Food Chain Magnate
A brilliant business-building simulation, Food Chain Magnate is a rewarding long play. It's complicated and can be quick to lose, but overall it's fun, has a fantastic theme and delivers detail without being onerous.
Food Chain Magnate: Quick Summary
Score:
8/10
Number of Players:
2-5
Time to Play:
2 - 4 hours
An excellent, fun, heavy strategy game, that's not for the faint of heart. It loses marks for really punishing mistakes when building your business at the beginning of the game, but give it a few chances, and this game provides a very rewarding experience.
What we loved:
A really rewarding deep business simulator which encourages long term strategy
This is a challenging game but still a lot of fun
The artwork is great, really kitsch but simple
Considering how heavy the game is, the instructions were pretty easy to follow
There is a good balance between interplayer competitiveness and focussing on your own business
What could be improved:
Some of the finishing on the playing items could be better
This game would be very intimidating for new board gamers
You need a lot of space for all the cards
This game can be brutal on players who fall behind in the first few turns
Some of the rules (such as drinks) could be explained better
Food Chain Magnate: Get those burgers cooked!
Food Chain Magnate is a business simulation strategy board game where players build and manage their own fast-food empire. The game is played on a modular variable city map that increases in size to accommodate the number of players and features a tile-placing system to manage your restaurant locations. The objective of the game is to build restaurants, hire key staff members, make products, and attract customers to eat your food before the competition does. Staff are represented by cards, set in a classic organisational hierarchy. A successful strategy requires balancing investments in people to generate more food production, distribution and marketing, without killing your profit margin or allowing the competition to beat you. Food Chain Magnate is deep, with rewarding mechanics for people who love games such as Pipeline, or video games such as Civilisation, Theme Park/Theme Hospital, or Capitalism Lab.
How to Play Food Chain Magnate:
Players take the role of CEO, and they take turns working through phases of running the business. They must decide which players need to work and which are going to take a day off, and then players can hire new staff to work under their managers, or train staff so they improve and become more productive for the business. There are multiple departments you can hire staff for, and they provide a mixture of bonuses depending on whether they are front of house or supporting behind the scenes. For instance, hiring a cook means you can make food to sell, and so should be a crucial hire early on in the game, but if you don't also hire a marketing director or marketing executive, then you won't generate demand for your food, and it will go to waste at the end of the turn.
The real joy from playing this game is discovering that working out the interplay between departments and creating a restaurant business that functions profitably is really fun! You are rewarded well for ensuring your departments are balanced and working closely together, and punished cruelly if you spend too much in one area. Luckily, you can fire people easily, and if you don't want to pay staff, then you send them on holiday! As you may tell from the employee politics involved here, the aesthetic is very much based on 1960s Americana; you'd never see this in a European management game!
Once you've hired your people and built your restaurants, you make food, run marketing campaigns (billboards, radio, blimp) and then you wait for your customers to arrive. Customers will come to you if you have affected them with a marketing campaign and fettled their taste buds (is that a thing?) for your particular fast food. If you are the only person on the board providing pizza, then you're going to attract everyone who wants pizza, but if they want pizza and a drink, and you only provide pizza, they are going elsewhere or staying in! If multiple players are providing the same food options, then customers will choose based on price, vicinity and waitresses at that restaurant. You can therefore follow a price-led strategy - but beware, your profits will take a hit, and it is a short way down to the bottom!
There are cash boosts and bonuses for players in the form of milestones - these cards are challenges that reward the first players to achieve them, such as the first pizza marketed. Once gained, many of the milestones provide bonuses for the rest of the game and winning players often ensure they've built milestones into their game strategy. This is really a game for people who enjoy interlocking moving parts in a game that eventually pays out big later on.
The winner is whoever made the most profit by the end of the game. Some employees need salaries every turn, and some employees force you to drop your prices, good for a price war but bad for profit in the long term.
The Components and Design in Food Chain Magnate
Food Chain Magnate has a very specific design, look and feel which harks back to classic 1950s and 1960s America and the boom of fast food. The board modules are a little too rustic in places, with the quality of these components being the lowest in the box, but despite their simplicity, the card and instruction manual design is great. Each card is really simple to look at, easy to read, and easy to understand - but still looks good. They are colour coordinated, which might be a struggle for people who are colour blind, but this isn't the only way to find the right card quickly, its position in the hierarchy and the very clear text means this is an accessible game. The manual is simple to read, too, with clear examples, so learning how to play the game is actually really easy - a triumph for a deep game like this. Food, restaurants and marketing are all represented by either wooden components (food) or tiles (marketing). The wooden components are well-made and easy to recognise, and the tiles are functional if not brilliant. Once you've learned the rules and played it twice, this game becomes very easy to play - but not necessarily to win!
The pros and cons in detail
What we loved:
Food Chain Magnate is really rewarding once you're into the game; whether you win or lose, the real joy is in playing the game and seeing your fast food restaurant business grow and make money. It's competitive without being aggressive, and the simplicity of play means that you can forget about how to play and concentrate on how to win - a rarity in many heavy games. Hiring your staff, then running your marketing campaign and pulling customers in to eat your food, is satisfying because it is challenging but not onerous. You'll have that moment where you get to the end, tot up the profit and then sit back and think "I enjoyed that", which is what board gaming should be about.
The artwork, the design and the manual make learning the game easy, but it should also be relatively simple to teach. If you can move a new board gamer beyond the scary thought of all the moving parts and the 4-hour game time and into the fun/stimulating element, then they should stick to it.
Unlike many heavy board games, where it can feel quite siloed and insular, Food Chain Magnate blends building your own strategy with competing against your friends really well. You need to keep one eye on who they are hiring, how quickly they might steal a milestone, which products they are making and where they are running their marketing campaigns to ensure you aren't shut out, sitting on stock you can't sell. Poaching their customers is fun without feeling combative, and there have been a number of times we've been left with a rueful smile after missing a clever strategy until it's beaten us!
Finally, the way the departments actually work in the business feels very accurate; some business games find the most simplistic measures to drive the game, such as more salespeople = more sales. Food Chain Magnate gives the right balance to each department. If your HR is weak, then so will your hiring. If you don't have enough waitresses, then you'll lose customers and tips, and if your marketing isn't on point EVERY turn, then you will get severely punished. The designers Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga really understand that marketing drives sales and desire, and it should be at the heart of every successful business strategy in Food Chain Magnate.
What we would improve:
Whereas the design on the cards and the construction of the instruction manual are great and really well thought out, the modular board lets the game down slightly. It's been designed to create a different playing experience every time, and in this regard, it's quite effective, but the finish, the ability to work out the spacing etc, are all a little below par for the rest of the game. It perhaps would have been more effective to increase the individual boards slightly, and the way drink icons are placed and played through in the game is probably the hardest mechanic to understand. Often, it feels easier to ignore drinks and simply focus on creating and marketing food instead.
This is a big game if you want to play it effectively. The employee cards need to be laid out in their hierarchy so you can easily see their interdependencies, and this in itself will take up half a table. We played on our GeeknSons gaming table, and the cards, milestones, boards and components took up the whole table for two people playing. So before you start your first game, find plenty of flat space that won't move! This definitely isn't a game to take on holiday for a quick game in an Airbnb. But then it wasn't designed to be that either.
Getting someone new to board gaming to enjoy this might be a challenge, too. Playing and teaching the game is actually very straightforward, but as an initial impression, a full table of cards, multiple game mechanics in play at once and the possibility of sitting there for four hours is very, very intimidating. You may trigger some post-Monopoly PTSD in friends if you suggest this! Food Chain Magnate is best aimed at those friends who have played a few gateway games (such as Wingspan or Ticket to Ride) and are ready to take the next plunge into our world of weird!
If you do entice a new player into joining you, and you are experienced, then beware! This game is punishing for players who make bad decisions or miss opportunities early in the game. Achieving milestone cards, hiring the right people, getting stock and marketing underway are all imperative at the beginning of the game, and if newbies miss the boat, they will have a torrid time for the rest of the session - and possibly put them off other experiences too. It's rewarding - but there is a learning curve, which for new people might feel too steep to be fun.
Food Chain Magnate: A Summary
We strongly recommend Food Chain Magnate, it's a great game for experienced board gamers who love a long afternoon of making money from pizzas and burgers! The design is perfect for the setting, the instructions are well put together, and above all, it's really fun to play and rewarding to win. It is challenging, and players who struggle may find it off-putting, but if you look beyond winning and find satisfaction in building the business, you may find the game is compelling despite early setbacks.
If you love heavy games, simulations or strategy games, then grab yourself a copy of Food Chain Magnate!
Expansions and Related Games
Expansions
Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism & Other Ideas is the expansion for Food Chain Magnate and expands the options available to players through cards and milestones. It includes new types of restaurants in coffee shops and baristas, new districts, kimchi, sushi and noodles plus new employees and marketing campaigns. It also provides the components to increase the number of players to 6. It's a chunky addition to a chunky game - but unlocks a host of new strategies and ways to make money.
Related Games
If you enjoy heavy business simulation games then Pipeline is worth a look. Winning strategies change every game as players take on the role of oil tycoons pushing to make the most money from their pipeline. Brass Birmingham is also a brilliant economic game, with players building an empire across canal and rail in Victorian Britain.
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Food Chain Magnate: Frequently Asked Questions
Is Food Chain Magnate hard?
Food Chain Magnate can be daunting for people new to board gaming, especially because there are so many moving mechanisms in each phase, however the instruction manual is excellent and easy to understand, the gameplay itself is very simple to remember once a few phases have been played and the rewarding feeling the game generates is worth the investment. We would recommend this for gamers who are experienced, or who have played a few gateway games and want to try something heavier, but we also don't think new gamers should be dissuaded from giving it a go once.
How long does Food Chain Magnate take?
Food Chain Magnate will take between 2 to 4 hours to play, depending on the number of players, but also bear in mind it will take about 30 minutes to set the game up and get prepped to play, as there are a lot of cards that require setting out in a certain way.
Is Food Chain Magnate worth the cost?
Food Chain Magnate is not a cheap board game; it currently retails above £60 in many places and therefore is a considerable purchase for many people. In our opinion, it is worth the cost because it has a high replayability score and above all is a lot of fun. It's a game that will sit in the collection and see regular time on the table over many years, offsetting the cost.
Transparency Notice
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