A Capital Venture: Trust Me

REVIEW FOUR: TRUST ME

PURCHASED: SAVERS CENTRAL ALBUQUERQUE

PRICE: $1.99 + TAX

PLAYERS: 2 - 4

AGES: 8 & UP

CREATED BY: PARKER BROTHERS (1981)

It seems like in the time period between 1960 and 1992 or so, you couldn't swing your arms sideways in a store without smacking into 20-30 different board games made by those ever-present rivals, Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers; there were nine million different game styles with all sorts of ideas thrown out there. Of course, depending on what side of the board game fence you are now on, you may view these as monstrosities of horror and doom or nostalgic little pieces of your childhood (the two, incidentally, are not mutually exclusive!); no matter which way you slice it, there was certainly a lot of quantity out there. But was there quality? That's generally the niche and "mission statement" of this blog. I wonder what the investors for each individual company thought at the time? Was it the same for them as it was for us consumers, with each new game being released either a nightmare of losses or a daydream of profit margins? Well, at least one company was out there to convince everyone....

"Trust me!" It couldn't get much clearer than that, could it? This is definitely a board game you can trust; it's printed right there on the package in huge letters for all of the world to see! But conspiracy theories abound when something like this occurs -- just exactly why do you need to "trust them"? Is this the name of the game itself, or some clever ploy to get you to subconsciously side solely with Parker Brothers in the ever-present battle of 1981's board game front? Well, for a massive, bank-breaking investment of $1.99 at the local thrift store, we're about to find out if this is a legitimate marketing practice or Illuminati brain-washing.

The marketing for the outside box is quite entertaining, and I really enjoy the freakish late 70s/early 80s designed Bill Plympton-esque caricatures on the box. The letters of the game are spelled out in "IN GOD WE TRUST" style monetary font, which gives you a clear idea that the game is about investing, and in case you couldn't figure it out, you've got this svelte executive sitting at his desk with some shares in one of the companies involved. He's got a pretty bad combover and a horrible case of butt-chin going on, though, so he could be an experienced used car salesman -- the point of the game is getting very clear here!

On the other side of the box we've got the whole gamut of people that apparently he's been telepathically calling on that blue phone, likely telling them, you guessed it, "Trust me!"; his telepathic skills seem very spotty at best, however, as we shall see in the following two examples:

 Mitt Romney here is defintely buyin' what he's sellin', and apparently this also is a parallel universe in which nobody believes in cashier's checks or money orders or realistically any other form of payment than varying size stacks of cold, hard cash. Did they all just hit the ATM on the way out or something, or does the office have a convenient bank branch right next to it? More importantly, what denomination of bills is that? $1s? This happy-go-lucky all-in investor is also lucky he has such gigantic hands, as carrying those huge stacks of what we shall assume are Benjamins must be incredibly difficult. It's probably the money he got from the lawsuit in whatever workplace accident occured to remove his fourth finger on his left hand, as evidenced on the top of the stack of bills.

Then there's this guy -- we'll call him Stereotypical Early 80s Fashion Model due to his amazing color coordination skills. Look ma, my socks match my jacket! Of course, the problem here being that everything matches in a disgusting Russet red, but hey, judging from the small size of his stack of cash, beggars can't be choosers. Nonetheless, apparently someone farted in the elevator on the way to the investment office, as this gent is downright disgusted with whatever's going on. With the size of his nose, it's probably safe to say he's more sensitive to the fart odor than anyone else, and with a genetic predisposition like that, I wouldn't be getting in any elevators at all in the first place. Nonetheless, he is soured to the concept of investing and is walking rapidly into the "here be dragons" territory outside the board game box.

He's probably going to get back into the elevator, thus assaulting his olfactory senses once again. Silly investor. Nonetheless, the art on the external marketing is very fun and unique, and I always give tons of extra Brownie points to hand-drawn items. The caricatures are not only humorous, but the front of the box gives you a very clear idea as to what's going on in the game -- your goal is to invest in certain companies throughout the game and attempt to convince others that you've gotten a "hot deal" that they just have to get in on. Some will eagerly hit the ATM outside, others will ponderously fart in the elevator, and yet others will disgustedly wave their hand at you and rush out the door. Capitalism the game! I'm guessing the goal is he who ends with the most fat stacks wins!

