Owner’s Choice – Passing as a One Percenter

Oh, great.  A game about buying and selling stock.  How enchanting.  Should I tuck the kids into bed now, so we can experience this magical world of trading off the margin?  Or should we let them stay up past their bed time so they too can enjoy the splendors of after hours day trading?

To my sensibilities, a game about the stock market is a terrible theme.  It sits somewhere between “A game based on adjusting your dietary budget so you can lose a healthy amount of weight in four months” and “A game where you must come to terms with your father’s disintegrating mental state and argue with your family over how to handle this development while maintaining your and your father’s dignity”.  Scrooge McDuck swimming in personal vault of golden coins aside, the act of investing and maintaining finances is a painful, tawdry activity.  Why would something you’re forced to do make good game fodder?

But it does, and it continues to.  Did you know that Pay Day was the best selling board game of 1975 when it was released?  That’s despite the fact that you make no meaningful decisions throughout the game, and the subject matter was about the 31 day work week, allowing you to play a game about the thing that you were playing the game to forget.  The top selling game that Pay Day displaced in 1975?  Oh, that would be a game about Monopolizing properties and collecting rent in a Depression Era economy.  Some of my favorite games I’ve played in the Myriad Games Podcast have been about making money and protecting valuables.  Both Cover Your A$$ets and Take Stock are excellent additions to any player’s cabinet.  How is this possible?

Well, I’ve got a theory.  Money and economics are already a large part of our lives.  We understand complex rules about how money trades between hands because we deal with the subject on a daily basis.  How does a person gain controlling interest in a company?  How do you tip a waitress?  How does supply and demand interact? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, that’s okay.  Someone out of the four people you play with will.

Games require limitations so we have obstacles to maneuver around.  Economics as a game theme has another advantage in that it was already a game.  The players consist of most people living in a capitalist society.  Every day we juggle the numbers in an attempt to balance or improve the books.  Many of the players already enjoy doing this, but, for the rest of us, all the game designer needs to do is find a way to make ‘the game’ a little more interesting, and a little more fun.  For contrast, it would be very hard to make a great game about quantum physics.  Most people don’t know the subject matter, so you would either have to teach them something, or the mechanics wouldn’t have relevance to anything they know.  Quantum physics isn’t something you can ‘win’ either, so you’d have to create goal posts, and a reason to roll your metaphorical ball through it.  When a designer creates a game about the stock market it’s a challenge for them to make the game bad, and, with some clever choices, they can instead make the game great.

So what choices did Yasutaka Ikeda decide on to make the stock market approachable?  Well, in Owner’s Choice we have:

• A central board where pawns move up and down, expressing a clean and dynamic stock market for four competing companies.
• Thick stock option markers that can be bought and sold freely throughout the game with play money.
• An outer board consisting of four L-Shapes that can be switched among themselves and flipped upside down, giving us ninety-six possible game play variations.
• A controlled set of options for each player when it’s their turn comes.  On their turn, they buy and sell stock and move up to three or four squares on the outer circuit, deciding which event will resolve.
• The title of company president, who represents the player with the most stocks in a company.  When any player lands on the president’s brand, the president chooses whether to invest his money for a chance to make the stock rise, or he can pilfer the funds of other player’s investments, destroying the value of his company.
• The concept that stocks pay dividends to the their owners, giving players a reason to want expensive stocks (they might pay high dividends) and cheap stocks (they might become expensive stocks in the future, and thus be a good investment).
• A few specialty squares, including a ‘chance’ square and die, for when a player feels frisky.

Owner’s Choice is a quick game, clocking in about twenty-five minutes.  It packs a lot of concepts and play into a skimpy three page rule book.  The strategy for Owner’s Choice contains deceptive deepness.  The first time my group played the game, three of us traveled the board’s circuit not spotting the nuances in the game’s strategy.  In this first play of ours, Owner’s Choice felt more like a game of blind choice while riding a luck based market.  Because the game felt like it required a sense of chaos to be fun, we started another five player game with the intention to spend more time having fun, and less time strategizing.  However, the group started to recognize that, similar to Checkers, there was much more to Owner’s Choice than players maximizing their individual turns.  Since there’s no dice rolling involved in moving your piece around the board, you can predict the most likely path the pawn will take as the game continues.  If you know the pawn is destined to land on blue, you can buy enough stock in Brand Blue to take advantage of the president of Blue’s future actions. But what if that player sells his controlling interest and invests in the company you left behind?  Or, even worse, what if that company’s president decides it’s in his or her best interest to liquidate Brand Blue?

Owner’s Choice combines strategy, people reading, negotiation and a fair slice of luck in a quick pick-up game that’s easy to understand and explain.  It’s a solid piece of work.  Is it great?  Well, I wouldn’t put it in the same category as the best games I’ve ever played.  That said, Most game groups would benefit from having Owner’s Choice in their collection.  It sure is great as an entremets between other great games.