One player in my group put forth the newest addition to his collection: Bear Raid, a stock market themed game. You speculate, manipulate the market and spread rumors with the ultimate goal of ending with the tallest pile of money.
Setup: The playing area is essentially up to 6 stocks, each with its own stack of event cards and a board for price / action tracking. Each player starts with:
- $100 worth of money tokens
- a bunch of multicolored tokens (your stocks)
- a bunch of multicolored dices (rumors)
- a precut cardboard to track quantities of stocks, and whether they were bought (positive asset) or shorted (negative asset)
- a screen to hide your clutter from the other players
Gameplay: The gameplay is relatively straightforward. Every round:
- Each available stock will have an active event card which may affect its price but is heavily influenced by rumors; you also get a sneak peek of what event will come next round.
- Players take 2 turns, 1st turn goes clockwise around the table and back counter-clockwise for the 2nd (ie, 1 player gets to play 2x in a row) to mitigate the (dis)advantage of playing first. A turn consists in one of:
- Buying a stock (pay for positive assets, drive price up, assuming long term price increase)
- Shorting a stock (get paid for negative assets, drive price down, aims at bankrupting the stock to wipe out debt from the negative asset)
- Place up to 3 of your rumor dices on a stock of the same color. This will make the event card more likely.
- Take any number of rumor dices from a stock, making the current event less likely, but potentially increasing your sway on a later turn
Events and dice colors will largely drive which stock you buy or short. The game loop is surprisingly satisfying, and the internal logic of the game emerges vividly out of the clutter on the table, to the point I'm still not sure if the messiness is an accident or a deliberate design.
Theme: I particularly enjoy when a theme and the mechanics blend and inform one another; this game did a great job in that department. The main concepts that lined up particularly well:
- Money management: buying stock is straightforward, but the shorting rather than selling makes the theme and the mechanic align very neatly. If anything, I wish the rulebook made the money flow more explicit, eg whatever you do you're always acquiring assets, and shorting is a bit like taking a loan you're hoping to repay at a discount (or not at all).
- the rumor system is a very satisfying way of involving players in probability manipulation, despite the obnoxious number of dices involved; to me, it's the defining trait of this game.
Impression: The game is fun, plays under an hour, and the more, the better (3-6 players, we were 5). I still find myself split between what feels like a nicely implemented theme with on point mechanics, and the clutter to deal with on the table. I think (armchair general hat on) the game could have been simplified without significantly impacting the mechanics.
A few ideas along these lines (house rules, maybe):
- the need for screens feels dubious: all actions are visible anyway, only the starting assets & dices are unknown. It's detrimental to a more relaxed playstyle (if I take a break, I will forget what player 5 did 3 turns ago) AND to a more competitive playstyle (better tracking, allowing more player counter). It also forces entrusting each player with his own accounting / scoring, which can get legitimately messy. The one reason in favor I can think of is to keep the rumor dices secret, which is both interesting and thematic, but I'd still recommend doing away with the screen.
- Talking about rumor dices, dramatically reducing their numbers would go a long way towards reducing the clutter. I kept thinking one could easily half any dice number / rumor value (rounded up) without impacting the feel of the game, although I don't know to what extent it might affect the balance.
TLDR: An interesting game but clutter and secrecy get in the way
Score: 6/10
Cheers,
Ady
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