My Favorite Board Game

"Hey guys, do you know what's even cooler than those Pokemon? Stocks!" My middle-school friend's dad was pulling open a purple and yellow box that rattled with the sound of dozens of plastic pieces. "Don't worry, I'll go easy on you."

He did not.

Despite getting thoroughly trounced by a middle-aged man, my friends and I were surprisingly captivated by this seemingly dry game of business mergers and stock trading. We played it dozens of time that summer, and though it eventually was replaced by our next obsession, it always held a fond place in my memory.

Decades later, working as a professional board game designer, I saw Hasbro was releasing a new version of that game. I was really excited to play it again after all that time.

This is a story of that game, what makes it so good, and how the crappy production value of the new version drove me to create my own, custom version of the game.

The Game

The game is question is 'Acquire.' It was originally released in 1964 as part of 3M's Bookshelf Games series - a collection of strategy and economic-themed board games that all came in a box size that could be easily fit onto a bookshelf. The series as a whole was very hit-or-miss, but Acquire has continued to stand the test of time, getting new editions about every decade or so. In my opinion, Acquire stood above the others due to the elegance of the game board, the mixed motivations created by the stock ownership system, and the right balance of hidden information to create a tricky memory game.

The Game Board

In Acquire, the stock market is represented by a grid of tiles numbered along the x-axis and lettered along the y-axis so that each tile has a unique designator showing which space on the board it belongs to. Each player is given a hidden hand of six random tiles and places one tile onto its matching board space on each of their turns. Once a player creates a group of 2 or more orthogonally-adjacent tiles, they found a company. That group is marked with a building, and players are now able to buy stock matching that building to buy ownership in that company. The value of the company increases as the number of tiles in that orthogonally-adjacent group grows, and if two companies ever touch, a merger occurs in which the larger of the two companies acquires the smaller one (I'm glossing over some details here, but I strongly encourage you to go play the game yourself to see it in action).

This fairly simple system creates a growing ecosystem of companies with changing sizes and relationships to each other, all of which are very clearly visually represented to all players on the grid in front of them. As players place tiles, they draw new ones randomly. This input randomness creates uncertainty, but is filtered through the players' decisions of what tiles to place, giving the board a blend of gambling, but also control. Additionally, the spatial relationship of all the companies gives interesting, easily-understood relationships - Company A shares 2 empty adjacent tiles with little Company B that I’d like it to acquire, but it shares a whopping 5 empty adjacent tiles with the larger Company C. I need to hurry and acquire Company B before the the far-more-likely merger occurs!

Stock Ownership

Once a company has been formed, each player has money that they can use to buy some of the 25 stock cards for that company (though a limited number each turn). These stocks grow in value as these companies grow, and when a company gets acquired, the two players with the most stock in that company get big payouts. This creates a jockeying for ownership in the different companies across the board, and another layer on the area control game described above. Each company is a balance of ownership percentages across the players that is constantly changing based on who buys what stocks and who has enough cash to keep buying more.

Memory

Additionally, once a player has purchased stocks, those stocks become hidden information. You can see how many total stocks players own, but have to remember which companies those stocks belong to. This is easy at first, but quickly becomes too much to keep in your head has companies are founded, acquired, refounded, etc, all the while players are buying new stocks turn after turn.

This complex amount of info to remember means that players (at least those with average memories) have to be selective about which companies they're keeping a close eye on. It's a lot simpler to remember which players bought a certain number of stocks in your pet company than it is to remember everything at once.

All of these elements combine to create an interesting, shifting landscape with just the right about of control over input randomness and obfuscation through hidden information and complexity from layering of motivations and control. This is the capitalist market-simulation that I always wanted Monopoly to be.

Feedback Loops and Haggling

Even though Acquire is one of my favorite board games, it is not without its faults. The system (much like the capitalism it's modeling) has a pretty serious feedback loop for players who get additional money early. A player being majority shareholder in the first company that gets acquired gives them a decent pile of cash that they can use to acquire new stocks. When the game is all about the balance of who can afford more stocks that someone else, the player with that early advantage is going to keep tipping the scales in their favor for the rest of the game, disempowering the other players and not giving them many options.

