Dutch publisher Splotter Spellen is well known in tabletop gaming circles for producing very complex, very expensive, and very difficult to come by titles such as ROADS AND BOATS, ANTIQUITY, and INDONESIA. Their games tend to focus on economics, logistics, and long-term strategies, and although I’ve only played a couple of their titles I’ve never really found any of their releases to be worth the outrageous prices given their Spartan production values or the effort required to track down a copy of any of them from one of their tiny print runs. I’ve always found their games to be interesting (particularly the ruthlessly unforgiving civilization game ANTIQUITY) but I’ve never really felt like all the insider hype their games received was warranted.
Recently, I had an opportunity to play their latest release, GREED, INCORPORATED, and I was completely blown away by it to the point where I would be willing to argue that it is one the absolute best business games that I have ever had the pleasure of playing. The big letdown is that its rarity and outrageous retail price means that most readers of this column will likely never get a chance to play it.
It’s a game that is timely, topical, and one that deserves to be played by anyone who cares about where game design is headed and what it can accomplish beyond base entertainment. It was released in 2009, and it would have given CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD a run for the Game of the Year money if I had played it enough to make that judgment—or if I really felt that the Gameshark Board Game of the Year should be a title that very few will ever get to play.
In GREED, INCORPORATED three to five players represent executives in charge of a variety of fictional businesses (Zenron, Loanman Brothers, and Milkthelot for example) that acquire asset cards that in turn produce an assortment of raw materials that are used in combinations to produce consumer goods. Companies can be set up to get into a variety of markets with fluctuating values such as real estate, loans, textiles, microchips, or a mysterious corporate product simply called “Blah Blah”. The market mechanics, which demonstrate a volatile and shifting economy over the course of the game, are some of the best I have ever seen and it is absolutely fascinating to watch how the values shift throughout the game and to plan your strategies accordingly. You can anticipate selling off some surplus housing only to find the housing market experiencing a devastating downturn due to other player’s sales or random factors that shift values over the course of the game.
Controlling companies is one facet of the game, but getting into the board room is another key idea. Players can jockey for executive positions in any company- including those under the control of other players. The idea is that you want to put your people in powerful CEO, COO, and CFO positions so that when a company tanks- meaning that it fails to book profit in excess of what it made in the previous fiscal year- you’re in a position to get a fat severance check when “the blame game” gets played and heads roll for the company’s poor performance.
It’s possible to wheedle your way into a majority board position and take over a company, or you can just settle for a percentage when the business inevitably hits the rocks. Because of the way the mechanics play out, it’s entirely possible to purposefully over-extend a company with no intention of going into the black the next year. Backroom deals, shady arrangements with other players, crooked trade-off deals, and other straight-from-the-headlines corporate shenanigans are definitely the order of business.
Despite the individual player boards that track company assets and staffing, GREED, INCORPORATED doesn’t shy away from player interaction. At first glance, I felt fairly sure that the game was going to be a typical multiplayer solitaire game where you build up an economic engine and whoever runs it the most efficiently wins. That’s just not the case at all. The game is filled with deal making and breaking, three-way brokered trades, marketeering of surplus goods, and other social interactions that go well beyond the range offered in many Eurogames that are more about watching what other players do than actually engaging them. This is a game for people who like to talk, lie, and manipulate under the pretense that it’s all for everybody’s benefit.
What makes GREED, INCORPORATED absolutely brilliant is that it is a business game that isn’t really about making money, monetizing companies, playing the market, or buying low and selling high. Sure, that’s all in there and a shockingly tight and surprisingly thematic set of rules describes those things and pretty much everything else you’d expect in a comprehensive business game but those are all simply means to an end.
