Big Boss is a great game of building business empires, both fiscally and physically! You take it in turns to found corporations setting their share price on the stock market. Then endeavour to build up their share price by actually building on the tower stacks to make a fortune on the market. As long as you remember to buy the shares whilst they were cheap!
Big Boss is designed by Wolfgang Kramer published by Funko games and has a heritage in Sid Sackson’s game of the ‘60s Acquire (still available today). It’s 2-6 players with a play time of about 90 minutes.
New York wasn’t built in a day
It works like this. The board depicts a chain of 72 squares that snake around the peripherary until it meets up back at the start. Each of these squares has a corresponding Industry card that has rather pleasing graphical representation of the generic or specific Industry involved. It can be quite fun to work out which candy company or burger chain they are hinting at whilst avoiding copyright suits!
Whilst pretty, the pictures have no impact on the gameplay, only the numbers.
You are dealt a hand of 10 of these cards at the start and 6 of the remainder are placed face up on the table by the draw deck. Note that in a 6 player game of Big Boss this means that there would only be 6 cards left in this draw deck. You also have $40m to spend.
Each turn you either buy a card or play a card to build companies. I’ll take the latter first as building is the only practical thing to do on turn 1. To found a company you take 4 of the chunky, square, stackable building blocks and place 3 of them in a line and place them so one of them covers the numbered square that matches the card you have played. You then put the 4th piece stacked on top of any of the other three and on top of that you place one of the 8 coloured capstone pieces that represents the companies. Each of these companies has 12 Shares available in matching colours.
Share and Share Alike
Now the share market comes into play. Each square that a company covers is worth $1M x the height of the tower on it to the share price. When a company is founded this will be 3 x 1 x $1M and 1 x 2 x $1M = $5M and the starting price on the Share Price table will always be $5M (indeed the first four spaces are blanked out to remind you). Simples!
It doesn’t cost you anything to do this in fact you get paid the $5M for founding the company. Now is your chance to buy shares in it whilst they are cheap. You are not tied to the company or companies that you found and you never “own” them even if you are a majority shareholder. Anyone can buy shares in any company that is on the board as long as there are shares still available. On the 1st turn there is only the 1 company available so you may as well buy your limit of 2 shares in that. You don’t have to but it would be rude not to!
You may also add 1 of your 2 Radio Towers to the top of your tower but this will cost you $15M (later $30M) A bit expensive early on but it is worth 3 Shares in the company. Probably best wait until the shares are worth a bit more or they’ve all been sold. Remember though each player has 2 Radio Towers and there are only 8 Company roofs to place them on. Not a problem in low player count games but with 5 or 6 players there won’t be enough roofs to go round.
Now the other players take their turns. They will probably found other companies and then buy shares in them or your newly founded company.
It’s All In The Cards
In later turns you expand companies to increase their share price. This is done by playing an Industry card that has a number adjacent to an existing building and placing a building there or, because it was one of the other 2 squares when a company was founded, placing the building block on top of an existing building that is on that number. The share price is then increased appropriately and you get paid the current share value.
You can then buy shares in the now more expensive company (NB you will always be able to afford one as you have just been paid the current price) or go bottom fishing picking up other cheaper shares.
So, Industry cards only allow you to build on their corresponding number and there is exactly 1 Industry card for each square.
Then there are so-called Level cards. These have to be bought in advance and they are twice the price of Industry cards at $10M as against $5M. They allow you to build on any square on the board as long as there is already a building on it. This is great for building high towers and rapidly boosting the share price but can’t be used to merge companies together.
Survival of the Longest
Mergers you say, what’s that? This, gentle reader, is where it all gets tasty! As companies snake around the board they will eventually come up towards others. If the final block is played to link two companies together they merge and the one with the higher share price takes over the other and its coloured pieces are removed.
The existing shareholders of the taken over company all get paid the current share price per share they own, including radio towers, which is nice but the bigger fish gets its share price increased by the value of the smaller one which is splendid!
So mergers are where it’s at – with two caveats: one the players with shares in the losing company, which could be yourself of course, will now be awash with cash whilst the winner will have a fortune but it will be tied up in assets – the old Cash Liquidity versus Net Worth conundrum; secondly there is a limit on the share price of $50M so there is nothing to gain from pushing it beyond that, you’d be better merging two smaller companies.
Looking out for the key numbered cards coming up for sale in the Industry card market is vital as that is the only way you can build on that particular square or stop someone else doing so.
Close of the Day
Big Boss is an excellent game with lots of nuanced plays on offer depending on your opponents. It is easy to teach and doesn’t take too long to play. This doesn’t seem to be dependent on player count as the game finishes when all the 92 building pieces are placed.
Said building pieces are excelent, as are all the components, fitting firmly together and being held in a recessed track on the playing board. The graphic style on the Industry cards and the Shares is also very attractive.
Having read up on, but never played, Acquire I must say it has a huge amount of shared DNA to the extent where I would call Big Boss a variant rather than a separate game. Saying that I think the changes made, particularly in the board, make it a better game.
Both games are currently available from ZATU but Big Boss is considerably cheaper. If you can still get it at the almost criminally low price it was on offer in the sale you’d be a fool not to.
It’s almost like insider trading but without the fear of prosecution!
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