Tycoon

From: Jumbo List Price: $35 Players: 3-4 Playing Time: 60 minutes  Type of game: Family Strategy Skill level: 8 Complexity: 5  Reviewed by: David Sidore, Issue 23, April 2000

Sometimes good things fall through the cracks. Ask anyone who has seen The Iron Giant. The best way to rescue such an overlooked jewel is word of mouth and it is with that in mind that I call your attention to Wolfgang Kramer and Horst-Rainer Rösner’s Tycoon. An unassuming yet entertaining game that seems to have gotten lost in 1998’s bumper crop of games (headlined by Euphrat & Tigris and Durch die Wüste and Alan Moon’s Spiel des Jahres-winning Elfenland), Tycoon offers an original twist on the conventional business game. Most of the classic elements are here. You have a board with areas ripe for development, loans to get that development going, and dividend payouts for those with the largest and second largest holdings in the nine major companies or markets (in this instance, nine major cities from around the world). And true to form, after about 90 minutes the person with the most money wins. But knowing how the story ends doesn’t really convey the financial tightrope you have to walk in order to become a Tycoon.

Each player is an entrepreneur seeking to take advantage of the new global economy by speculating on the fortunes of nine of the world’s major cities. Players do this by building hotels and factories in the cities. At the end of each of the game’s three rounds, the two players with the most hotels in each of the world cities collect income based on the relative value of the city (cities are grouped in three tiers with New York and Monaco at the top as the most profitable) and total level of development in that city. As you might imagine, cities initially grow more valuable as they get more developed. In a welcome change from games like Acquire and Big Boss, the pie that players are fighting over eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns. After two thirds of the twelve hotels each city can hold are built, each additional hotel dilutes the value of the city. Players also earn income based on distribution (how many cities they have hotels in— it pays to have your chain extend around the globe) and from factories, which I will discuss more fully below.

Of course, one needs to spend money in order to make money. Each of those hotels costs $2-5 million to build. The cost is based on the city’s relative value. Naturally it’s most expensive to build in New York and Monaco. This is further complicated by the fact that only two players can build in any given city at a time, and the second player in the city has to pay an extra $1M for the privilege. This leads us to one for the major mechanisms of the game: movement. Players actually begin the game off the board, conversing with their bankers. In order to get on the board, they need to buy a ticket for a “scheduled” plane flight. “Scheduled” tickets range in price from $4-6M. These tickets can be used to go from anywhere on or off the board directly to the city listed on them, or allow a player to move a number of spaces orthogonally on the boards three by three grid of cities. Once on the board, players can use “chartered” flights to fly between the various cities. Each chartered ticket lists two cities and costs $1M for the number of moves it takes to get from one city to the other on the grid. Two scheduled flights and six chartered flights are turned face up at the start of the game and replenished after each player’s turn. On their turns, players may buy as many of these as they like and use any combination of tickets to move about the board. As you might imagine, cheap tickets disappear quickly and the 8 slots inevitably get filled with a motley assortment of pricey options until someone breaks down and buys one. The tickets are thus the primary source of luck in the game. Before moving on I want to note that I personally find it best when teaching the game to explain the tickets by reversing their names—i.e. flights between two cities are regular and scheduled while the more expensive tickets represent flights that you have chartered and so have more control over.

Now for the bad news. You start the game with $15 million and the first scoring won’t occur until the end of the round in which someone builds their sixth hotel. If you’ve been paying attention you know that there is no way to build 6 hotels with $15, even if you got a “cheap” $4M scheduled flight onto the board and built a $2M hotel in the city where you landed every turn. Not to worry. Your bankers are willing to float you a loan to get started. You merely have to pay 20% interest for a small loan ($10M) or 25% for a large loan ($16M). Loans come due after the scoring. Each player has to decide whether they will pay the loan back then or roll it over until the next scoring (when they must pay it) at an increased (read ugly) interest rate. Manage your money carefully because every turn you must build something or take out a loan. And while you can take out as many loans as you like, you must be off the board to meet with the bankers. While the flight off of the board is free, in addition to losing a turn of building the player must also pay for the flight back onto the board. The early rounds therefore have the added problem of managing your cash to avoid having to fly off the board for an extra loan and the associated interest and opportunity costs.

After the first and second scorings each player receives another 6 hotels. The second and third scorings come in the rounds when someone builds their twelfth and eighteenth hotels, respectively.

A few elements conspire to make this more than a race to see who can build eighteen hotels the fastest. First is the fact that three of the lots in each city (the earliest coming on the sixth or seventh lot) cause the oldest hotel in the city to be declared unfit for use. While the hotel can be “renovated” for free by its owner, until then that hotel does not count towards a player’s distribution bonus. If that’s a player’s only hotel in that city, he’ll need to high-tail it back there to claim credit for that city.

If two players have the same number of hotels in a city, the tie is broken by the one with the older hotel in that city. And then there are the factories. Instead of building a hotel, a player may choose to build a factory. Each city has two slots for factories that cost $4-10M depending on the city and whether it is the first or second one built. Factories pay out income equivalent to second place for that city unless that city has (or ties for) more hotels than any other, in which case the factories pay an income equal to first place in the city. I’ll warn you now to watch out for someone sitting in one city, buying both factories, and then building it into the “biggest” city during the first two scoring periods while everyone else flies around in search of distribution bonuses. This can be very profitable for them and worth everyone else’s while to band together to create a “bigger” city and/or push the city over the top and dilute its value.

Foolishly thinking that I developed a “perfect strategy” for this game (it had worked three times in a row), I tried it with a new group only to find someone had optimized my approach better than I had. And then both he and I were beaten by the “sit in one city” strategy noted above which we have since learned to recognize and counter. Ultimately, Tycoon offers a very satisfying level of complexity that rewards careful play without dictating a single, “optimum” strategy. The game mechanisms are well balanced and integrated and support a number of different strategies. While some might question how a plane flight could cost as much or more than a hotel or factory or why Tokyo is grouped in the same real estate tier as Cairo and Mexico City, I am willing to indulge Kramer and Rösner in these conceits because the result is an original take on the ninety minute business game that I feel deserves another look and some positive buzz. Give it a try and pass on the good word.