The game board itself continues with the goofy caricature theme, and the artwork is just as enjoyable as the box. With names like "The Albuquerque Turkeys" and "Slipped Disc, Inc." with respective goofy caricatures, you can tell the tone of the game is certainly light-hearted and, to be honest, pretty witty! The game pieces are little dollar sign/Price is Right logos, which adds a bit of flair to them, and they've included orange instead of yellow. I'm on the fence about this, as I like the traditional 4-color scheme, but at the same time, memories of being 8 years old and thinking "NO! YELLOW IS THE COLOR OF PEE!" leads me to think they were avoiding that one piece that nobody seems to want. My dad always ended up being yellow. Sorry, dad!

The play money and shares come in garish, bright colors, which is always good for a family game, and once again, we see some hand-drawn items, which adds more Brownie points in the quality department. However, although the caricatures are very well done and the pieces are thought out, the board seems a little Spartan -- simple tracks to move on without a lot going on, and a lot of plain background color, leading me to believe that the guy with the upturned nose on the box was the executive in charge of paying for the background art on the game board, and he actually walked out on his job instead of an investment chance. Nonetheless, the board is functional and makes sense for the game; pathways are easily marked and it's clear what direction you can be going. The "roll goals" are obvious to shoot for and you can formulate a plan quite easily.

The key part of setup involves putting investment return indicators -- once again stacks of cash! -- into plastic briefcases. The indicators are again hand-drawn, and vary between the two-stack return and "You've Been Had!", which means get used to that McDonald's job, because you're going back to it. You shuffle the stacks, place them inside the holders on the briefcases, then re-shuffle the briefcases and place them on the businesses to invest in on the board. This adds a nice little touch of randomness to the game, as each business will be worth a different value.

You may have noticed there's 4 more cards than briefcases. More than likely you didn't, as you just scanned the photo without really looking. Shame on you, reader. This is because 4 cards don't end up within the game, which adds another nice little layer to the randomness in the game, as you may end up with all the 2-stacks out or the "You've Been Had!" out of the game. So far so good for the replayability factor!

However, the set-up itself in this instance is a bit painful and a re-write of the setup rules would help immensely. The set-up person isn't supposed to look at the cards; you keep them upside down and put them in the briefcase without looking at the guidance tabs. What this means is every single card will not fit properly and the only solution is to flip over the briefcase and look so you can line up the card properly. Whoops, you now know what briefcase has what! Purpose defeated. It's clear that the purpose of the card shuffle is to take out 4 -- which you do before this step, but.....

You shuffle the briefcases ANYWAY! So, this means that unless you're Rain Man looking at toothpicks, you've forgotten what each briefcase is anyway, so the whole previous mechanic is completely pointless. It's much easier to simply take 4 out of the shuffled cards, set them aside, then look to place the briefcases, then play Deal or No Deal with said cases with your eyes closed. The same result with less effort! I'm beginning to have second thoughts about this whole concept they're pushing of trusting them. It's a small nuisance, sure, but it's glaringly obvious what the solution was from the very beginning. Perhaps the fart-executive also was in charge of this part. Parker Brothers has some strange hiring practices, just like Aunt Agatha in a previous review. Of course, that's a Milton Bradley game, but nonetheless.....

 But can we "trust them" on the gameplay? So far things have seemed so good. The key idea behind gameplay is to go out and about in the "city streets" and enter local businesses to decide whether you want to invest in them by sneaking into their office and tipping over the briefcase everyone is buying in this town. You actually get the choice -- you can tip it over and peek, ending your turn, or you can go hog wild and invest sight-unseen in the property willy-nilly. If you do this, you don't have to wait an extra turn, which can be a big plus!

After you have done this, you can choose to "claim" the property by locking the briefcase, thus preventing both others from seeing it and the business owner from using the stacks of cash for those horrible things like payroll and rent. You then go back to the Trust Me Investment Co. space in the center of the board and the investment phase begins. Do you bee-line there, giving away your hot investment tip, or do you take a leisurely stroll, looking under other briefcases to get a better view of the board? The choice is entirely yours!

