This week Mike discusses his love for Gordon Gecko.
Date: Thursday, March 11, 2010
Author: Michael Barnes
Most of the money in the game is actually held by the businesses, not the executive players, and the goals that emerge are more about figuring out ways to get that money out of the companies and into your own hands, at any cost and without any sense of corporate responsibility or business ethics. So what GREED, INCORPORATED is really about is exploitation, men with lots money that want to make more money running businesses into the ground and walking away richer than they were before. Success in the game isn’t measured by a totaling up of how much money you’ve made, or how much profit you’ve accrued over the course of the game- it’s measured by how much extravagant junk you’ve blown your ill-gotten gains on: “executive” transportation such as private jets, yachts and fancy cars; expensive-looking women, jewelry for the expensive-looking women, and other luxury items.
I’ve gone on in a couple of columns about how board game designers should be looking not only at new themes and settings and also ways that mechanics and gameplay concepts could be used to get at deeper meanings, agendas, and ideas. GREED, INCORPORATED does exactly that with its unexpected goals but it also remains a very fun to play game that leavens its message with a dose of humor. In a sense, this is the ultimate capitalistic board game, and one that unlike any other really digs into the kind of abusive capitalism that the Enrons and Bernie Madoffs of the world represent. It’s a sharply satirical game that may look abstract at first glance, with its spreadsheet-like board tracking market values for all of the game’s goods and products, but it is every bit as thematic and narrative as a Fantasy Flight game packed with plastic miniatures and cards full of flavor text. Not only is the game actually about something, it has something to say about its subject matter.
GREED, INCORPORATED is a great game and one of the best I’ve played over the past several years, but it is an absolute tragedy as well. It’s sad that such a great game will likely be played by a very small fraction of the hobby gaming community because I think it’s one of those games like ANDROID that both reaches for something more than just another iteration of a tired formula as well as something more than just simple fun or entertainment. It’s a game that has impact and social relevance, and yes, it’s also an absolute blast to play. I doubt there are more than a few thousand copies of the game in the world, and even a used copy would probably run somewhere in excess of $120-$130 for what amounts to about $30 worth of components. It’s a shame that such a brilliant, progressive game will likely remain obscure in the wake of lesser, disposable, more widely available games.
Volume One of this series of books does a grand job of introducing gaming to the masses, but offers a lot of familar information for gamers already in the know.