My second biggest issue with the game is less an problem and more of an omission. When I think about the stock market, I think about trading and haggling with other people for deals, and this game doesn't have any of that. All buying an selling happens with the game itself, not between players. Now, you can house-rule haggling and trading into the game (and I have on occasion), but this enables some truly nasty behavior where the leaders team up to disenfranchise the trailing players, so these house rules can really only be played with a group who know what they're getting into.

My Homemade Copy of Acquire

Despite those couple issues, as you can probably tell, I love Acquire. I think it is safe to say that it is my favorite board game. I fell in love with the big, plastic pieces of that copy I first played with my friends in the 90s. The pieces where big, stood up on their own, and nested together in a satisfying way that kept the whole board together.

So you can imagine my disappointment at the new version being released by Hasbro. The art on the stocks is beautiful, but to keep the price of the game down, all of the tiles and hotel markers are cheap, thin punchboard. As you play the game, you can to set each piece down on a flat board, and if anyone bumps the table, everything goes flying everywhere.

Knowing my disappointment with the modern version of the game, my amazing partner Sam set out to make something better. The end result is amazing. All of the images of the wooden version of the game you've been seeing thus far are of this version of the game she made.

First, the board. We laser-cut a board with dividers between each space so the tiles don't slide around, and created tiles stained a different color and cut twice as thick so they're easy to remove:

Next, the pièce de résistance of the entire set are the new businesses. We used the stock cards from the Hasbro version of the game, and Sam custom modeled and printed version of the building shown in their art. We mounted them to bases that are designed to snap over the wooden tiles to hold them in place with the rest of the board:

For the money, I found prop money online. Though, given that American denominations are significantly smaller than the $5,000 bills in the Hasbro game, I scaled down all the prices in the game by a common factor so that these bills actually worked:

Finally, for storage we created a box that uses the game board as a lid. It has magnetized slots for all the hotels, and a laser-cut tray that keeps each of the stock types separate:

It took a lot of work, but I'm incredibly happy with how our custom version of Acquire turned out, and I’m so grateful to Sam for doing all her hard work on it. I hope that you enjoyed seeing a glimpse at this hobby project of ours, and that maybe this inspires you to customize or bling out your own favorite board game.

If you have any questions on how we made anything, or want tips on your own custom game projects, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter!

I Will Do Anything for Revolution (But I Won’t Do That)

Disco Elysium is a beautiful and bizarre game that puts you into the boots (or stolen ceramic military sabatons) of a complete trainwreck of a human being and amnesiac who claims to be a cop. It sees you bumbling around the fictitious city of Revachol, solving a murder, hunting cryptids, opening dance clubs, and becoming entangled with the political forces at work in the city. It is a game with a lot of lessons, and left me thinking about what it had to say for days. I highly recommend you play the game for yourself. This article will go into the lightest of spoilers. It will leave all the biggest plot points unspoiled - but if you want to go in completely blind, you’ve been warned.

As I mentioned, this game left me mulling over a lot of different themes and lessons. At some point I might dive into some of the more deep and heady takeaways from this game about politics in our broken world, personal discovery, and existentialism. However, today I wanted to touch on a small takeaway that felt especially relevant to something I’ve seen in modern political discourse on social media. I’m not sure if this is a lesson the developers intended for anyone to learn from this game. In fact, I suspect it mostly arose from a limitation imposed by the rigidity of the digital RPG format.

Disco Elysium plays much like many other isometric RPGs or point-and-click adventures. The game leans heavily on the text, and the vast majority of content comes out of your conversations or introspection written out in a text window. As with other games of this type, Disco Elysium has an alignment system that, through your actions and choices, categorizes you into certain groups. You have your “copotype” - a representation of your personal philosophy and approach to life and your job, and you have your political alignment, which is primarily what we’ll be discussing here.

The dialogue system features a fresh and amusing take on traditional RPG skill systems. Based on your scores in skills, they will offer suggestions, context, or general goading to guide you in conversation. They are the “voices in your head.”