Once you get back, the game gets a little strange. Your goal is to "convince" other investors to put their cash into your pot to buy shares of said company. If you've been good at bluffing up until this point, you might get a couple bites, but at the last minute you're certainly not going to "convince" anyone of anything. What does Parker Brothers want you to do here? I cracked a couple jokes about the company involved, which seems like the intent. Are you supposed to talk about the company? That can be funny, and you can have some cool acting sessions with your family, but it doesn't convince anyone of anything. I don't really care that  Huff 'N Puff Railroad is building a new track -- the only thing I care about is how many fat stacks are underneath that briefcase. So "convincing" turns into nothing more than just trying to lie to other people to tell them that what's under the briefcase isn't, or vice-versa. This doesn't seem particularly effective at all, but perhaps with kids playing it would be a little different.

If other people invest, they pay you directly by putting the money into the "reserve account" in the center of the board; if you buy shares, you buy them directly from the bank. In this way, you can gain both shares and money from a good transaction. This provides an "elevator fart control" knob -- if you know it's a "You've Been Had", in which case you lose all your shares but keep your money, you can sell all your shares after convincing others to invest. If it's a two-stacker (Burger King would be so proud!), you can buy all the shares you want, thus allowing you to double your money in the venture. So the mechanic here is pretty clear; convince others to invest in crappy stuff, and invest yourself in the good stuff. Make money, die with the most toys, win the game, go to heaven, collect virtue.

 The general mechanic continues throughout the entire game -- invest, go to investment company, lie, rinse, repeat. There's a couple little twists to add (more on that later) but the mechanic does get a little stale pretty quickly, which is a common pitfall of most family-style games. With only 2 players, as well, the game gets even more stale: You only have one person to convince, and if it's a person who knows you quite well (such as my wife in this instance), they're going to be able to call you out on your BS as soon as it spews forth from your mouth cavity. 4 players would certainly add a lot to this mechanic, as people are coming and going much more quickly, and if they're friends of friends or someone you don't know completely well, you may even end up being convinced that Fritters Away Fast Food is a great idea and that you should put all your money in the corner.

Adding a bit more to the randomness factor, rolling a 1 doesn't move your piece; instead, you draw from the TRUST ME deck of cards. These cards are of varying type -- send you somewhere, challenge another player, bamboozle you by making you roll a certain dice roll or lose your briefcase claim, etc. It's pretty typical for a family game, but it does add a bit to the game, so you're not just simply weaving back and forth between businesses and the investment company. However, this does fall a little short -- you can't steal another person's shares, money, or the like, which would add a bit more to the game. Apparently they wanted to play Wall Street the nice game, not Wall Street the real game, compete with espionage, thievery, and all sorts of white-collar crime. A shame, we could have called this game "educational" then!

The "Hot Tip" space lets you look under any briefcase in that street, which is a nice touch, and the Wild Goose Chase spaces in the corners are spaces you send other players to in an attempt to get them as far away from the precious leather cases as possible; both mechanics continue to add a bit to the basic gameplay and provided the right factors, can make for a pretty fun little family game. 

Despite this, the entire game hinges upon a rather simple strategy: know as much as you possibly can before investing, which ironically is similar to reality. Maybe this game is educational after all! With 2 players this was very easy to do -- just claim a case then wander around looking at the other cases. 4 players would probably make this a little more interesting, but the basic gameplay is still a little lacking and isn't as complex as an investment game is capable of. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're playing with 8 year olds, but if an 8 year old is investing stacks of bills in businesses, I'm a little concerned about the state of the planet.

The "convincing" mechanic just doesn't work with 2 players, as stated earlier. If you both have been traversing the board and know what the entire board looks like, and which cases are which, ending up with a "You've Been Had!" card doesn't do anyone a bit of good. You have to resort to alternate strategies to convince the other player that they need to give you all their money....perhaps this game is realistic after all! Mafia tactics!

So the game winds down, and with 2 briefcases left over, the game ends. You get the one last opportunity to invest and make some cash, and then you count up your Scrooge-fodder, seeing who ended up with the most. That person is declared investor king and goes off to buy plastic Ferraris or something -- they probably end up going to those "You've Been Had!" businesses, as they seem to be accepting play money. So can you "TRUST ME" in this game? Is it worthwhile -- a fun game for the ages? Is it a bear market or a bull market for Parker Brothers in the time-machine world of 1981?

