enough hamburgers drives the game forward and is extremely fun. SATIRE Proximity to customers: This determines how much discounting you’ll need to attract and serve those customers, and Of the openings, Recruiting Girl is my favorite. That is because Recruiting Girls allow you to recruit, which in turn, allows you to respond to threats that materialize on the board. The key to this is the “First to Hire 3 Employees” milestone. It gives you 2 free Management Trainees which allow you to accommodate all of the new employees you’ll be bringing to bear. What a fourth-turn Recruiting Girl Strategy should look like. Benefits of the Recruiting Girl Opener

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. It’s also fun. There’s something funny about flooding the board with hamburgers or driving food prices negative just to crush the competition. You can even get Zeppelins to get drinks and plop down houses simply to sell more food. The brutality of the gameplay drives home its satirical message, without resorting to clichés such as fast food being unhealthy, unclean or its consumers dumb. DIFFICULTY If you’ve read the Food Chain Magnate rulebook, the adage “location, location, location” holds true. A restaurant’s location affects two things: Un côté impardonnable où la moindre erreur se paye cash et empêche de revenir dans la partie : j’ai vu un joueur s’ennuyer durant les 3 dernières heures de la partie car il s’était planté durant les 10 premières minutes !!! Conversely, if you spent your turn making pizzas and nobody has marketed a pizza, then your pizzas are thrown in the bin at the end of the turn.

Once you get going, you’ll be hard to stop. When you’re the one parading around with a Brand Director, showering radio advertisements willy nilly with no one able to meet all of the demand, then your engine will help you take home the prize. Within this Trainer-first paradigm, there are two branches that you can conceivably take. Use the Trainer with the goal of getting a Guru or Coach 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.

Hiring employees: When the game gets underway, prioritize the “First to Recruit 3 Employees in one turn” milestone. Here’s how to do that: Turn 3: Hire three people, whatever makes sense, and get the milestone “First to Recruit 3 Employees” so that you get access to two Management Trainees. Some will find the 75€ price tag galling. While the hundreds of wooden tokens are not cheap, they will disappoint those who value games by their pieces. Still, there are some minor issues. The game is in dire need of an organizer and the board tiles, plain or not, aren’t perfectly cut and don’t fit each other. Like most economic games, the paper money is inadequate and best replaced by poker chips. Find a location close to customers– Being closer to your customers decreases the amount of effort you need to put in to generate a sale. Rather than spend time hiring Pricing Managers and making sure you have space in your org chart for them, you can focus on higher priorities like finding other ways to undermine your competition.

Bus

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. If someone markets burgers to a property, that property will want to buy a burger next turn. If someone else markets beer to that same property, then next turn they will only buy from a restaurant that can provide both burgers and beer. Marketing campaigns can become incredibly powerful, controlling the demand in large parts of the board. Of course, anyone that has the required products can sell to the market. Once it has been created and this gives wonderful opportunities to steal customers from the person doing the marketing. It’s harder to maintain the tempo and flexibly respond because you’re deliberately neglecting the Recruiting Girl which lets you be more flexible in how you want to run your org chart. Food Chain Magnate is the first breakthrough hit for Splotter, a two-man operation from the Netherlands known for their economic games. They have released some of the most intriguing games in the genre like Roads & Boats, a love-letter to logistics, and Greed Incorporated, a game about taking companies down from the inside for personal gain. 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. There’s no mincing words about it: Food Chain Magnate might prove disheartening at first. Some will be crushed on their first match and vow to never play again. But what makes it great is its sharpness, it’s high level of interaction and punishing gameplay. It’s up to us to rise up to the challenge and overcome its learning curve. FOOD CHAIN MAGNATE (2015)