At many points throughout the game, you will be prompted to take political stances on various issues. Your possible opinions fall into four broad political categories:

• Communism - socialism, power to the people

• Facism - authoritarian nationalism

• Ultralibralism - basically capitalism

• Moralism - supporting the status quo

When playing most RPGs, you are not being asked to make these decisions personally, but on behalf of a character that you are shaping to be their own kind of person, separate from yourself. In Disco Elysium however, the combination of the amnesiac blank-slate, and the laid-bare nature of these political ideologies pulls the player towards reflecting their own ideologies in their character, and I definitely found myself doing that. Looking at the options above, I know pretty clearly where I fall in my personal politics. In a vacuum, my left-leaning beliefs would leave me picking the communist philosophies the vast majority of the time. Workers rights! Equality! Revolution!

But that’s where Disco Elysium throws a wrench into the works. You are rarely just spouting a context-less political opinion (if there is such a thing). Instead, your political choices are rooted in the struggles of the various political forces at work within Revachol. In the case of the communist viewpoint, this political force is the Union, run by Evrart Claire. Evrart is a smooth-talking, overly-congenial snake who quickly asserts his social dominance over you and who runs the whole town with his knowledge, resources, and man-power. He is a mob boss.

The Union boss Evrart Claire

That’s not to say that Evrart or the Union are all bad. Throughout the game you see many examples of how the Union is helping the workers and the people (though, always at some cost). They provide physical protection to the less-fortunate … through an extralegal squad of vigilante goons. They are striking for workers to have an equal share in their company … and so that Evrart can gain more control. They are building a youth center for the children of Revachol … by paving over a poor district in town. They are going to support some workers, but at the cost of others. Ultimately, Evrart and his “union” (mob) do not represent my personal socialist ideals, and I didn’t feel comfortable endorsing them in the game. Evrart and his Union were not my kind of revolution.

But the format of a digital RPG doesn’t leave room for the nuance to express my own personal opinion and how it might differ from the game’s portrayal of the ideology. Most of the time in dialogue, you get four options - one for each of the four political ideologies, and each supporting the corresponding faction in the game. But then, where does that leave me if I don’t want to endorse Evrart and the Union? Do I support fascists? Do I support capitalists? No thank you. I guess all that’s left is to support the status-quo with the moralists?

That brings me to the real-world takeaway from this in-game interaction. Yes, real life leaves us open to express our own opinions at whatever level of nuance we desire. But, when it comes to actionable things you can do to meaningfully enact change based on your ideology in your political system, your hands are nearly as tied as in Disco Elysium. You may have a nuanced view of how you want to see liberal policies change America for example, but if you don’t choose and support the candidate supported by the DNC, your vote is unlikely to lead to much change. The DNC’s candidate is your only option, even if they don’t exactly align with your view or they’ve done objectionable things in their past.

So, what are you left to do? You can broadcast your beliefs through your own personal activism or art. You can support small candidates who aren’t going to win but might bring about an incremental change if their policies gain enough traction. You can talk of guillotines and revolution from the safety of your couch. But in the end, when it comes to actionable change from your vote, if you don’t support the objectionable power-holder - if you don’t support Evrart and his Union - are you any better than the “Moralist,” than someone actively supporting the status quo?

I know this looks like I’m leading you into my thesis statement of how Disco Elysium taught me that anyone who doesn’t “vote blue no matter who” isn’t any better than a moderate. But that’s not exactly how it played out in the actual game for me. I didn’t support Evrart and his Union. I held back, not endorsing the communists, the fascists, or the capitalists. This caused me to end the game with the “moralist” political alignment, but also to end the game with the “art cop” copotype due to all of the small acts of artistic revolution I had enacted throughout the game. When I fundamentally couldn’t get behind the established power that was ostensibly supporting my ideology, I chose to instead enact small expressions of my personal ideology, hoping they might spark a future revolution I could actually get behind.

I might not have been any better than a moderate to the other political players in the game, but to myself, and to the individuals my art touched, I was revolutionary. And on a personal scale, maybe that’s enough.