This quite possibly sets the record for the most inappropriate name and theme ever applied to a board game. Sid Sackson’s original name for this game was Plan Ahead, a title which, though abstract, sums up the essence of the game nicely. For reasons known only to them, Relaxx decided to go with Business. Don’t let it throw you. This game has absolutely nothing to do with business. They didn’t even bother to try to fool us with the components, which are simple wooden chips and abstract conversion charts rather than, say, commodity tiles and stock indices. So we’re still scratching our heads about the title choice, but fortunately it doesn’t interfere with the gameplay.
As you might expect from the creator of Acquire, Bazaar, and Can’t Stop, Business is essentially a multiplayer abstract game.Like most Sackson games the rules are simple and the mechanisms kept to a minimum. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of individual taste. Some will relish the game’s purity, while others might grow tired of repeating what is essentially the same activity over and over.
The game revolves around a series of “in your fist” sealed bid auctions for groups of colored chips (“shares”). Players draw their initial portfolio of shares randomly, and twelve of the game’s fifteen price charts are dealt onto the board (the remainder are left unused, allowing for some uncertainty as to what combinations will appear during the game). Initially only the first three charts are visible. At the end of each turn, or month, the next chart is turned face-up so that players always have a two-month look-ahead. This proves very useful in choosing what shares to go after, giving players a few turns in which to acquire the ideal combinations.
The goal of the game is to gain the most money by exchanging shares for cash. Shares are only available in certain randomly-drawn sets each month. There’s always one set per player, but the sets vary in size from three to five shares. Once all sets have been drawn, players secretly bid on them and reveal their bids simultaneously. It’s here that one of Relaxx’s more curious choices comes in. They elected to go with paper money, which is more difficult to conceal in a hand than chips (ala Modern Art). They also provide only four denominations from 10 to 100 (although this might have been Sackson’s choice), which means bidding tends to be less granular than seems optimum. The somewhat frequent result is a tie, resolved with a fairly unsatisfactory die roll. Whoever has the highest bid (or the best die roll in a tie) wins their choice of share sets. This continues down through the bids, with each successively lower bidder choosing from the remaining sets until the last player gets what’s left. In all cases, bids are paid to the bank.
Now everyone has a chance to sell some of their shares. The price chart for that month lists the sets of shares (blue-blue-red-green; yellow-yellow; etc) the market is looking for as well as the price each set will fetch. Any player(s) can trade in any number of sets listed on the price chart, returning the shares to the bank in exchange for cash. Remaining shares are carried over to the following month. Nobody can hold more than ten shares from month to month, though, but you can opt to discard any shares you don’t want.
Every third month prices double. Which means, of course, that you want to sell as much as possible in those months to take advantage of the better rates. Unfortunately this also diminishes the impact of the interim months. Often the only exchanges which happen in those months are when players exceed the ten share limit and need to offload their surplus. Even a poor trade on a doubled month is worth more than most trades on the other months, so there’s no real decision about whether to hold or sell. Sackson originally had the first nine months trade at normal rates, with the October and November doubled and December tripled. This scheme has its own problems, shifting the big gains to the endgame and making the preceding nine months feel like so much preamble. It also emphasizes the luck of the draw, giving an advantage to whoever happens to hold the most shares towards the highest-priced combination on the chart drawn in December.
The distribution of shares isn’t flat, making some shares less common and therefore inherently more valuable. If the price charts featuring premiums for groups of those colors haven’t shown up by the midgame, those shares get awfully hard to come by. A reverse phenomenon occurs in the endgame, where one type of share might become worthless because it’s not featured on any of the remaining price charts and suddenly you’re drowning in those shares. Anticipating such vagaries of supply and demand doesn’t really seem possible, owing as it does to the luck of the price chart and share draw.
Something I may try in future games is playing with all the charts face-up from the outset. The long look-ahead might slow the game down as players try to plan too far in advance, but it would eliminate the luck factor as players would know beforehand the consequences of keeping or trading various shares.
Business is a perceived value game, where players must divine their optimal set’s worth to their opponents and bid just a little bit higher. If sealed-bid auctions don’t appeal to you, steer clear. Personally, I love the scanning my opponents’ holdings and deducing which of the sets on offer they’re most likely to snatch. Surprisingly, I found the game worked better with four players than with six. With more sets being auctioned each turn, too often there are multiple sets which meet your needs and consequently bidding becomes less tense than when you absolutely must have a particular set.
So what we have here is a game with a solid core system but some possible balance problems and poor choices in components and theming by the publisher. The latter aren’t terminal and the former are the difference between a B+ and a B-. Either way, Business lacks the depth and excitement to make it an A title. Still, a solid B is nothing to sneeze at.