Acquire Board Game Review
Acquire is a classic business strategy board game that has been going strong since 1962. Using nothing but your wealth and wits, you must vie against other business magnates in this game of mergers and acquisitions – buying, trading, and selling stocks in the world’s biggest hotel chains in order to get the greatest return on your investments.
Acquire was designed by Sid Sackson in 1962, and has been among the most popular board games in its many versions since those days. Part of its long-lasting appeal is its simplicity and the ease in learning how to play it. The game comes with just a board, tiles, company counters, stock cards and cash. And the gameplay all boils down to just two actions: placing tiles and buying shares.
Although the basics of Acquire are pretty simple, there is a fair amount of challenge in deciding where you place your tiles and which shares you buy. Since there are other players trying to make their millions as well, you have to be very strategic in your decisions to ensure you profit from them much more than your competitors do. It wouldn’t be in your best interests to hand another player a cool grand!
Placing tiles is how you start, grow and merge hotel companies in Acquire. And the board is a representation of the “business playing field”, where you can see how each hotel chain can grow and merge. When you create a group of 2 or more adjacent tiles, you are in essence starting a new company. When you place a new tile next to an existing company, you are growing that company. When the tile you place connects 2 separate companies, you have merged those 2 companies.
The other part of the game is buying shares. Having shares in a company means you have partial ownership of it and can profit if it grows or merges. When a company grows, its share value grows as well, benefiting its owners. And when a company is acquired by a bigger company, its owners get bonuses and can trade in their stock in the defunct company for shares in the larger company.
The last 2 paragraphs describe pretty much all the mechanics in the game, but what makes Acquire so interesting is the amount of strategy required to be able to use those simple mechanics effectively. You’ll have to worry about liquidity; buying lots of shares early is good, but if your company doesn’t get merged, you end up with not enough cash to use later on. You’ll also have to worry about majority shareholders; the