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Get Rich Quick – Gen Con 2016

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What is it? a lightweight role-selection game disguised as a mass market product to trick your family into playing games with you

The deets: 3-5p, 30-40min

Designer: Lenny Herbert

Publisher: Foxmind Games

Get Rich Quick is intentionally designed to look like the sort of game you’d pick up at a Wal-Mart. The reason? It makes the game look less intimidating the non-gamers. Not everyone’s into elves or robots or medieval farmers, but getting rich quick is universally understood. Hopefully the simple, classic design doesn’t turn off hobby gamers (incidentally, there’s already a forum post on BGG calling for improved components).

The game is primarily a role-selection game. You choose three cards at once from your hand (everyone has the same hand), reveal them at the same time as everyone else, and resolve them in numerical order.

Five of the roles get you cash, but at an increasing risk (and increasing payoff). You can Work to just get $1000. Or you can invest and pay money for a hopefully higher return – but your return depends on the other players NOT all playing the same card. Remember how you choose three at once? It’s not as easy as it sounds. The best return for your investment – $10,000 back when you put in $3000 – only goes through if you’re the only player who chose the card. Just remember, you have to pay the investment fee either way.

With 5 players, there's a lot of competition...
With 5 players, there’s a lot of competition…

The fifth role lets you play the lottery – you pony up a grand, and roll five dice. If you get 3 of a kind or better, you win cash back. If you manage to roll 5 of a kind, helicopters fly to your house and dump mountains of cash on your head. (Okay, it’s $30k, which is pretty sweet money in this game).

Role number 6 sends you to the store, where you can pay that hot cash for stuff on the board. These “buildings” give you permanent bonuses, such as increasing your take-home pay when you play the Work card, providing insurance against failed investments, letting you re-roll your lottery dice, and many ways to earn Fortune points. Those fortune points are how you win the game, people. 25 points ends the game, but it’s whoever has the most in the end who claims victory.

You can also buy new cards – extra copies of Work, Lottery, and Take It Easy (the final role card, which we’ll get to). With those you can play the roles multiple times in one round. Work’s mighty tasty if you get that major promotion, so you might want to play it twice. Hey, maybe three times. Dedicate your life to work!

The final role, number 7, Take it Easy, gives you 1 Fortune point. That’s it. Well, you can buy up some buildings that give you extra Fortune points when you play this card, which is one way to rocket to the finish line.

Get that 25 fortune points and that means you’ve achieved enough wealth to comfortably retire and live a glamorous life of luxury.

If you can snag the two promotions and an extra Work card, well... let's just say you're doing well.
If you can snag the two promotions and an extra Work card, well… let’s just say you’re doing well.

 

The game is very simple but leaves plenty of room for decision making. It can be a little rough at the start of the game, but once you have a bit of backup cash and you land a few of those buildings, things pick up speed towards the end. There are a variety of strategies to pursue, although I do have some concerns about possible balance issues. It definitely works as a gateway game (I already had a chance to sling it on my family) and it has enough player influence over the course of the game to be interesting to hobby gamers. Yet, it’s super easy to teach, so it seems to be accomplishing exactly what it set out to do.

Also fun fact I learned while looking up information about this: apparently “Get Rich Quick” was the original name for the shouty, trading card game Pit.

Futurewolfie loves epic games, space, and epic games set in space. You'll find him rolling fistfuls of dice, reveling in thematic goodness, and giving Farmerlenny a hard time for liking boring stuff.

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