Acquire

From: Hasbro/Avalon Hill List Price: $35 Players: 2-6 Playing Time: 60-90 minutes  Type of game: Family Strategy Skill level: 7 Complexity: 3  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 24, September 2000

For years I’d resisted getting anywhere near Sid Sackson’s Acquire. The 3M and Avalon Hill editions of the game featured a drab grid marked with letters and numbers and a similarly-marked set of plastic tiles. Photographs of the game showed nothing that interested me, and it was hard to generate much curiosity over such uninspiring materials. But after years of seeing it in the Games Magazine hall of fame I finally took a gamble and picked up a copy. And cursed myself for judging a book by its cover and avoiding a good game for so long.

Now Hasbro has brought us a new edition of Acquire with slick, snazzy components that engender excitement instead of ennui. The company names have changed, both inside and outside the box, but the rules remain the same.

Acquire is a game of mergers and acquisitions, and the milieu has been shifted from the now incongruous realm of hotel chains to the more apropos world of high tech corporations. The board is a high-gloss but abstract 12x9 grid with one plastic tile for each grid coordinate. Each player starts with six tiles, kept secret from his opponents.

Each turn begins by playing a tile onto its corresponding spot on the board. If the tile touches an otherwise unconnected tile, a new company is formed. There are seven companies in three groups— small-cap, mid-cap, and large-cap, the only difference being the cost of their stock (of which the founder gets a free share). Founding a small-cap company means a player will need to spend less of his money to secure a majority, but his ultimate payoff will be smaller. Large-caps are expensive, but that very expense can discourage rivals from challenging a player’s majority early on.

After playing a tile, a player can buy stock in any companies currently on the board— up to three shares in all. Whether shares are kept public or private is a matter of religion with some. The rules explicitly leave it up to you. I prefer private holdings, but that’s probably because I’m pretty good at tracking them in my head and can turn that to my advantage. Players with less practiced memory skills may prefer to leave shares open.

As a company grows, its network of connected tiles expanding on the board, its stock price increases and players’ wallets drain faster. Money only comes back to players when two companies merge, which happens when a played tile connects two companies on the board. At that point the bigger of the two companies swallows the smaller. The owner of the most shares in the smaller company gets a bonus equal to ten times the company’s current stock price, with the second-largest shareholder getting a bonus half as large. Everyone can then sell their shares, keep them, or trade them two-for-one for shares in the larger company. Early in the game players usually keep their shares, since the company will probably get refounded somewhere else on the board.

The hardest thing for new players to grasp about Acquire is that you don’t want your initial investments to gobble up their competitors— you want them to be gobbled themselves. The worst thing that can happen to you is to run out of money. A broke player can’t buy stock, so his opponents can overtake him for the majority bonuses. To prevent this from happening, you’ve got to be a majority shareholder in one of the first chains to get absorbed. This is a bit counterintuitive, since in most financial games the goal is to invest early in the long-term winners. In Acquire, having your pet company get sucked up by a rival is the only way to generate cash flow. And if you’re not liquid, you’re nobody.

In fact, what you really want to do is get the majority in a company, get it eaten by another, refound it, and repeat as often as possible, maximizing the return on each investment. But eventually there comes a point of diminishing returns. Recognizing that moment is one of the key skills to learn in the game. At that point, players want to grab shares of the behemoths that will survive to the end. As the board fills up and possible locations for new companies evaporate, holding onto shares of devoured companies gets riskier. If they don’t reappear before the game ends, those shares are worthless.

Companies of eleven or more tiles become “safe” and can’t be absorbed by another. The game ends when all companies are safe or one company has at least 41 tiles. All remaining chains pay out as if they just merged, and the player with the most cash wins.

There’s a lot of skill in Acquire, but the entire game can hinge on drawing the right tile at the right time. It’s maddening to buy into a company seemingly on the verge of being merged, yet be powerless to actually make the merge happen. Of course, factoring that into account and managing your tiles is part of the strategy. For example, it’s generally better to play a tile between a company and the edge of the board, rather than between two companies. Try to reserve the latter tile until playing it causes a merge in your favor. Holding a merger tile puts you in control— it’s inside information. With your best poker face start buying up shares in the smaller company, then play the tile when you’ve got the majority and will earn the bonus. Players who successfully identify and hold onto potential merger tiles will gain a significant advantage.

The majority bonuses are a big deal. You just can’t win without cashing in on them, and the battle for majority is at the core of the game. Players usually start off by securing the lead in a newly-founded company, then venturing out into another. Other players will nip at their heels and before long they’re often forced to choose which of their majorities they’ll defend. There are 25 shares of each company, and obtaining an absolute majority of them is the only guarantee. Even a simple majority can be tenuous in the long run if the company merges and a rival sells back his shares, making them available once more to the market. It’s easy to see how the public or private nature of players’ shares can have a big impact on gameplay.

Hasbro has put together a sharp-looking update to carry Acquire into the new millennium. The tiles are large and easy to read, and though some claim they don’t stand on end as well as the old tiles did I haven’t had any difficulty myself. The capstones which mark each hotel chain are now not only color-coded but height-coded, with taller capstones for larger-cap companies— an elegant touch, although it can be hard to see the board behind the taller capstones. They’re no longer lettered, either, and the orange and yellow are unfortunately very similar to each other.

Other games like Big Boss, Shark, and Union Pacific have traveled the shareholding path since, but Acquire is the game that blazed the trail. And over thirty years later, it still holds up. There are very few games from that era that can make a similar claim. What makes Acquire such an impressive design is the relative simplicity of its rules. There’s very little in the way of mechanics to learn, but over repeated play the emergent subtleties of the system surface. This is a game all members of the family can enjoy, but not an ounce of depth was sacrificed to make it so. I’ve heard it said that this is the game that should be in every home in America instead of Monopoly. That will probably never happen, but now that Acquire is under the Hasbro umbrella, perhaps its popularity will rise closer to the level it deserves.