LogFAQs > #933287944

71. Acquire (1964)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Tile-laying, economic, stock market
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 3
Game length: 45-75 minutes
Experience: 3-4 plays over 3-4 sessions (2016-2017) with 4-5 players
Previous ranks: 26/100 (2016), 48/100 (2018)

Summary - Each player is an investor trying to acquire the greatest net worth at the end of the game. On your turn, you choose one square tile from a small hand to lay on the printed (on-tile) coordinates on the grid of the game's map. The tile you lay can either found a new hotel chain or expand one (if it touches an existing one), and you have the option of buying one share of that chain's stock. When you lay a tile that merges two hotels, the larger chain acquires the smaller; the shareholders of the smaller chain get dividends plus an option to sell (the only time when you can sell). Larger chains' stock is more valuable than smaller chains'.

Design - Acquire is incredibly elegant and clever. In those senses, it may be one of the best designs on my list. Investing in hotels can be counterintuitive and inherently has some sort of "push-your-luck" element. Liquid money starts drying up as the game wears out, meaning you have to pick which chains to invest in carefully. Adding to the difficulty of the decision is the fact that you can never increase the value of your stock on the same turn that you buy it - the simple fact is, you can only buy stock after making all the existing shareholders richer (by expanding that hotel), but when you buy stock, it's at the new, inflated price. Inverting this would change the incentives - it makes the decisions more infuriating but meatier.

And then there's the game's namesake, the acquisition events. Nothing makes people excited like getting paid (even if it's with shitty paper money), so mergers are absolutely thrilling.

Acquire is from the '60s. It has its share of luck limiting your agency (tile draw determining where you can place), and some might criticize its rather grim, dreary color palette (though it has its own beauty-of-the-game thing going for it). Paper money is an annoying component to deal with (though of course it can be overcome). And it can feel punishing when you are out of money and can't figure out how to score points anymore. Sometimes, a player's early decisions win the game, sometimes based off luck, even though they appear to do little else throughout the game (though that said, it's nice that the winner isn't always the person who takes a long time make a bunch of extra moves.)

Experience - I've played Acquire three times and generally sucked at it. Crappy tile draw and being low on cash can be tough in any economic game, and I don't know if it's because I wasn't in last place that it wasn't more painful. But it was interesting enough that following the arc of the game as a somewhat active participant was exciting.

Future - Given its appearance and age, I'm (perhaps hypocritically) not as inclined toward buying Acquire (and notably, it's not a 2p game). The friend who owns Acquire rarely comes to game night anymore. However, its playtime is extremely manageable, it's interactive, and earning money is fun. I feel there's unexplored depth to this game that I'd like to plumb, if only time and circumstances allowed.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness