Food Chain Magnate: The Ketchup Mechanism and Other Ideas

Boardgames
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Have tried some modules in this expansion. Some I can’t say much without further plays, but some of these are easy additions and can do feedback very quickly.

Night Manager (all entry level staff operates twice) - only played one game and the RG player seem to run away with it. But I’d like to see more plays of this.

Hard Choices (In the base game: marketer and trainer milestones are inaccessible after Round 2, RG milestone after R3) - I’ll be trying this one out from now on, and with this, the Marketer Trainee opening looks very appealing that I will suggest Trainer, Marketer, and Recruiter Girl as openings to my players.

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I have only played with new milestones, and I like how it shakes up the game, but with no other modules I’m not sure yet if there’s any real choice other than marketing to start.

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Expanding on Hard Choice - I’ve been playing with the Marketer opening a few times now, but I am always the most experienced player. So, I manage the Marketer rush towards the $20 and $100 milestones. It’s still a question on how viable the Marketer is with base game.

New Reserve Cards - first play with these cards and I really like the idea so far. Instead of determining the amount of the bank, it determines the base price the of game ($5, $10, or $20). It answers the big pacing question of the game - just like the original reserve cards - but there’s now a new angle where salaries can be cheaper or costlier. We had $20 base price in the game and selling just one item can pay for 4 skilled employees - even more if you sold to a house with a garden. Keen to play more with these cards from here on.

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Lobbyists allows the construction of:

Roads - this is fun!! That isolated neighbourhood ain’t isolated no more! And cutting down distance is a nice alternative to the Regional Manager.

Parks - I need more plays to form my thoughts on this. Because parks are nuts! They increase the multiplier of your revenues. So, a house adjacent to a park acts like a house with a garden (x2 unit price). Garden + Park is x3. Since I don’t play enough FCM nowadays, I don’t know how this whacks the game in a good way or bad way. For now, I’m a bit sceptical.

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New Districts - set aside the tile with the park if you don’t play lobbyist, other than that, the tiles are integral to my game. The apartments are fun for both Marketing player and sellers.

New Reserve Cards - I only use this now. I think I’ve played enough to say that these cards are more interesting than the base game cards. Also, small bonus: it allows me to just set up a $200 x N players 2nd bank right away at setup.

Kimchi - out of all the Asian stuff in FCM, this is best so far. Allowing players to best the Marketing -2 distance milestone. Also makes the Luxury strat very attractive. More plays required on the Asian foods.

Sushi - really dislike so far. Defeats the purpose of making complex demands. I understand that the sushi cook/chef produces fewer sushi, but it still a bit meh where it not only circumvent the complex demand of, say, a house with a garden wanting 2 beer, 1 pizza, 1 burger, and 1 lemonade by simply selling 5 sushi in lieu, the sushi player also BEATS the player who fulfills this demand with normal food. Hmmm…

Rural Marketing - need more plays but so far, it feels weak. It’s basically just another apartment, in practice - double the marketing and demand is infinite. Need to plays where the rural area is in play and use effectively.

Ketchup - I’m not sure if I like this. Who else would get this milestone but the Marketing player?

Movie Stars - cute. Good tools. People underestimate them.

I didn’t mentioned the others for reasons. Overall, I really like the Ketchup expansion now. The base feels a bit skeletal. But I am a bit concern on how the Trainer opening fares now due to having more and more ways to drain the bank faster than before.

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Posted this elsewhere after playing full Ketchup a bunch of times, but the Trainer is extremely underpowered compared to the other two.

When looking at opening milestones there doesn’t seem to be any comparison. Marketeer gets the -2 distance, $5 for everything marketed, free kitchen trainee & errand boy and the lemonade milestone of training on the job. This sets them up immediately for all other food selling milestones, and the ability to grow their company with reliable on the job training and assured money from marketing and selling food.

Recruiting Girl gets the immediate massive company, can easily go into waitresses and coffee (and luxury manager) to secure money for training, or follow marketeer to pick up the other food milestones (being careful of marketeers lemonade training and reduced distance). They can get night shift manager before anyone else.

Trainer gets an extra trainer and doesn’t fire people when broke. The second seems very strong, but the other two openings simply won’t go broke. Marketeers will be getting marketing money from round two, and reliable sales from 3 onwards. Recruiters will have waitresses for costs or coffee shops setup from round two as well as the night manager. The first Trainer bonus is just an extra hire that actually restricts your next turn to get the most out of it- to use the extra trainer you want two people to train, but if you wanted to go straight into business developer for the necessary new house milestone for example, you have to either wait a turn or lose the usefulness of an extra train. Whoever you train round 2 needs to stay at the beach round 3 for the 2nd trainer to be used.

If trainer is on their own island or far enough away from marketeer they can get unclaimed sales milestones, but this plays out like a worse recruiter. Instead we tend to go new business developer for the house bonus and ether coach, guru or night shift manager (if left in a 4p game) to hire and promote people to the top spot straight away, build a team for the big payday.

The issue is, the fast pace of the expansion game means the bank busts twice before trainer can have their mega turns. The trainer has to develop both their management structure which the recruiter has, and get a food and marketing team in place which the marketeer has. Not only that, but as soon as they start to make their money, the second part of their bonus becomes moot.

Now I’ve read enough plays of this to know Trainer opening is generally regarded as significantly weaker than the other two, but was wondering about a couple of changes and was curious if people had tried them out:

  • Removing the “remove on turn 2” marker, so either recruiter or marketeer could still jump on this. I don’t think marketeer would bother, so it might just force recruiters hand, but I actually don’t think recruiter needs it.

  • Swap the “extra trainer” perk with lemonade’s “train on the job” perk.

That swap is something I want to put into practice, but haven’t played it since"!

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Yes. I’m finding Trainer to be theoretically weaker. I don’t read online so I can’t follow what the meta is.

The solution suggested by Joshua Starr was to have a “long game” variant where the bank is larger. This is simpler to do and it lengthens the time giving the Trainer more room. Not sure how much. Maybe +$100 per player?

I find that Trainer either needs to straight for Guru, which is typical with Trainer strat. Or get the “use multiple Trainer on same person” which is on both Old and New Milestones. With that, getting top level staff is easy, albeit still gradual. I can get a Exec VP or Senior VP in one round. Followed next round by a Marketing Director - if you still need one. If someone went for the new Pizza milestone, you can skip this and just get a Pizza Chef, which likely they still don’t have. Then, followed by food staff. But since I’m often the most experienced on the table, I’m not sure how effective it really is and if it is easy to counter. I’m assuming an RG player can get the discount milestone and remove $100 from the bank every time is crazy.