THE RATINGS:

PACKAGING/MARKETING: The game entices you with its imperative exclamation on the front, and the type of game it's going to be is clear from the very beginning; however, the caricatures and hand-drawn characters show you that it's definitely a game that doesn't take itself too seriously and is potentially good for the whole family. The general ideas are clearly defined by the box and you basically know exactly what you're getting into from the start. It's simple, and could be a little more artistic in the background, but it's still very solid and quite frankly, I enjoy the box. A bishop!

BOARD QUALITY: The caricatures on the front are continued in the businesses on the board, which add more irreverent humor to the game; great for a family night. The plastic pieces are constructed pretty well and the colorful play money and shares are a nice touch, but the board just doesn't have much going on. Although it's clear where the pathways are and the move/non-move areas, there's a great missed opportunity for some cool background art that really would have kicked the game in. The plastic briefcases may be fun, but assembling and setup is a bit difficult if you follow the pre-made rules, and although that's not too much of a bother, the solution seemed so obvious that I'm amazed the developer didn't go with the easy route for setup. A Knight!

COMPLEXITY: The basic game mechanic is very simple, and as such can get stale pretty quickly. You're just rushing back and forth and rolling the dice without too much else going on. The "convincing" part, or investment phase, doesn't seem to make much sense and doesn't help the game along unless you're playing with 4 people, the group of whom don't intimately know each other. This ends up just being a basic bluffing strategy instead of a more interesting complex story-telling strategy, which is sad given that's what the designer was trying to go for. However, with the card mechanic and the specialty spaces, there's just enough there to be able to eke out a game without getting too bored or feeling stale. A Knight!

ENTERTAINMENT VALUE: To add to the extrapolation, this game falls prey to one of the most common pitfalls of board games -- the "Fun with 4, not-so-fun with 2" cavern. It's such a common pitfall that it gets very frustrating to be able to find something that non-strategy gamers will play that is actually fun. The "convincing" part, as stated earlier, isn't anywhere near convincing, and the game boils down to just rolling, flipping over cases, then rushing back to collect your earnings if you got something worthwhile. With some simple additions, such as share stealing, espionage, and the like, the game could be much more fun to play, and I don't think these would be too difficult to incorporate into the game itself. A low Knight, with potential to get into High Knight/Low Bishop territory if you have the right set of circumstances.

VARIABILITY: The game shines quite a bit here. From the get-go, 4 different briefcases each game are not included in play, making games different. To add to the layer, the setup mechanic involves blindly setting briefcases in each business, and the cards get shuffled once again. The dice roll always adds a bit of randomness, and although not functional in its current sense or particularly entertaining, you do have the possible wild-card of convincing other players of the investment. There's quite a few different layers there to make each game something different, which is a very nice touch. A solid Bishop!

POTPOURRI: No farts in the elevator here, either -- the game is a goofball trip with witty business names and fun hand-drawn caricatures. It doesn't take itself seriously and due to that you end up ignoring some of the little frustrating bits of the game, which is a good indicator of just what Potpourri is all about! A solid Bishop.

AND THE OVERALL RATING IS:

SOLID KNIGHT!

This game is almost a prototypical "family-style" game, complete with all the strengths and all the pitfalls. The marketing is very clever and you get a good sense of the way things work from the very beginning, and the rules definitely aren't too complex for a family game. The pieces are fun, the art is nice, and there's a great variability to the game that really packs a punch; games are the same mechanic but different enough each time that there's something that might keep this coming out to play on regular intervals.

However, the art does lack in 'oomph' and there could be a lot more done with it. The setup is simply baffling in certain parts, and although witty and irreverent, the gameplay simply isn't the most entertaining thing out there. You'll have a hard time "convincing" anyone to invest in anything, and you'll likely just end up rolling the dice to rush to wherever you want to go. With some simple additions to the gameplay, this could be a solid contender for Family Game night, though -- which makes the game all the more sad for its pitfalls. 2 players is an absolute "no-go", and 4 players is optimum, which is typical for this type of game. I'd say if you could find it for under $5 or so (AKA thrift store/garage sale find), it's worth a pickup and play or two, and who knows, with house rules it could be something fun!

Secondary funny note: This game involves "inVesting", not "inCesting", which are two keys ironically right next to each other. To add to this, "incest" doesn't get caught by the spell checker, as it's obviously a legitimate word, so this review could be about something entirely different and downright frightening without constant vigilance over the keyboard while typing.

So: "TRUST ME", FOR $1.99 YOU WON'T MIND IT!

Next week's review: THE GENERALS!